Making Home ProfitableSaint Maur, Kate V. (Kate Vandenhoff)
Science
Making Home Profitable
Saint Maur, Kate V. (Kate Vandenhoff)
Agriculture; Country life
The matter of feeding the old birds is of great importance and is the
rock most farmers founder on. Too often the birds are left to forage
for themselves or, at the best, are given uncertain quantities of
corn, which means that they are miserably thin and dilapidated or
outrageously fat. In either case they lack the components which the egg
for hatching should possess. Result, weak youngsters which are doomed
to die, no matter how much care is lavished on them.
I once heard an old poultryman say that the care of the chick must
commence when its mother is hatched. This may seem ambiguous to the
amateur, but it is literally a fact and one which my Massachusetts
friend had made me understand was most potent when applied to turkeys.
So our turkeys are fed with special reference to supplying the
ingredients to be converted into bone and vigour in the birds to be.
Breakfast: Chopped clover-hay, steamed overnight, two quarts; corn and
oats ground together, one quart; beef-scraps, half a pint. At noon, one
quart of oats, Kafir-corn or barley scattered broadcast in the yards.
At night, whole corn when the weather is very cold, but as it moderates
in the spring the amount is decreased and wheat is used in its place.
These are their regular rations from December to April, when the
beef-scraps and corn are entirely omitted. Water and grit is before
them all the time. We buy screenings from the stone-crusher and, as it
is cheap, dump a lot into each yard twice a year.
I generally steal the first ten eggs from each nest and set them under
the hens. However many a turkey lays after that, she is allowed to keep
and hatch them. It takes them twenty-nine days to hatch, and large,
motherly old hens should be chosen from the chicken-house to do the
incubating. It is not safe to put more than five such eggs under an
ordinary hen.
When the hatch is over, put the hen into a brood-coop and, in front of
it, put a box about nine inches deep and large enough to form a yard
for the babies to exercise in. It is, of course, necessary to remove
part or the whole of the end of the box which joins the front of the
coop, so that the little ones can run in and out. Cover the bottom
of the box with coarse sand and put a small drinking-fountain in one
corner. Thus the babies will have a safe place to play in the first
few days of infancy, when they must be kept dry. After that the box
can be removed and the coop moved a few feet every day for the sake of
cleanliness.
When Mrs. Turkey’s brood hatches, we treat them in the same way, only
the brood-coop is specially made and is much larger than the ordinary
hen-coop. The first feed the babies have is stale home-made bread
soaked in scalded milk, which is squeezed out of it before it is fed.
Like little chicks, they must have nothing for twenty-four hours, then
little and often must be the rule.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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