INTENSE EGG PRODUCTION.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 236, 5 October 1928, Page 15

INTENSE EGG PRODUCTION.

CHANGE YOUR OBIT OCCASIONALLY

Slowly but surely we are mastering the secrets of intense egg production and at the same time retaining the vigour and constitution of the birds. There still are persons who were very sceptical when I first stated that the mineral salts were as necessary to the laying hen as to the human, in fact more so, because the laying hen is abnormal. We are asking her to supply the material for the growth of 200 or more chicks a year, whereas nature intended her to supply the, material for the development of not more than twenty* chicks. No other animal has ever approached this degree of abnormal development, fore the bird has to be fed abnormally unless she breaks down and she ceases to lay for extended periods till her system again recoups itself. I have for some few years claimed that the chief cause of weak chicks, dead in shell, and infertility was due to the want of the3e necessary mineral substances, which must be in solution in the contents of the egg or the chick is not developed— that is, not developed normally. I have gone further and pointed out that there has been a sad lack of the value of minerals for stock feeding in New Zealand and Australia generally. The latest reports show that attention is now being turned in this direction and will include some research subsidised by the Marketing Board of Great Britain. Up till now it has been a very difficult matter to get even the experienced breeder to recognise that anything more than lime, and possibly a little iron, was required, but recent researches have included lime, iron, sodium, phosphorous and traces of manganese. By and by, these professors, with their expensive laboratory will be able to tell us that stock, poultry and humans require at least fourteen mineral salts, as they are termed. Some of them are in only minute quantities, and it is the knowledge of experiments and the chemical composition of various substances which enable one to say how these may be supplied. If there is a heavy crop of oats the oat will contain just a trace of the substance known as silicon. The fowl will extract that in eating the oat, convert it into a soluble form and give it up to *an egg to be utilised as one of the small essentials in the development of a perfect chick. Small as this trace of silicon is, if the supply contained or stored in the body of a hen were exhausted the egg would not hatch a normal chick, but there are other. substances besides oats from which the hen can procure this trace; for instance, from a speck of granite which instinct teaches her to pick up to serve the double purpose of grinding her food and being assimilated for its mineral content. The oat had to obtain its substances from the soil, and the soil is .chiefly broken down rock. The question of grit is a much bigger one than we suppose. The average poultry keeper has one idea in his mind, the formation of an egg shell, and possibly the grinding of grain. We all know that on certain ground, in certain districts or countries, poultry and stock develop much better than in others; this is due to one cause, the ground on which they run end the food fed. We can bring this condition of almost any class of soil to bear on our poultry by the feeding of the correct grit or an admixture of grits. This is a subject which I believe has never been fully or even .primarily gone into. I don't expect poultrykeepers to be really scientific in this direction, but surely they can see the common sense of occasionally changing both what might be termed the grinding grit and the shell grit. Small scoria may be given for a time, then possibly crushed blue metal or road sweepings, then a change to crushed

limestone. If you have been feeding oyster shell for some considerable time change to cockle or pipi. Also remember that you can feed mineral matter through the green stuff that you may grow for the birds. This especially applies to lucerne. Never waste spinach which has grown to seed or is not wanted for the table. It contains au abundance of mineral matter in a very soluble form.