I was really delighted to receive October’s edition of Your Chickens magazine yesterday as it
includes a lovely review of our book on Poultry-Keeping
by Jeremy Hobson (see below).
As Jeremy says, much of the advice given in Poultry-Keeping is as relevant today as
it was when the book was first written in 1918. In fact, as I was flicking
through the rest of Your Chickens I
noticed a striking example of this. The magazine includes an article entitled
‘Are You Our Mother?’ about using a chicken to hatch turkey chicks. Our book
includes a section on raising turkeys and the authors have the following to say
about brooding turkey eggs:
Some
breeders, Mr Cattell included, prefer putting the turkey eggs under fowls,
allowing these to hatch them, and then transferring the day-old chicks at night
to turkeys which have been broody about fourteen days. The turkeys usually take
to the chicks all right, and certainly make the best mothers, as they find the
youngsters so much natural food. An advantage of this plan is that as many as
twenty-five turkey chicks can be given to one turkey hen to mother, and there
is less risk of the eggs being crushed by a fowl than by a turkey, which is
often a clumsy although a good sitter.
So, back in 1918 it was recognised practice to use
chickens to brood turkey eggs, particularly where the turkey hen is a
first-time mother.
Your
Chickens magazine also includes adverts for modern chicken feed
that includes all the nutrients chickens require to live healthy lives. In 1918
too, chicken keepers were very concerned to keep their chickens well-nourished.
Poultry-Keeping provides extensive
daily menus, which vary month by month, in order to ensure chickens had a
varied diet that incorporated all the ingredients to keep the birds fit, well
and laying successfully throughout the year. For example, in September and
October the authors recommend that chickens kept in confined earth runs are
fed:
SUNDAY,
TUESDAY AND THURSDAY—Breakfast, 8 a.m., stout white oats or white
Canadian peas. Dinner, 1 p.m., meat scraps and cooked vegetables, such
as cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, or carrots, but not potatoes. Also green food
each day. Last feed of day, at 5.30 p.m., to be wheat, if oats given at
breakfast time; but if peas are given for breakfast, then let the last feed be
oats.
MONDAY
AND WEDNESDAY—Breakfast, soft food, biscuit and meat meal and fine bran;
scald these together and let stand for a few minutes, then add sufficient
middlings to make the whole crumbly. If biscuit and meat meal are not
procurable, then use equal parts pea meal, ground oats, and fine bran, scalded,
and dried off as above, and to this should be added a cup of granulated meat or
meat greaves to every four cupfuls of meal, and this meal should be scalded
well with boiling water before adding it to the meal and before the latter is
scalded. When this is done, there will be no necessity to give cooked animal
food at noon. The same applies to biscuit and meat meal. Dinner, green
food, such as cabbage leaves or cauliflower leaves, hung up in the run about
two feet from the ground. Last feed, oats, wheat, or peas, alternate
nights, but do not give mixed.
FRIDAY
AND SATURDAY—Soft food as on Monday; but should the weather be cold or wet add
a handful or two of maize meal to the biscuit meal and bran before
scalding—about half the quantity of the biscuit meal—and this must be allowed a
little extra time to swell before adding the thirds or middlings.
It looks as though the early twentieth-century chicken
keeper had to be a chef and run a restaurant for his fowls! It is much easier
today when you can just open a sack of ready-mixed chicken feed. By the way,
middlings are a by-product of the wheat milling industry – the coarse-ground
wheat and bran that is left over after making flour – and meat greaves is an
edible by-product of rendering animal carcases. Therefore, chicken-keepers in
1918 were feeding their birds the unprocessed leftovers that are today processed
for inclusion in animal feed (which looks and smells a lot nicer than the basic
ingredients from which it is made!).
A bronze turkey (one of many beautiful illustrations in our title Poultry-Keeping)
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