94 THE BEGINNER IN POULTRY 



Apples, as a regular supply, are followed by excellent 

 results in the egg basket. They are, of course, well up 

 in water content, and the sugar in the juice is more than 

 one tenth. In Rhode Island Greenings, which are es- 

 pecially fine apples, the analysis is given as 11.97 P^r 

 cent. Sweet apples, strangely enough, are given as being 

 a little lower, but only a fraction of one per cent. Pears 

 have not quite 9 per cent of sugar. Most of these figures 

 are averages. Samples vary endlessly. For instance, 

 oat fodders, in five samples only, varied from 1.5 per cent 

 of ash to 4.2 per cent. Though all were rated as " fresh, 

 air-dry," some would doubtless be nearer ripening than 

 others. At least, this might easily account for a consid- 

 erable variation. To call attention to the difference be- 

 tween the analyses of green fodders and dried, I mention 

 here that Red clover hay is given as containing 1 1.33 per 

 cent of moisture, 2.07 of nitrogen, with 9.51 per cent of 

 phosphoric acid and potassium oxide. A rough general 

 rule might be that air-dried samples of grasses, etc., 

 analyze about three times as high in protein, etc., as the 

 green samples. In winter, a combination of the cut 

 clovers, clover chaff, etc., works well in connection with 

 a juicy vegetable like cabbage or mangel-wurtzels. 



In order to grasp the practical value of this knowledge, 

 in its application to supplying green feed to yarded stock, 

 we need to fix our minds especially on two facts : {a) the 

 wastes cannot be swept from the animal system without 

 water in abundance ; (d) the eggs which are to pay for a 

 hen's keeping cannot be produced by yarded birds with- 

 out supplied water in abundance, since the average egg 

 is itself 73.7 percent water, and the maximum amount is 

 almost 75 per cent. 



