No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 291 



THE POULTRY INDUSTKY 



By I'ROF. JAMES E. RICE, in ClKirgft PonHry Husbandry, Cornell University, Ithaca, S'. V. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: 1 do not know bow mam- 

 people in this audience are interested in poulUy. 1 have been trying 

 lo tind out. As near as 1 can learn most of you are delegates who 

 are interested in everything else but poultry. 1 hope that there are 

 a iiiw here that are tiiiiiking seriously of paying more aUeution to 

 poultry than they have already done and wiih this object in view 1 

 have selected slides that will represent some of the recent results of 

 the experimental work, with a practical bearing. Each one of the ex- 

 periments that 1 shall deal with have been carried out with the idea 

 of saving money, of making more money out of our hens. 



I'ntil very recent years poultry husbandry has been looked uixm as 

 a side issue on most farms. It has been looked upon as a business 

 primarily for women and children and men who, having failed in some 

 other line or broken in health, think that they can retire to a little 

 ]>atch of land and keej) a few thousand hens and, because it is easy to 

 make a dollar or so per hen, they figure out with a lead pencil that 

 they can make several tliousand dollars by keeping seveial thousand 

 hens; hence many people have gone blindly into the chicken business 

 (mly to discover that Ihey know nothing about it. xVnd secondly. 

 ])oullry husbandry as a ])rofession has been looked u]iou as a great 

 risk, as a hazard, a business for example, which the banks could not 

 loan money on; not a safe, conservative, sane business investment. 

 This view])oint is rai)idly changing, poultry husbandry is just now 

 coming into its own. It is becoming a perfectly safe and a very profit- 

 able business when it is carried on in the line of our best knowledge. 



The difticulty with poultry husbandry is that we are dealing with 

 so many little individuals; that there is too much detail to look alter, 

 and conseipiently the amount of business that any one person can do 

 is exceedingly limited. But in recent years we have discovered 

 methods of hatching extensively and successfully, brooding in large 

 fiocks and very successfully, and the keeping of hens in large numbers 

 for egg ])roducti()n and kee})ing them by easier, safer melhods, and 

 housing them iu the large o])en air houses, and giving them free range 

 instead of the little close ''bare yard" conditions; and marketing their 

 eggs as they should be marketed, carefully grading them as fruit 

 ])eople are supposed to grade their fruit, and the hens bred as scien- 

 tifically as men have been breeding their horses and cattle; and as a 

 result, to-day we have all over tlie country men who are keej)ing from 

 1,000 to 10,000 or more hens and keejjing them more successfully than 

 before, with greatei' ])rofit than we could have expected from 500 to 

 1,000 hens five or six years ago. These changes have come about by 

 virtue of the careful work by men who have studied and experimented 

 for themselves and by the colleges and ex})eriment sialions that have 

 been investigating some of these problems, and I think that as I show 



