THE POULTRY RUN.
Even the hen is intensively cultivated these days, and that makes room
for her and her chicks on the small patch. It is perfectly amazing how
little the ordinary farmer knows about poultry, although he has raised
some, more or less, from time immemorial. The modern farmer is too wise
to be caught with the extravagant stories found in some poultry papers,
of the profits to be made from a hennery, though at the same time he
is not wise enough to believe that with careful attention and improved
methods, the hennery can be made to pay well.
It is for the benefit of the farmer who is neither too wise nor too
ignorant to be taught, as well as for the villager and the intensive
farmer, that this chapter is written.[11]
One of the new systems, Philo’s,[12] extensively advertised, makes it
possible for people with but little room to keep a small flock. By this
system, the hens are always kept in confinement; but with some extra
care and proper treatment they do well and yield great results; which
is in harmony with the modern theory of intensive culture.
The first thing to be decided is what kind of poultry to keep. Chickens
are the most popular of the various domestic animals suitable for the
intensive farmer. Turkeys and guineas do not thrive well in confinement
and are difficult to rear in a commercial way. Farmers who have free
range, especially if they are adjacent to woodland, may do well with
a few of these less domesticated birds. On the other hand, ducks and
pigeons do even better than chickens in confinement, but there is less
demand for the product.
The first essential for success with poultry, as with crops, is to
secure good stock; the very best possible. To buy fowls simply because
they are cheap is poor economy. Much better buy well-bred stock at five
dollars and upwards, for they will not only give more eggs, but their
brood will be worth more, so that in a year you can build up a fine
flock of your own.
The second essential is to keep them in small companies, not more than
six hens in a pen; still better results can be had with four. These
are the days of intensive culture and chicks will respond to it as
surely as field crops. Like the crops, they need abundance of food, to
force growth and vigor and egg production. Care must be taken in the
selection of food, but you are always safe on lots of oats, wheat-bran
and green stuff, with some lean beef now and then. Corn should be fed
sparingly to heavy fowls, but is an excellent diet for Leghorns or for
any chickens on free range. Running water, or plenty of fresh water
should be furnished. An open water vessel is best, although almost any
self-feeding fountain is good. Place it about ten inches from the floor
that no dirt may be scratched into it.
Fresh air and sunshine are necessities, but drafts should be avoided.
Cleanliness is vital; if only a few hens are kept, all droppings should
be removed every morning, and sand or lime or ashes sprinkled on the
roosts and boards. If the food is good and well balanced, the premises
kept scrupulously clean, and the fowls protected from storm and wind
you will not be greatly troubled with disease or weakness. Daily care,
never slackening, is the price that must be paid for success.
The poultry house should be in a sunny spot, on a hillside sloping to
the south, if possible; but no one need be kept from chicken raising if
such a spot cannot be had, for many successful plants are not so well
situated. A light sandy soil offers the same advantages as a southern
slope. Such locations or soils are not only much dryer but also much
warmer, for the snow melts and the frost leaves the ground earlier in
the spring than on northern slopes or in clay soils. The advantage of
this earlier season is just as real as in a more southern latitude.
One of the main defects of poultry houses has been that they were built
for people, rather than for hens; being too high, they are not easily
kept warm in winter. The house itself should be well built to exclude
storm and wind, but the southern side should be largely enclosed with
muslin, which is much better than glass, as it affords an entrance for
air without draughts, and furnishes plenty of light.
The roosting room may have a ceiling close above the roosts; this can
be made of round poles or narrow boards, laid an inch or more apart,
and over these there should be spread a covering of hay or straw. This
will give ventilation, and yet retain most of the heat, especially if a
thin muslin curtain is placed before the fowls during the night.
In the warmer localities, on the Atlantic coast from New York south,
and in the Mississippi Valley anywhere south of St. Louis, curtain
fronts are not necessary, but, instead, a part or all of the south side
of the poultry house is made of poultry netting.
If chickens are to be raised in large numbers, incubators must be used;
those holding two to three hundred eggs are most commonly used. After
the chicks are hatched, comes the serious question of brooding them,
especially during the winter. All kinds of little chicks need air and
sunshine even more than older folk, and not many buildings allow of
either; consequently, we must consider brooding out of doors, where air
and sunshine can always be had. Fortunately, the experimenting has been
done by others, so now we may avail ourselves of the knowledge they
have gained, as many successful people are doing.
