FEEDING.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1648, 30 September 1903, Page 68 (Supplement)

FEEDING.

Chicken-rearers who have not yet been educated up to the modern style of feeding, .and those who prefer to practToe in the worn-out ruts of their ancestors will continue to scatter a deal ■more whole corn into the fowl runs or around the back door of a morning than the birds can eat, and by tins mean* stuff the birds inordinately, and cloy them until they got siok and die of indigestion. -> Those who are keeping valuable fowls for breeding purposes, must exercise caution in feeding, that their birds do not become too fat, and eventually cease laying at the very time their eggs are most valuable; or, what is quite as serious, lose chat life and vigour they should possess for breeding stock. To them such food should be given aa will keep their physical forces in nearly the same oonditon in spring as in summer.

The cockerels and pullets of the large breeds are still growing, and to attain that size so much to be desired, they need both flesh and bone, but not fatproducing food. They cannot in cold, weather, as in summer, run over the meadows and secure their daily allowance of green grass and insects, which form so large a percentage of their diet, and it is imperative that an equivalent should now be furnished.

Allow us to except one enemy of poultry yards—lice—and we will assert, most emphatically, that improper feeding has caused or at least promoted, the majority of diseases, such as roup, cholera, etc., and lias had more to do with failure in the poultry business than anything else. There are two extremes, and there is also a “happy mean” in this feeding business; there is such a thing as giving fowls too much of what they do not need, and of giving too little of that which they do require; but that they will not eat more than nature requires of proper food, is demonsrated ©very summer, where fowls have a wide range on ‘ farms, with abundance of food of all kinds about them.