Poultry Emancipated

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 Excerpt: ... equal given quantity of food by hand; hence we must make a wide discrimination in the quantity and variety of the rations when studying the essential requirements of each individual case. We are perfectly satisfied that fowls kept in confinement yield far more eggs when each meal is composed of two or more different varieties of grain or meal than when restricted to one kind of food only. For example--two parts barley and one part wheat will be found to yield much better results than barley or wheat alone, and yet the last-named method is the one in general use to-day. The foodstuffs mentioned below are such as we have found to yield the largest number of eggs at the lowest possible cost when fed in the manner here advocated. Soft Foods.---Barley meal, middlings (coarse), bran, pollard, maize meal, bean meal and pea meal. Hard Corn.--Wheat, barley, oats, maize, buckwheat and peas. Sundry Adjuncts.--Water, flint grit, greenstuff's and roots, crushed green bone (fresh), common salt, cinder ashes and Epsom salts. For the use and feeding of these foods.we would refer the reader to the end of this chapter, where will be found a programme of our "daily feed," as practised by ourselves for several years past with a success unequalled by any other system of feeding we have ever tried. The modern food analyst is never so happy as when up to the neck in a mass of analyses of the usual orthodox order, and he rarely fails to emerge without delivering himself of a solemn warning against the use of maize as a food for poultry, other than birds intended for the table. This sort of reasoning is more often than not in the nature of surmise, founded upon elaborate and uncertain tables of chemical analyses of feeding-stuffs, instead of proof derived from actual exp...