With properly constructed brooders and brooder coops, it is perfectly
practicable to care for chickens from hatching to full growth, out of
doors, at any time of the year, without artificial heat. This does
away with all danger from fire and over-heating, and gives the chickens
a vigorous constitution that will enable them to withstand all the ills
to which chickens are liable.
These suggestions are not given as great discoveries, but they are a
brief summary of the practical points of chicken raising, and are all
workable. Some of them are given by the Rev. W. W. Cox, as the results
of years of personal experience in the business. He is now making a
specialty of raising White Orpingtons, and is brooding out of doors,
with success.
There are many branches of the “chicken-tree,” the more important ones
being breeding stock, or fancy poultry; egg farming, broiler farming
and roaster growing. Running a public hatchery, and selling day-old
chicks, is the latest development, and is indeed so intensive that
it links manufacture to farming, for the building site is the only
ground required. These branches are recommended to the inexperienced
poultryman in the following order:—1st, Egg farming; 2d, roaster
growing; 3d, fancy poultry; 4th, broiler production.
Egg farming, properly conducted, is profitable in almost any locality.
Roaster farming has proved a great success near Boston, but has not
been largely introduced into other localities. Fancy poultry is a
money-making game for those who are successful in winning prizes at the
show, and getting well advertised as breeders. The broiler business,
seemingly the most profitable branch, has in practice been a source of
loss to many investors. The cause of failure in the broiler business,
lies chiefly in the difficulties of artificial incubation, especially
in the winter season.
Incubation is to the chicken raiser what the hot-bed is to the tomato
raiser. If incubation is a failure, the whole business must fail.
For the poultryman with a few dozen, or even several hundred fowls,
hatching with hens is to be recommended, unless he keep Leghorns
or Minorcas; these varieties not being good brooders. Convenient
arrangements for setting hens in large numbers will be a more
successful investment than incubators. For duck farms or Leghorn egg
farms, or any poultry business on a large scale, artificial incubation
is a “necessary evil.”
The Central Hatchery, only now being established here, although in
use in Egypt for centuries, promises to solve this difficulty. The
advantage of centralizing the hatching is that it admits of better
methods than are available on a small scale, and also allows one man
to devote his entire energies to this feature. Such hatcheries may
be handled either by private individuals, or, as in the case of the
creameries, may be co-operative institutions run for the good of the
whole community.
A continuous house can be built with small compartments for each flock,
and separate runs for summer use, though the colony plan is preferred
by some, and has its advantages, among them being the fact that the
flocks are more widely separated, so there is less danger of any
disease spreading; and if any particular house becomes infected, it can
be cleansed without disturbing the whole plant.
The colony plan requires considerable less expense in housing and other
equipment than the yarded plan. The expense for food is also decreased,
because of the greater number of insects and green food that the hens
get from the range.
The following plan of poultry keeping is, perhaps, the simplest known,
and for that reason, the most successful. By “successful” I do not
necessarily mean the most profitable, but the surest of paying a
reasonable profit. The plan is that of using inexpensive colony houses,
which are located in a large yard or small field. These houses are
built very light; they are floorless, and are moved frequently, either
by team or by a pole-pry. By this method the droppings are distributed
directly on the soil without the usual laborious work of scraping the
dropping-boards.
In the poultry field some green crop is kept growing as much of the
year as possible. As a general rule a crop cannot get a start in a
poultry range, and so a plan of rotating the chickens in two or more
fields, is desirable. No more profitable combination of “small” farming
can be found than that of rotating poultry with the leafy vegetables
(lettuce, spinach, cabbage, etc.) which utilize to the greatest
advantage the rich, nitrogenous manure. Under this system, the hens
are fed grain, chiefly corn, and beef scrap in hoppers, and water
is supplied in the simplest way possible, preferably from a running
brook. The chief point to be kept in mind is to cut down the number of
necessary visits to the poultry houses, thus reducing the labor cost.
The custom of raising chickens on fresh ground every year is of value
to the farm, but the one disadvantage has always been the expense of
fencing. In a recent issue the _Rural New Yorker_ told of the plan of
one wide-awake chicken raiser which can be followed by anybody. His
plan is to sow sunflower seed with a drill, at the earliest possible
moment in the spot where you wish the fence to be; then drive stakes at
intervals along the row and stretch two-foot chicken wire over them.
