650 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



In selecting your breed It Is not so much the breed as the strain. 

 For Instance, we find some Plymouth Rocks which have been bred for 

 high egg-productiveness and which will be just as good layers as the 

 little class, such as the Leghorns. 



Too often we find pure bred poultry condemned because of the lack of 

 selecting the best layers each year. In selecting stock you choose the best. 

 Why not do so with poultry? 



Keep your poultry and poultry houses clean and comfortable. A. 

 lousy hen is not a laying hen and insecticides are so cheap one can 

 have clean, sanitary houses at a very small expense. A thorough spray- 

 ing occasionally will keep the houses clean and do a great deal toward put- 

 ting your poultry on a profitable basis. In the winter give them plenty of 

 straw and litter to scratch in, plenty of water and feed, and instead of 

 bringing your eggs to town in a peach basket you will come with several 

 egg cases loaded in your wagon. 



The past few days have been balmy as spring and the poultry raiser 

 realizes that hatching time is at hand. A few already have broody 

 hens but the broody hen has been supplanted by the incubator. This 

 machine has come to stay and the setting hen may as well abdicate, 

 for the machine is better in every respect than the hen for hatchingr 

 purposes. Assuming that the farmer has a good reliable incubator 

 (and anything less is too dear at any price) he can hatch more chickens, 

 and stronger and better chickens, with less labor than hens would re- 

 quire. If the incubator is a good one, and the operator is painstaking- 

 and careful, the results with good fertile eggs will be all that could be 

 desired. 



Directions come with each incubator. Follow them closely and when 

 you once understand the machine, it requires very little care. Ten or 

 twenty minutes once a day is all the time it takes. This time is re- 

 quired to fill and trim the lamp, turn and cool the eggs. There is nO' 

 danger of hens breaking eggs, having other hens lay in nest, of greedy 

 rats stealing the eggs, no dusting of old chicks with lice powders, no 

 trampling of young chicks by a fussy hen, and last and best, no lice- 

 on the young chicks, for every poultryman knows that lice is the cause 

 of most of the loss among young chicks. 



Well begun is half done, but finish the other half with good brooding, 

 care, and proper feed and you will be more than satisfied with the re- 

 sults obtained with machine incubation. 



We all hope that this institute will give the poultry question the 

 proper position on its program that poultry deserves. That in a few 

 years Buena Vista county will be the banner county for poultry and 

 eggs and that each and every farm will have a fine flock of thorough- 

 bred hens, well housed and cared for and yielding a handsome profit 

 to their owners. 



USES AND ABUSES OF PASTURES. 



B. F. Seaman, Davenport, Iowa, Before Clinton County Farmers' Institute^ 



It is with pride that corn fanciers in Iowa point to the many mil- 

 lions of dollars represented in corn during the past year, but even the 



