[Illustration: FIG. 18—A long poultry house on the White Leghorn
Poultry Yards, Waterville, N.Y.]
In New York State it has been thought desirable to have warm houses
for the Single Comb White Leghorns so largely kept there, and we give
illustrations of one of the long poultry houses of the White Leghorn
Poultry Yards, Waterville, N.Y. This house is two hundred and forty
feet long by sixteen feet wide, divided into pens twelve feet square
and a walk three and a half feet wide along the north side. It has a
floor of seven-eighths inch matched boards throughout. The outside
walls are first boarded, then covered with sheathing and clapboarded.
The inside of the building is boarded up with matched boards on the
inside of the studs, making a four-inch dead air space between the
walls. The ceilings are made of matched boards laid at the level of the
plates. In this ceiling, over the centre of each pen, is a small trap
door, two feet square, opening up into the attic space above, which is
designed to give diffusive ventilation.
Three ventilating cupolas cap the roof, and there are full-sized
windows in each gable end. This attic space is storage room for straw,
which is drawn upon from time to time, to furnish scratching material
for the pen floors and opening the trap-door into the ceiling, it
gives excellent ventilation without drafts. A door opens from the
alleyway into each pen, and doors in the partition between the pens
permit passing through from pen to pen. The roost platforms with nest
boxes beneath are against the partition between the walk and pens and
the plan of partitions between pens as shown in Fig. 19. The roof is
covered with Paroid Roofing. A fault here is the wire netting in these
partitions; a better plan would be matched-board partitions throughout.
The twelve feet square pens have one hundred and forty-four square feet
of floor space each, giving ample room for twenty-five head of layers,
and while a long house of this description is somewhat expensive
to build, it has many advantages, which, on a large and permanent
poultry plant, will more than make up for the first cost in the ease
and economy of feeding, etc., and the warmth of the house and the
simplicity of the ventilation. This style of poultry house has been
in use on the White Leghorn farm for several years, and it has been
found to be both practical and economical; it combines very completely
the laying and the breeding house. On this plant they practise the
alternate system of males in the pens, a small coop for the extra male
being set against the partition in one corner of the pen, four feet up
from the floor. One male bird is cooped up while the other runs with
the hens and they are exchanged every two or three days, the change
being effected at night, on occasion of the shutting-up visit.
[Illustration: FIG. 19—Interior, showing partitions between pens.]
[Illustration: FIG. 20—Interior of pens, showing roosts.]