No. 1.—Ground oats, 2 parts; ground barley, 1 part; ground corn, 1 part; mixed with skim-milk.
No. 2.—Ground corn, 4 parts; ground peas, 1 part; ground oats, 1 part; meat-meal, 1 part; mixed with water.
A ration used by some fatters with great success is composed of simply oatmeal and buttermilk.
The feed is given as a soft batter and is left in the troughs for about thirty minutes, when the residue is removed. Chickens are generally fed three times per day. Water may or may not be given, according to the weather and the amount of liquid used in the food.
The chicken that has been crate-fattened has practically the same amount of skeleton and offal as the unfattened specimen, but carries one or two pounds more of edible meat upon its carcass. Not only is the weight of the chicken and amount of edible meat increased, but the quality of the meat is greatly improved, consisting of juicy, tender flesh. For this reason the crate-feeding process is often spoken of as fleshing rather than as fattening.
The enforced idleness causes the muscular tissue to become tender and filled with stored nutriment. The fatness of a young chicken, crate-fed on buttermilk and oatmeal, is a radically different thing from the fatness of an old hen that has been ranging around the corn-crib.
The crate-fattening industry while deserving credit for great improvement in the quality of chicken flesh in the regions where it has been introduced, cannot on the whole be considered a great success. It is commonly reported that some of the firms instrumental in its introduction lost money on the deal. The crate-fattening plant has come to stay in the communities where careful methods of poultry raising are practiced, and where the stock is of the best, but when a plant is located in a newly settled region where the poultry stock is small and feed scarce, the venture is pretty apt to prove a fiasco.
While poultryman at the Kansas Experiment Station, the writer made a large number of individual weighings of fowls in the crates of one of the large fattening plants of the state.
These weighings pointed out very clearly why the expected profits had not been realized. The birds selected for weighing were all fine, uniform looking Barred Rock Cockerels. At the end of the first week they were found to still appear much the same, but when handled a difference was easily noticed. By the end of the second week a few birds had died and many others were in a bad way. The individual changes of weight ran from 2-1/2 pounds gain to 3/4 pound loss, and many of the lighter birds were of very poor appearance. It is simply a matter of forced feeding being a process that makes trouble with the health of the chicken if all is not just right.
It is probable that in the future more fattening will be done on the farm, or by the farmer operating in a small way among his neighbors. The reason for this is that the saving of labor in the large plant is hardly as great as the added loss from the shrinkage of the birds due to the excitement of shipping and crowding, and the introduction of disease by the mingling of chickens from so many different sources.