CHAPTER XXXIII. 



THE BROODER OF THE FUTURE. 



As the cheapest thing for extensive artificial hatching 

 will prove to be the large apartment, so the cheapest 

 brooder the writer has already found to be a big room. 

 "Hire a hall," was once a popular phrase, and it applies 

 here. To have 1000 chicks in a brooder house, twenty- 

 five in a brooder, will take forty of these, to hold which 

 the house will have to be large anyway. As commonly 

 constructed, the pens attached to the brooders would 

 have to be quite small, necessitating restricting locomo- 

 tion of the inmates. There might be forty outside yards, 

 using up a great lot of building material (cost ! cost !) 

 but the chicks would have to be stived up closely in bad 

 weather. The indoor exercisers might be provided, but 

 there is " cost, cost," again. Now suppose the entire 

 floor of a good sized room, built with high walls to 

 enclose plenty of air, is accessible to each and every 

 chick of the 1000 in all weathers. The first published 

 account of an arrangement of this kind was given years 

 ago by that veteran poultry raiser and author, and noble- 

 hearted man, Mr. P. H. Jacobs, who reared some six 

 hundred chickens in a not large room upstairs in Chi- 

 cago, to the age of six weeks, with substantially no 

 death rate. They were then removed to the country. 

 There was a stove in the center of the room, where fire 

 was burning constantly, and the birds ran in one flock 

 all over the room by day, being separated at night into 

 squads and lodged under hovers ranged at the walls. 

 They had runs, literally, as the whole floor space of the 



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