The Gross Maintenance Requirement of White Leghorns

This paper is a preliminary report on some results obtained in attempting to estimate the gross maintenance requirement of White Leghorn chickens from data obtained from feeding experiments specially planned for that purpose. The expression, “gross maintenance requirement,” as employed here, is used to designate that weight of feed (in grams) which a chicken requires each day for all purposes, except for increasing its live weight and for producing eggs. The feeding experiments were so planned that a number of pens of chickens were fed at levels of feed intake which differed from one another by a fixed amount, all the levels of feed intake being less than that required for maintaining live weight. The daily allowance of feed for each pen was weighed and placed in small paper bags before the experiment was started, and each morning during the experiment proper one of these bags was emptied into the . . .