Oats as a Food for Fowls.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 123, 18 January 1909, Page 3

Oats as a Food for Fowls.

As a food for fowls oats have few superiors. There are few better balanced foods than a good sample of this grain. It is equally well adapted for being fattened for table purposes. In the case of laying hens the oats serve a double purpose, because they not only supply material for the formation of the egg shell, but they are also very nutritive, and the flavour of the eggs laid by the birds to which they are fed is particularly good. For fattening fowl also oats have much to commend them, as the flesh produced when they are given in any quantity is of the very finest flavour, and at the same time possesses the whiteness of colour which is so much esteemed in table fowls. In Surrey and some of the other leading fattening districts in England, ground oats is one of the principal constituents in the food rations given to the birds. In these districts the oats so fed are ground into the very finest flour, special care being taken not only to grind up the meal of the gram, but also the husk. In this finely ground condition, the birds when put up for fattening are do remarkably well upon the oats—in the opinion of some people better, indeed, than upon any other kind of grain food that can be given them.