The profits of the business will be increased by supplying the green food in such tempting forms as to increase the amount consumed and cut down the use of grains.
The methods we have been describing in which various dry unground grains, beef scrap and oyster shell, each in a separate compartment, are exposed before the hen at all times, together with the abundant use of green food, either as pasture or a soiling crop, is the method of feeding assumed throughout this book.
The hopper feeding of so-called dry mash or ground grain mixture has been quite a fad in the last few years. The tendency of the hens to waste such food has occasioned considerable trouble. They are picking it over for their favorite foods and trying to avoid disagreeable foods. This difficulty is relieved when the food be separated into its various components and the hen offered each separately. As a matter of fact, there is no occasion for feeding ground feed except in fattening rations and here the wet mash is desirable.
The use of the products of wheat milling has been the chief excuse for such practices, but unless these get considerably lower in price per pound than corn they may be left off the bill-of-fare to advantage. The great use made of these products in poultry feeding was chiefly a result of the attempted application of the balanced ration idea, but as has already been shown the efforts to raise the protein ratio with grain foods is generally false economy.
The old-fashioned wet mash which the writer does not recommend because of the labor involved, is, nevertheless, a fairly profitable method of poultry feeding. It is used in the Little Compton district of Rhode Island and was also used in the famous Australian egg laying contests elsewhere described. Personally I would prefer feeding ground grain wet, especially wheat bran and middlings, to feeding it dry.
The scattering of grain in litter so generally recommended in poultry literature is all right and proper, but is rather out of place in commercial poultry farming. It is used on the large poultry plants with the yards and long houses, but is not used on colony farms or in any of the poultry growing communities. I should recommend littered houses for Section 6 and the northern half of Section 3 (see Chapter IV), but with warmer soils and climate where the snow does not lie on the ground it would add a labor expense that would very seriously handicap the business.
The systems of poultry feeding that are commonly advertised are based either on some patent nostrum or a recommendation of green food in novel form, such as sprouted oats. The joke about poultry feed at 10 cents a bushel, absurd though it may seem, has caught lots of dollars. To take a bushel of oats worth 50 cents, add water, let them sprout and have five bushels costing 10 cents, is certainly a wonderful achievement in wealth getting. The only reason a man couldn't run a soup kitchen on the same principle is that he can't do a soup business by mail. Sprouted oats are a good green food, however, though somewhat laborious to prepare. I should certainly recommend them if for any reason the regular green food supply should run out.
The points already mentioned are about all the practical suggestions that the science of animal nutrition has to offer the poultryman. The discussion of feeding from its technical viewpoint is sufficiently covered in the chapter on "Farm Poultry" and the discussion of the management and economics of various types of poultry production.