ARTIFICIAL INCUBATION 1 83 



and plenty of it, a dry floor with half an inch of litter, 

 and plenty of floor space, and not until you have done 

 at least these things ought you to complain about mor- 

 tality among the chickens. If my experience in rais- 

 ing several thousand broilers annually counts for any- 

 thing, forty, or at most fifty chicks are enough for 

 any brooder, and my advice to one about to purchase 

 an incubator is to buy one brooder for every fifty 

 chicks he expects to take out of that machine for the 

 first three or four times he sets it. That is, for one 

 360-egg machine run all through the spring I would 

 plan for ten or twelve brooders, and I believe I would 

 raise enough more chicks to pay for them. — [Francis 

 E. Pearson, Lincoln County, Me. 



HANDLING BROODER CHICKS 



The mortality among brooders chicks is due to the 

 influences of heredity and the conditions of environ- 

 ment during incubation, mechanical causes, imperfect 

 sanitation and imperfect feeding. Special emphasis 

 needs to be placed upon the feeding. Experiments 

 with brooder chicks by the Rhode Island experiment 

 station showed at the end of thirty days a loss by death 

 of 62,.^ per cent in a lot fed on &^^, liver and green 

 stuff, chiefly from digestive troubles resulting in 

 diarrhea. Another lot fed on grains alone, showed a 

 mortality of 32.7 per cent, mainly from digestive 

 troubles, strongly indicated by abnormal enlargement 

 of the gall bladder. A lot fed on grain and green stuff 

 suffered a mortality of 9.5 per cent, while a lot fed a 

 complete balanced ration of t^g, meat, grain and 

 green stuff had a death list of only 3.5 per cent. By 

 using a proper amount of animal food with the grain 

 food, and supplying the necessary green food, a large 

 proportion of the untimely deaths may evidently be 



