STARTING A POULTRY FARM.
If every hen should only raise five broods yearly of ten each, and
there were ten hens to start with, at the end of two years they
would number 344,760, after the superfluous roosters were sold; and
then, supposing the extra eggs to have paid for their keeping and
the produce to be worth only a dollar and a half a pair, there would
be a clear profit of $258,520. Allowing for occasional deaths, this
sum might be stated in round numbers at a quarter of a million,
which would be a liberal increase from ten hens. Of course I did not
expect to do as well as this, but merely mention what might be done
with good luck and forcing.
ROBERT ROOSEVELT.
Having always heard, on the best authority, that there was “money
in hens,” I invested largely in prize fowls secured at State fairs
and large poultry shows, buying as many kinds as possible to make an
effective and brilliant display in their “runs.”
There _is_ a good deal of money in my hens—how to get it back is the
present problem. These hens were all heralded as famous layers; several
did lay in the traveling coops on the journey, great pinky-brown
beauties, just to show what they could do if they chose, then stopped
suddenly. I wrote anxiously to former owners of this vaunted stock to
explain such disappointing behavior. Some guessed the hens were just
moulting, others thought “may be they were broody”; a few had the
frankness to agree with me that it was mighty curious, but hens always
were “sorter contrary critters.”
Their appetites remained normal, but, as the little girl said of her
pet bantam, they only lay about doing nothing. And when guests desired
some of my fine fresh eggs boiled for breakfast, I used to go secretly
to a neighbor and buy a dozen, but never gave away the mortifying
situation.
Seeing piles of ducks’ eggs in a farmer’s barn, all packed for
market, and picturing the producers, thirty white Pekins, a snowy,
self-supporting fleet on my reformed lakelet, I bought the whole lot,
and for long weary months they were fed and pampered and coaxed and
reasoned with, shut up, let out, kept on the water, forbidden to go to
it, but not one egg to be seen!
It was considered a rich joke in that locality that a city woman who
was trying to farm, had applied for these ducks just as they had
completed their labors for the season of 1888-’90; they were also
extremely venerable, and the reticent owner rejoiced to be relieved
of an expensive burden at good rates. Knowing nothing of these facts
in natural history, I pondered deeply over the double phenomenon. I
said the hens seemed normal only as to appetite; the ducks proved
abnormal in this respect. They were always coming up to the back door,
clamoring for food—always unappeased. They preferred cake, fresh bread,
hot boiled potatoes, doted on tender bits of meat, but would gobble
up anything and everything, more voracious and less fastidious than
the ordinary hog of commerce. Bags of corn were consumed in a flash,
“shorts” were never long before their eager gaze, they went for every
kind of nourishment provided for the rest of the menagerie. A goat
is supposed to have a champion appetite and digestion, but a duck—at
least one of my ducks—leaves a goat so far behind that he never could
regain his reputation for omniverosity. They were too antique to be
eaten themselves—their longevity entitled them to respect; they could
not be disposed of by the shrewdest market man to the least particular
of boarding-house providers; I could only regard them with amazement
and horror and let them go on eating me out of house and home and
purse-strings.
But at last I knew. I asked an honest man from afar, who called to sell
something, why those ducks would not lay a single egg. He looked at
them critically and wrote to me the next day:
“DEAR MADAM: The reason your ducks won’t lay is because they’re too
old to live and the bigest part of ’em is drakes.
Respectfully,
JONAS HURLBERT.”
I hear that there are more ducks in the Chinese Empire than in all the
world outside of it. They are kept by the Celestials on every farm,
on the private and public roads, on streets of cities, and on all the
lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, and brooks in the country. That is the
secret of their lack of progress. What time have they to advance after
the ducks are fed and cared for? No male inhabitant could ever squeeze
out a leisure half-hour to visit a barber, hence their long queues.
