The Mena weekly star., 1919-03-27

maturec, or little lame or crooked just because you get it cheaper. A little poor color in feathers or defect m comb will not matter so much when your hens are not full-bloods, but be sure your male bird is well-built. Some people imagine that just be- cause they will raise chickens only for their own use it does not matter if he has crooked wing or a broken tall or is scrubby, but it does. Instead of making your focks healthy you are running it down in vigor. You will get less eggs, lose more chicks and make less profits. Better keep fewer chickens and have them good, If you can have only a small amount of money invested. This selecting of females and mating to a good bred-to- lay cockerel will give you a good bred-to-lay strain of chickens which you can improve each year by selling oil the poorest types and those get ting too old to be profitable.
 The best way, of course, is to buy few bred-to-lay thorobred birds, or some eggs to set, or baby chicks of the breed you like best, then sell off your other stock and keep your chick ems well-culled each year.
 Now, that you have your well-bred Lirds either bred up or the full-bloods, the rest is up to the one who feeds the poultry And right here is where many fall down.
 One woman said to me, "Oh, feed my chickens good" but when l picked one up it had absolutely nothing in its crop. Another one, a few days previous, was complaining that her hens did not lay, and here it was February. l asked her what she fed them and she said: "Oh, 1 have been feeding them all winter dicerent kinds of feeds. fed chops and barley and oats," but upon inquiry I found that she had fed one at a time. She had never fed them a balanced ration. What housewife would think of feed ing her husband on meat till it was all gone, then potatoes till they were gone, then bread for while, etc. :? Would there not be onother world war if this was tried? He wants a more balanced ration than that, and so does the hen.
 Why will some people be so foolish as to feed only one kind of feed at a time to their chickens? It does not cost any more to get two kinds of feed at one time, as they will last twice as long when fed together than when each is fed alone.
 If that woman had gotten the three feeds she fed at once, and fed oats and barley in the morning, and corn at night, with dry mash of corn meal, or hominy heartsmeal shorts, bran and tankage or cottonseed meal set before them at noon or kept be- fore them all the time, she would have had baskets of eggs to buy both feed for the hens and the family. If you do not want to feed hen enough besides what it takes for her to live on, to produce eggs, eat her or sell her. If you do not get eggs at least the biggest part of the year, either your hens are no good or you are no good as feeder.
 Now, I will tell you one sure way to bed at night with full crops into getting enough to eat or not. Just slip into the henhouse at night after they have all gone to roost and pass your hand from one hen to another, and see if their crops are full They need to be full and round, not hard, but pliable Quite a great deal of their food needs to be vegetables, grass and such things. Cooked tur-