40 The Truth About the Poultry Business 



Now and then I shut up fifty of the hens in ten different 

 pens and placed before them different grains, beef-scrap, and 

 bran and middlings, thinking that they would go on laying. 

 But in a short time they stopped laying, while the hens run- 

 ning outside kept right on. The hens had by this time gotten 

 over the roup and canker. The cure had been effected by an 

 abundance of fresh air without draught in a sheltered spot. 



At this time I had to move to a different location where 

 the ground was not soft as it had been at the other place. 

 The hens could not scratch and get worms and bugs, and 

 while .they had a larger place to run and were fed in the same 

 way, they soon stopped laying. Bowel-trouble appeared and 

 roup also began to come back in the flock. I noticed that the 

 droppings were full of pin-head worms, sometimes as many as 

 ' fifty passing from one hen at a time. There were also many 

 long, round worms from a fourth of an inch to five inches 

 in length. Many times a large number of them would be 

 found in one pile. These hens were kept in colony houses. 



As they stopped laying, I was again forced to experiment. 

 I fed corn and oats, as the poultry books advised, but the 

 results were disastrous, as quite a number of hens got white 

 diarrhoea and were in an awful condition. The more corn 

 and oats I fed the worse my hens became, and the less I 

 fed the better they would be. This turned me once more 

 against corn. 



I began to feed mostly wheat and dry bran, with a little 

 meat scrap, but got no results. Then I read of a man who 

 advocated feeding dry bran in a hopper, and wheat, oats and 

 corn in straw, and also placing beef-scrap in a separate 

 hopper; but I could not make this work, either! 



At the same time I fed several hens I had shut up the 

 same way I had fed the bread-and-milk hen, but they would 

 not lay. I kept on experimenting, and it seemed as though 



