In dairy work the individual preferences of the cows are given attention and their whimsy catered to by the herdsman.  I know of nothing that makes a man more feel his kinship to the beast than to hear a good dairyman talk of the personalities and preferences of his feminine co-operators.

With commercial chicken work, humanly guided individual feedings is out of the question, though, if used, it might hasten the coming of the two-egg-per-day hen.  Individual feeding with the hen as sole judge as to what she shall eat, which means each food in separate hoppers and free range, is the best system of chicken feeding yet evolved.

The duty of the poultryman is to supply the food, giving enough variety to permit of the hens having a fair selection.  In practice this means that every hen must have access to water, grit (preferably oyster shell), one kind of grain, one kind of meat, and one kind of green food.  In practice it will pay to add granulated bone for growing stock.  One or two extra grains for variety and as many green foods as conveniences will permit to increase palatability—­hence increase the amount of food consumed, for a heavy food consumption is necessary for egg production.

As corn is the cheapest food known, let it be the bread at the boarding house and other grains the rotating series of hash, beans and bacon.  The grain hopper may have two divisions.  The corn never changes but the other should have a change of grain occasionally.  The extent of the use made of the various grains will be determined by their price per pound.

The proportions of food of the various classes that will be consumed is about as follows: 

Of 100 lbs. of dry matter:  8 to 12 lbs. meat; 66 to 75 lbs. grain; 15 to 25 lbs. green food.

The profits of the business will be increased by supplying the green food in such tempting forms as to increase the amount consumed and cut down the use of grains.

The methods we have been describing in which various dry unground grains, beef scrap and oyster shell, each in a separate compartment, are exposed before the hen at all times, together with the abundant use of green food, either as pasture or a soiling crop, is the method of feeding assumed throughout this book.

The hopper feeding of so-called dry mash or ground grain mixture has been quite a fad in the last few years.  The tendency of the hens to waste such food has occasioned considerable trouble.  They are picking it over for their favorite foods and trying to avoid disagreeable foods.  This difficulty is relieved when the food be separated into its various components and the hen offered each separately.  As a matter of fact, there is no occasion for feeding ground feed except in fattening rations and here the wet mash is desirable.

The use of the products of wheat milling has been the chief excuse for such practices, but unless these get considerably lower in price per pound than corn they may be left off the bill-of-fare to advantage.  The great use made of these products in poultry feeding was chiefly a result of the attempted application of the balanced ration idea, but as has already been shown the efforts to raise the protein ratio with grain foods is generally false economy.