These birds are fed green food about eight o’clock in the morning. In good weather it is fed in their large range yard, where the attendant scatters it in small bunches over a wide area. At 11:30 is fed to every hundred birds, six quarts of corn, wheat and oats, two-thirds corn, the wheat and oats making up the other third. This is also distributed widely over the yard. In this way the cockerels are kept busy hunting for food, and they are less likely to get into broils with each other for entertainment.
At 1:30 o’clock they are allowed to return to their House, having been shut out during the morning hours. The Mash is fed daily at 1:30, and a sufficient amount is placed in their troughs for them to thoroughly clean up by roosting time.
Sufficient grain is fed in the litter in the House to make the quantity for the day’s rations about eight quarts for one hundred birds.
BREEDING COCKERELS FALL OF 1911
CHAPTER XXIV
Preparing Surplus Cockerels for Market
The growing cockerels, fed in the same way as the pullets up to six or eight weeks of age, will be, in the majority of cases, in prime condition to have the finishing touches applied to round them out into the best possible weight at the age for market.
We, of course, do not go into the various liquid foods which are fed with a pump, but simply the most inexpensive and rapid way of putting the birds in a condition to return the most money in the shortest possible time. Corn, in its different forms, is, perhaps, the most fattening food which can be fed, and for the cockerels intended for market, the grain ration consists of nothing but corn, and as much of it as they will clean up.
If it is possible to give the time to it, the mash, fed three times a day, will produce the finest quality flesh. A mash made from corn meal, ground oats, gluten meal, middlings and bran, in equal parts, with beef scrap, or green cut bone, equal to the total of the meals, and moistened so that the birds can choke it down in large quantities, will produce the result better, perhaps, than anything else.