Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 12, March 22, 1884: A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and FiresideVarious
Science
Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 12, March 22, 1884: A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside
Various
Agriculture -- United States -- Periodicals; Farm life -- Periodicals; United States -- Rural conditions -- Periodicals
Probably you have fed the same thing every day for the last six months,
and the hens are getting tired of it. Hens are like other people--they
like a change of provender once in awhile--especially when confined
indoors. Sometimes over-feeding will cause indigestion, and then the
biddies will exhibit the symptoms you describe. In either case, let the
fowls fast for a whole day, and then for a few days feed lightly with food
that is different from what they have been living on. Give plenty of green
food, also Douglas' mixture in the drinking water twice a week.
Another correspondent wants to know why I always advise giving cooked food
to fowls and chicks when uncooked food is the natural diet.
I advise cooked food because experience has taught me that it is much
better for poultry than the raw articles would be. Because raw bugs and
worms constitute the "natural diet" of fowls in their wild state, it does
not follow that raw meal and potatoes would be the best and most
economical food for our domestic fowls. Other things being equal, chicks
that are fed on cooked food grow fatter, are less liable to disease, and
thrive better generally than those who worry along on uncooked rations.
If you are short of sitting hens and don't own an incubator, make the hens
do double duty. Set two or more at the same time, and when the chicks come
out, give two families to one hen, and set the other over again. To do
this successfully, the chicks must be taken from the nest as soon as dry
and given to the hen that is to raise them; for if a hen once leaves the
nest with her chicks, no amount of moral suasion will induce her to go
back. Before giving the hen fresh eggs, the nest should be renovated and
the hen dusted with sulphur or something to prevent lice.
A lady who commenced raising thoroughbred poultry last season writes me
that she proposes to sell eggs for hatching this season, and asks for
information about advertising, packing eggs, etc.
The advertising is easy enough: all you have to do is to write a copy of
your "ad.," send it to THE PRAIRIE FARMER and other papers that circulate
among farmers, pay the bills, and answer the postals and letters as they
come. But if I were in your shoes, I would "put my foot down" on the
postals to begin with; they don't amount to anything anyway; the people
who ask a long string of questions on a postal card are not, as a rule,
the ones who become customers. Before we went into the poultry business an
old poultry-breeder said: "Don't have anything to do with postals, it
don't pay." We thought differently, but to satisfy ourselves, we kept
track of the postals, and to-day I have the addresses of over 300 people
who wrote us on postal cards. How many of those people became customers?
Just one, and he was an Ohio man. When I go into that branch of the
poultry business again, my advertisements will contain a postscript which
will read thusly: "No postals answered."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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