VALUE OF GREEN FEED

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 70, 24 March 1933, Page 12

VALUE OF GREEN FEED

In their wild state poultry and birds consume large quantities of tender young shoots and roots. Their food would consist mainly of grubs, green feed, and what seeds were obtainable. Today we shut our fowls up in sheds and small dirty yards, ana often wonder why we don't get enough eggs. Green feed is absolutely essential for health reasons, and must be fed daily in some form. Many a backyard lot of fowls are left to gaze greedily through their netting fence at the cabbages and grass growing outside their' run, whilst the owner unknowingly forgets to give his birds some of the discarded leaves from the vegetable plot. Cabbages, and all the cabbage family, lettuce, silver beet, lawn clippings, if short and tender, and almost any of the roughage from the garden will be most acceptable to the fowls. Those birds on free range will ■ecnre enough without additional feedIng, and it ig interesting to see them ipread out after a meal, dodging hero and there after a tender leaf or some grub, and in this way they often balance their ration, which, mixed by the owner, maj not be good enough for

their needs. Complaints are coming to hand that young pullets, just starting to lay, are not looking well, and are not laying as well as they should. The long dry spell has something to do with this, for dry weather means a shortage of , greens and grubs. ■Especially will ducks stop laying in such weather. Green feed supplies tho colouring matter to make thoso rich golden yolks, which cook likes so much for custard, and birds deprived of green feed for any length of time will not lay good strong hatching eggs.