Even the wire will confine the chicks when they are small, and by the
time they have grown big enough to get over that, the sunflowers have
grown up and made a “chicken-tight” combination. Hens are too stupid to
think of flying over such a barrier, yet the poultry raiser can come
and go as if there was no barrier.
This is not only a cheap fence, but it affords the necessary shade for
the fowls in hot weather. They lie about among the stalks scratching
in the cool earth and getting a dirt bath at any time in the day. Then
late in the season the sunflower heads are cut down and the pullets do
the harvesting of that crop in short order. No other variety of fence
can be used for food when its usefulness as a barrier is past. You
could easily put up this sort of a fence yourself, and as the sunflower
is a very hardy plant, you might even try sowing the seed in the fall,
so as to get an early start in fence building in the spring.
You must be willing to give your time and attention if you are to
succeed. One man who has had a good deal of experience writes me
about the new method of chicken raising as follows:—“No doubt it is
a valuable contribution to the subject of intensive cultivation of
poultry. It involves, however, the most intensive and persistent labor,
to which very few men are willing to subject themselves, and I am
one of that class. I have had enough. Still, I need more income, and
I am thinking, just a little, of Indian Runner ducks, which demand
cheaper buildings and less care than chickens. Yet I cannot raise much
enthusiasm on the subject, and I shrink from the constant attention to
details which even they require.”
But even if you are not prepared to raise fowls after this fashion,
there is no reason why you should not keep a few hens and raise a
few chickens for your own family use. If you hatch in incubators,
use eggs that are laid the day you put them to hatch, and with good
management practically all of them will produce vigorous chickens that
can be induced to lay early, if pullets, and can be fed for market, if
cockerels.
Eggs are more profitable than chickens, especially if you can produce
them out of season, and this depends upon the time of hatching, the
feed and care. A flock of 25 fowls will produce eggs and chickens
enough to add a tidy sum to the income, if you feed and house them
right. And the feeding need not be much of an expense, if you save the
table scraps and give corn, cabbage and other green stuffs, buying
whatever wheat and oats you can’t raise. In winter, change their
drinking water frequently and see that it is slightly warmed. If you
cannot provide running water, then you must give them clean water many
times a day all the year around.
As a matter of fact, the amount of effort expended is pretty closely
related to the profits to be derived. Whether you raise hens, ducks,
geese, squabs, or any of the many animals now raised for profit on the
home acre, you must study their needs just as you must study plant
needs, if you are to succeed. Only by the use of intelligence can you
expect to reap profits, and to natural intelligence must be added
study. A man could not expect to be a successful teacher of mathematics
unless he had studied all the authorities in his special line, and kept
himself in touch with all the new theories as they were advanced. So it
is with the farmer. If he does not read the papers that deal especially
with his calling, he cannot keep in touch with the improvements and
discoveries constantly made in his line. He should take in at least two
standard agricultural papers. In a community where there is no public
library, the farmers might agree among themselves to take one or more
different papers each, and then exchange. In this way they could keep
in touch with all, at the expense of only one or two.
It will not be worth while for anybody to take up this work with any
hope of success, who expects to go at it with “a lick and a promise”
idea. It is only by thorough, careful, intelligent and persistent
effort that anything worth while can be accomplished. For the person
who will undertake the task in that way, there is an opportunity; but
he will need to have patience and some money while getting started and
learning the business. By all means, start in a small way, and find out
a lot of things which only experience can teach you; after that you can
gradually increase your plant with comparative safety.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] NOTE.—This chapter has been specially revised by Milo M.
Hastings, the author of a new and thorough work, “The Dollar Hen.” Mr.
Hastings was formerly the commercial poultry expert of U. S. Dept. of
Agriculture.
It will be impossible in the brief space available to go into detail
concerning all the up-to-date methods of poultry production. I can only
call attention to the system by which the industry is being modernized
and by which, also, it may be made to yield handsome profits to the
intelligent and aggressive poultryman.
[12] NOTE.—These systems mean small numbers together. A few eggs in
the incubator; a few chicks in a brooder; a few youngsters in a colony
coop; a few layers in a small house. The Philo poultry plant covers 40
× 40 feet.