DRY-MASH FEED 149 
For THE Suy FEEDER 
It is almost impossible for birds to overfeed with dry mash. I 
will explain. Supposing, instead of eating porridge and milk to 
breakfast you were allowed only dry oatmeal. At most you could 
only take a few mouthfuls before you would be compelled to drink 
something to wash down the dry meal. This is exactly what 
happens to the hens. They eat a few mouthfuls of dry meal, 
when they have to jump down from the hopper and run to some 
remote part of the “run” or house for a drink. If they are 
hungry they have to run back again to the hopper and back again 
to the water till they are satisfied. I take care that the water is 
as far away as possible from the food, and in this way the birds 
get exercise, and instead of their one meal per day (as in the case 
of wet mash) lasting five minutes, they can have several smaller 
feeds lasting half-an-hour each. Then there are intervals when 
no other birds are round the hopper and the shy feeder can then 
take what is required. The virtue of dry mash is that no bird gets 
too much and every bird can get enough. It is the rarest thing 
possible to see a fat dry-mash-fed fowl. They are almost in- 
variably in that hard lean condition such as the egg-farmer loves 
to see. It is the busy active fowl that lays eggs and keeps on 
laying them. If you see a bird all hunched up in a corner with 
its eyes closed, that is a fat and lazy bird, and the farmer can 
dispense with its services. 
Many of the largest and most successful egg-farmers in England 
are convinced dry-mash feeders and swear by the results. I give 
the opinion of Mr S. G. Hanson of Basingstoke in his Commercial 
Egg Farming. 
Unfortunately no great public test of the two methods of 
feeding has ever been made in England, and the dry-mash system 
is so comparatively new that all the big laying competitions, as 
well as Government experiments, have been conducted on the old 
style of feeding. It takes time to convert most people to anything 
new, and it always takes much longer for anything revolutionary 
to percolate to an institution or a branch of the Government. 