About this time the statement of Mr. Crankin, of North Yeaston, Rhode
Island, that he makes a clear and easy profit of five dollars and
twenty cents per hen each year, and nearly forty-four dollars to every
duck, and might have increased said profit if he had hatched, rather
than sold, seventy-two dozen eggs, struck me as wildly apocryphal. Also
that caring for said hens and ducks was merely an incident of his day’s
work on the large farm, he working with his laborers. Heart-sick and
indignant, contrasting his rosy success with my leaden-hued failure, I
decided to give all my ducks away, as they wouldn’t, couldn’t drown,
and there would be no use in killing them. But no one wanted them! And
everybody smiled quizzically when I proposed the gift.
Just then, as if in direct sarcasm, a friend sent me a paper with an
item marked to the effect that a poor young girl had three ducks’ eggs
given her as the basis of a solid fortune, and actually cleared one
hundred and eighteen dollars from those three eggs the first year.
Another woman solemnly asserts in print a profit of $448.69 from one
hundred hens each year.
The census man told me of a woman who had only eighteen hens. They
gave her sixteen hundred and ninety eggs, of which she sold eighteen
dollars’ worth, leaving plenty for household use.
And my hens and my ducks! In my despair I drove a long way to consult
a “duck man.” He looked like the typical Brother Jonathan, only with
a longer beard, and his face was haggard, unkempt, anxious. He could
scarcely stop to converse, evidently grudged the time, devotes his
entire energies from dawn to twilight to slaving for his eight hundred
ducklings. He also kept an incubator going all the time.
“Do ducks pay you?” I asked.
“Wall, I’m gettin’ to be somewhat of a bigotist,” he said; “I barely
git a livin’.”
“Why Mr. Crankin—” I began.
The name roused his jealous ire, and his voice, a low mumble before,
now burst into a loud roar. “Yes, Crankin makes money, has a sight o’
incubators, makes ’em himself, sells a lot, but some say they don’t act
like his do when they git off his place; most on ’em seem possessed,
but Crankin, _he_ can manage ’em and makes money too.”
“Do your ducks lay much?”
“Lay! I don’t want ’em to lay! Sell ’em all out at nine weeks, ’fore
the pin feathers come; then they’re good eatin’—for them as likes ’em.
I’ve heard of yure old lot. Kill ’em, I say, and start new!”
“Crankin says—”
“I don’t care nothing what Crankin says” (here the voice would have
filled a cathedral), “I tell ye; me and Crankin’s two different
critters!”
So I felt; but it would not do to give up. I purchased an expensive
incubator and brooder—needn’t have bought a brooder. I put into the
incubator at a time when eggs were scarce and high priced, two hundred
eggs—hens’ eggs, ducks’ eggs, goose eggs. The temperature must be kept
from 102° to 104°. The lamps blazed up a little on the first day, but
after that we kept the heat exactly right by daily watching and night
vigils. It engrossed most of the time of four able-bodied victims.
Nothing ever was developed. The eggs were probably cooked that first
day!
Now I’m vainly seeking for a purchaser for my I. and B. Terms of sale
very reasonable. Great reduction from original price; shall no doubt be
forced to give them away to banish painful recollections.
I also invested in turkeys, geese, and peacocks, and a pair of guinea
hens to keep hawks away.
For long weary months the geese seemed the only fowls truly at home
on my farm. They did their level best. Satisfied that my hens would
neither lay nor set, I sent to noted poultry fanciers for “settings” of
eggs at three dollars per thirteen, then paid a friendly “hen woman”
for assisting in the mysterious evolution of said eggs into various
interesting little families old enough to be brought to me.
Many and curious were the casualties befalling these young broods.
Chickens are subject to all the infantile diseases of children and
many more of their own, and mine were truly afflicted. _Imprimis_,
most would not hatch; the finest Brahma eggs contained the commonest
barn-yard fowls. Some stuck to the shell, some were drowned in a saucer
of milk, some perished because no lard had been rubbed on their heads,
others passed away discouraged by too much lard. Several ate rose bugs
with fatal results; others were greedy as to gravel and agonized with
distended crops till released by death. They had more “sand” than was
good for them. They were raised on “Cat Hill,” and five were captured
by felines, and when the remnant was brought to me they disappeared day
by day in the most puzzling manner until we caught our mischievous pug,
“Tiny Tim,” holding down a beautiful young Leghorn with his cruel paw
and biting a piece out of her neck.
