INTENSIVE POULTRY FARMING 21 



is always on the move, ever looking up some new place to get into 

 mischief and the very food it eats is run through it like a sausage 

 machine, always grinding but never holding what it grinds. 



Intensive Poultry Farming 



It is a notable feature in this method of poultry keeping that the 

 intensive farms are all along one line, namely, eggs. The farmer or 

 poultryman who keeps the general purpose fowls keeps them in 

 ordinary runs or ranges, not cooped up in little 'dinky houses, nor 

 even in large roomy houses. However, there is little doubt but that 

 intensive poultry farming can be conducted in our dry climate to much 

 better advantage than in a cold or very wet climate. 



In 1913 we gave an account of a poultry plant on a city lot that 

 occupied a space of 25x100 feet. The plant consists of one house 

 20x100, is two stories high and has pens 20x20 feet, holding 100 hens. 

 There is a cellar, which serves as a manure pit. There is an office 

 and feed room on the first floor, and a room the size of one pen for 

 storing litter, etc. The building has a -gable roof and on the south 

 side is nearly all open. The product is all sold at the office at retail, 

 customers calling for the eggs, which command a premium of five 

 cents a dozen over those sold at the grocery store. No chicks are 

 raised, but instead 400 pullets are bought each year to keep up the 

 stock. The flock is kept two years, so that half of them are always 

 hens and the other half pullets. 



When the hens stop laying in the fall they are sold to the egg 

 customers at 20 cents per pound, and the proprietor claims that 

 nearly all of them are disposed of at this rate. By this method the 

 old hens can come very near paying for the pullets. 



The proprietor says, having conceived the idea that hens could 

 be made to pay in houses on the "no yard plan" it did not seem very 

 far away to put them in a two story buiMing and do away with all 

 land and yards. Hence, as there was no use in buying land and locat- 

 ing in the country in order to have an egg farm, he decided to have 

 his egg factory right in the city. .Strict cleanliness is the watchword, 

 the dropping boards are cleaned every day. A little car runs on a 

 trolley just beneath the dropping boards and the manure is scraped 

 directly into it. It runs to the end of the building and empties into 

 a chute, where it falls into the manure pit in the cellar. The same car 

 is used when the pens are cleaned out to carry both clean and dirty 

 litter. No foul smells or odors are allowed to remain in any part of 

 the plant. A systematic method of spraying is used that keeps every- 

 thing sweet and clean. 



The Method of Feeding. The hens are fed a dry mash from a 

 hopper that stands on a platform above the floor. Scratch grain is 



