56 Money in Broilers and Squabs. 



"It may be that the bread is not necessary and that something 

 else is just as good. We have tried many other foods, including 

 several of the most highly advertised prepared dry chicken foods, 

 but as yet have found nothing that gives us as good health and 

 growth as the bread fed in connection with dry broken grains. 



"When the chicks are first brought to the brooders bread 

 crumbs are sprinkled on the floor of the brooder, among fine grit, and 

 in this way they learn to eat, taking in grit and food at the same 

 time. After the first day the food is given in tin plates, four to each 

 brooder. The plates have low edges, and the chicks go onto them 

 and find the food readily. After they have had the food before them 

 the first one or two weeks, the plates are removed. As they have 

 not spilled much of it, they have little left to lunch on except what 

 they scratch for. In the course of a few days light wooden troughs 

 are substituted for the plates. The bottom of the trough is a strip 

 of half inch board, two feet long and three inches wide. Laths are 

 nailed around the edges. The birds are fed four times a day in these 

 troughs until they outgrow them, as follows : Bread and egg or 

 scrap early in the morning ; at half past nine o'clock dry grain, either 

 pin head oats, crushed wheat, millet seed or cracked corn. At one 

 o'clock dry grain again, and the last feed of the day is of the bread 

 with egg or scrap. 



"Between the four feeds in the pans or troughs, millet seed, pin 

 head oats and fine cracked corn, and later whole wheat, are scat- 

 tered in the chaff on the floor for the chicks to scratch for. This 

 makes them exercise, and care is taken that they do not find the 

 food too easily. 



"One condition is made imperative in our feeding. The food is 

 never to remain in the troughs more than five minutes before the 

 troughs are cleaned or removed. This insures sharp appetites at 

 meal time, and guards against inactivity which comes from over- 

 feeding. 



"Charcoal, granulated bone, oyster shell and sharp grit are 

 always kept by them, as well as clean water. Mangolds are cut into 

 slices, which they soon learn to peck. When the grass begfins to 

 grow they are able to get green food from the yards. If the small 

 yards are worn out before they are moved to the range, green cut 

 clover or rape is fed to them. 



"After the chickens are moved to the range they are fed in the 

 same manner, except that the morning and evening feed is made of 

 corn meal, middlings and wheat bran, to which one-tenth as much 

 beef scrap is added. The other two feeds are of wheat and cracked 

 corn. One year we fed double the amount of scrap all through the 

 growing season and had the April and May pullets well developed 

 and laying through September and October. To our sorrow they 

 neatly all molted in December, and that month and January were 

 nearly bare of eggs." 