So they left me, one by one, like the illusions of youth, until there
was no “survival of the fittest.”
In a ragged old barn opposite, a hen had stolen her nest and brought
out seventeen vigorous chicks. I paid a large bill for the care of
what might have been a splendid collection, and meekly bought that
faithful old hen with her large family. It is now a wonder to me that
any chickens arrive at maturity. Fowls are afflicted with parasitic
wrigglers in their poor little throats. The disease is called “gapes,”
because they try to open their bills for more air until a red worm
in the trachea causes suffocation. This horrid red worm, called
scientifically _Scelorostoma syngamus_, destroys annually _half a
million_ of chickens.
Dr. Crisp, of England, says it would be of truly national importance to
find the means of preventing its invasion.
The unpleasant results of hens and garden contiguous, Warner has
described. They are incompatible if not antagonistic. One man wisely
advises: “Fence the garden in and let the chickens run, as the man
divided the house with his quarrelsome wife, by taking the inside
himself and giving her the outside, that she might have room according
to her strength.”
Looking over the long list of diseases to which fowls are subject is
dispiriting. I am glad they can’t read them, or they would have all
at once, as J.K. Jerome, the witty playwright, decided he had every
disease found in a medical dictionary, except housemaid’s knee. Look at
this condensed list:
DISEASES OF NERVOUS SYSTEM.—1. Apoplexy. 2. Paralysis. 3. Vertigo.
4. Neuralgia. 5. Debility.
DISEASES OF DIGESTIVE ORGANS.—99.
DISEASES OF LOCOMOTIVE ORGANS.—1. Rheumatism. 2. Cramp. 3. Gout. 4.
Leg weakness. 5. Paralysis of legs. 6. Elephantiasis.
Next, diseases caused by parasites.
Then, injuries.
Lastly, miscellaneous.
I could add a still longer list of unclassified ills: Homesickness,
fits, melancholia, corns, blindness from fighting too much, etc.
Now that I have learned to raise chickens, it is a hard and slow
struggle to get any killed. I say in an off-hand manner, with assumed
nonchalance: “Ellen, I want Tom to kill a rooster at once for
tomorrow’s dinner, and I have an order from a friend for four more, so
he must select five to-night.” Then begins the trouble. “Oh,” pleads
Ellen, “don’t kill dear Dick! poor, dear Dick! That is Tom’s pet of
all; so big and handsome and knows so much! He will jump up on Tom’s
shoulder and eat out of his hand and come when he calls—and those big
Brahmas—don’t you know how they were brought up by hand, as you might
say, and they know me and hang around the door for crumbs, and that
beauty of a Wyandock, you _couldn’t_ eat _him_!” When the matter is
decided, as the guillotining is going on, Ellen and I sit listening
to the axe thuds and the death squaks, while she wrings her hands,
saying: “O dearie me! What a world—the dear Lord ha’ mercy on us poor
creatures! What a thing to look into, that we must kill the poor
innocents to eat them. And they were so tame and cunning, and would
follow me all around!” Then I tell her of the horrors of the French
Revolution to distract her attention from the present crisis, and
alluded to the horrors of cannibalism recently disclosed in Africa.
Then I fall into a queer reverie and imagine how awful it would be if
we should ever be called to submit to a race of beings as much larger
than we are as we are above the fowls. I almost hear such a monster of
a house-wife, fully ninety feet high, say to a servant, looking sternly
and critically at me:
“That fat, white creature must be killed; just eats her old head
off—will soon be too tough”—Ugh! Here Tom comes with five headless
fowls. Wasn’t that a weird fancy of mine?
Truly “Me and Crankin’s two different critters.”
From the following verse, quoted from a recent poultry magazine, I
conclude that I must be classed as a “chump.” As it contains the secret
of success in every undertaking, it should be committed to memory by
all my readers.
“Grit makes the man,
The want of it the chump.
The men who win,
Lay hold, hang on, and hump.”