282 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



or Leghorns or a number of others I might mention, is not living 

 up to his immediate opportunities, because one can buy in any neigh- 

 borhood with only a little additional expense for eggs or chickens, 

 breeding quality that has taken men 50 to 75 or more years to bring 

 up to its present state of perfection. You have then secured a founda- 

 tion of uniform type as regards size and color, quality of egg, and of 

 reasonably good production and good constitutional vigor if care is 

 used in selection. We also need to have birds that have inherited 

 a tendency to long life. The greatest handicap to-day to the poultry 

 business is the comparatively short life of our birds. In Nature 

 they might live 10 or 15 years or more; I have known them 13 years 

 old in domestigation. We have a number of hens in the college flock 

 now that are G years old, many of them laying fairly well. We want 

 to impress the inherited quality of longevity upon our birds because 

 we know that if a bird is born with a vigorous constitution and the 

 inherited tendency to long life, it will be easier to rear the chickens; 

 we will be getting individuals that can stay with us for a period 

 of years and make it unnecessary for us to go to the most hazardous, 

 most difficult, and most expensive process connected with poultry 

 farming, namely, the hatching and rearing each year of as many or 

 more chickens as we have mature fowls on the place. With the present 

 normal life of our domestic fowl, a profitable life of only two or three 

 years at most, it is necessary for every poultryman in the country to 

 hatch and rear each year as many chickens as he has capacity for 

 mature hens on his farm. A 1,000 hen farm must rear every year at 

 least 1,000, and ought to rear 1,200 or 1,500 chickens in order to 

 allow rigid selection. If we can by any means develop birds with 

 longer lives so that we can keep them 3, 4 or 5 years as choice se- 

 lected individuals to breed from, then we are impressing quality 

 of longevity and we do not have to go to that heavy expense of 

 rearing so many chickens each year. 



We need to develop the quality of producing fertile, hatchable eggs. 

 Many a man has succeeded well in getting high egg production but 

 failed to hatch the chickens. There seems to be a limit to the endur- 

 ance of a hen to produce 150, 175, 200 or 250 eggs a year and have 

 enough vitality left to give us healthy offspring. The dairy- 

 men know what that means when they push their cows to the 

 limit. It is the same with the hens. We must get reasonably high 

 yields but this must be consistent with vitality in order that these 

 birds will give us chickens as strong as their parents. If the poultry- 

 man cannot so organize his methods of breeding, feeding, housing and 

 care that the next generation is going to be as good or better from 

 the standpoint of fertility and hatching power and vitality, it will 

 only be a few years before that person is out of the chicken business. 

 Many a person has gone out by that doorway. There are some things 

 that we know about breeding poultry, but not all. This question of se- 

 curing heavy production, good fertility and strong hatching power is, 

 at the present time, the most difficult thing we have to confront in 

 breeding. 



The next factor that we must consider is the question of quality 

 of eggs. It is not simply the number of eggs that the hens lay that 

 determine the profit. In my humble judgment we have been ''bark- 

 ing up the wrong tree" a good share of the time in this question of 

 breeding for egg production. The quickest results and the be^t pay- 



