All the food a young chick needs the first twenty-four hours is provided by nature. After that it is "up to you." Their first meal may be hard-boiled eggs minced finely, shells and all, and mixed with oatmeal or custard made of milk and eggs baked hard, or it may be baked and crumbled corn bread. By the third day they will be ready for raw broken grain. There are many good commercial kinds: less trouble than making your own mixtures. The chicks will learn to scratch for this in a week or two. The hen is their teacher. Fine grit, charcoal, and clean water must be kept where they can get what they want. Soft food should not be fed in unlimited quantities; give what they will eat in five or ten minutes, then take it away. They are likely to over-eat of wet mashes, but what they have to work for is not likely to give them indigestion. When chickens are two months old they no longer need wet mash. They should now have access to food whenever they want it. A mixture of cracked corn, wheat, beef scrap, bone, grit, shell, and other grains, with dry middlings and bran, may be put into a slatted self-feeder, like the illustration, easily constructed by yourself. It is not much trouble to see that this is never empty. If fed only at intervals they rush at you, bolt the biggest grains, stuff their crops, crowd away weak or modest ones; result, some are under-fed, others are over-fed. If food is kept where they can get it whenever they happen to think of it they take a reasonable amount, then visit the growing clover or grass, pick up a casual pebble, take a drink of water, scratch out a worm, and return to the feed tray, all in natural course of the day's work. You will want to get rid of most of your young cockerels as soon as they are marketable. Broilers bring highest prices. To put them in tip-top condition they should be fattened for about two to three weeks when they are four months old. There is nothing better for fattening than a mash made of equal parts finely ground corn meal and wheat middlings with one fourth the quantity of meat meal. This should be wet with sour skim-milk or buttermilk and fed in a semi-liquid condition, about the consistency of pancake batter. Ground oats may be added. The product is known in the highest priced city hotels as "milk fed" or even "cream fed" chicken. If you can get skim-milk cheap why not buy a bunch of young cockerels and stuff them for market? They have been known to put on a pound for every five pounds of this mixture eaten. BUSINESS METHODS