FOODS AND FEEDING. 
rapid fermentation, and we soon have germs of 
bowel trouble growing at the rate of forty miles 
an hour. Books say chicks should be fed five 
times a day, and the nervous owner thinks that 
if five is good six is better, and soon comes 
around with another dose of the same food and 
puts on the top of the first “ charge, ” and we 
have a sandwich of wet dough and dirt. In a 
few days’ time the chicks begin to start for the 
world where mashes are unknown and the owner 
says “Darn the chicken business,” or else he 
blames the man from whom he purchased the 
eggs for having “inbred stock,” and we have 
another case of “ the business don’t pay.” Per¬ 
haps his painstaking neighbor improves on this 
method and bakes the mash, which is quite an 
improvement as it removes a large part of the 
water, but at the same time is quite a little labor. 
His chicks do better, making phenomenal 
growth for a few weeks, and he thinks that the 
solution of the poultryman’s trials lies in cook¬ 
ing the food. He invests in an amateur bakery 
and bakes everything. His chicks continue to 
thrive, apparently, but as the hot weather comes 
on, he notices some bowel trouble among the 
half grown birds. These die and he shouts that 
cholera has struck him, writes to the editor of a 
poultry paper who tells him that the symptoms 
look like cholera. After changing the food and 
losing half his flock, he gets around to hard 
grain and pulls them through, or what is left of 
them, although they are not now as large as the 
chicks raised under the natural method without 
the assistance of the bake shop. 
Feeding the Chicks. 
Our method, which we have practiced now for 
four years with uniformly good success, has been 
to give the chicks a mixture of assorted grains 
and grit ground to about the size of a pin head 
for their first feed. With a dish of beef scraps 
standing constantly before them, and the fine 
ground food fed in litter with plenty of green 
food (cabbage or green grass), they have an in¬ 
ducement to scratch from sunrise to sunset, and 
take the food slowly and naturally. With the 
beef scrap always within reach, they at no time 
crave more animal food, and their systems 
rapidly adapt themselves to the season of 
plenty and nature constructs a body planned 
for a continuation of this same diet, namely: 
good, thick, strong leg and frame and a chicken 
that looks ready to eat at any stage of the game, 
-long-bodied, short-legged, hardy, “ born to 
Mr. Park’s R. I. Reds at the Food Hopper. 
live” looking fellows, free from all the ills and 
pains of chickendom and fit to wrestle for a 
living through thick and thin, good weather and 
bad, as long as the food holds out. 
When they reach a more mature age, say 
from six to eight weeks, we gradually wean 
them from the small grains and substitute 
cracked corn and wheat, place them in colony 
coops on grass range and soon discontinue the 
wheat, feeding cracked corn and beef scraps in 
hoppers, feeding once a week or oftener as the 
size of the hopper and number of the chicks de¬ 
mand. These hoppers should be made quite 
high in front,-—three inches or more at least, 
as the birds are always looking for the largest 
pieces of beef scraps, and with low-front hopper 
waste quite a little by throwing it out with 
their bills. Figs. 1 and 2 show the style of hop¬ 
per we use, made of second hand boxes or other 
available material. They should be covered 
with waterproof paper to prevent the food’s 
becoming wet if kept outside the roosting coops. 
This system continues until the sexes are sepa¬ 
rated, and then we place the males in yards 
sufficiently large so that the birds never eat 
them bare of grass. Placing the cull cockerels 
intended for market by themselves, we com¬ 
pound a mixture of equal weights—corn, wheat, 
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