New York AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 55 
MIXED FEEDS. 
There has appeared in the feeding stuff trade during recent 
years a class of materials which, as a rule, are mixtures either of 
some cereal grain with certain manufacturers’ by-products or of 
two or more by-products. To these are applied a variety of 
names, often of a proprietary character, some of which give no 
hint of the nature of the mixture, and others, if taken for their 
face value, indicate the sources of the ingredients. If these 
mixtures were always made up wholly of high grade materials, 
they would need less attention than they now really demand. 
As a matter of fact, many of them are found to contain a con- 
stituent of very inferior value, viz.: oat hulls, a by-product from 
the manufacture of breakfast foods. Not only have large manu- 
facturing establishments used these hulls in compounding 
mixtures, but some local millers in the State of New York have 
bought them to grind with corn and sometimes with mill wastes, 
the mixed product being sold as ‘ mixed feed,” “corn and oat 
feed,” “chop feed,’ and so on. To quite an extent, at least, 
farmers have been ignorant of the real nature of these feeds, and 
as this Station has abundant evidence, have paid for them prices 
equal to the cost of whole corn and oats. If our millers have been 
aware of the inferiority of oat hull mixtures, and have sold such 
goods to consumers who were ignorant of what they were buying, 
it is charitable to say no more than that the rules of an honorable 
business policy have been severely violated. 
In order that there may be no misapprehension as to the real 
character of oat hulls, attention is called to their composition and 
their relation to the kernel. 
It was found at the Ohio Experiment Station that with 69 
varieties of oats the hull constituted from 24.6 per ct. to 35.2 per 
ct. of the weight of the grain, the average being 30 per ct. From 
other sources we learn what is the composition of the dry matter of 
the whole grain, the hulls and the hull-less kernels. 
