THE LEGHORNS 



123 



A HOUSE FOR SROODY HENS. HENS 



ARE DROPPED IN THROUGH 



THE ROOF. HOUSE HAS 



SLAT FLOOR. 



typical poultry farms, of the average poultry farms and 

 the average poultry farmer of Petaluma reads all that is 

 said about feeding hens and then does the opposite. He 

 feeds soft mash heavily. Mr. Hyatt, one of the success- 

 ful poultrymen, who has been in the business for some 

 ten or twelve years, said that he fed about 3^ pails of 

 soft food to one of whole grain. The method is to let 

 the fowls eat as much soft food as they want during the 

 forenoon and as much whole wheat as they want in the 

 afternoon. 



While that method is pretty generally practiced, there 

 is less agreement as to what shall constitute the mash. 

 Wheat, of course, is the base of all 

 rations, but 1 found -lo two poultry- 

 men mixing up iho same kind of 

 mash. One mar. fed boiled wheat 

 and horse meat mixed with shorts, 

 another fed 5 sacks of meal — wheat, 

 corn, etc., and one sack beef scraps, 

 mixed with skim milk. Another feeds 

 this way: 40 sacks wheat, 40 sacks 

 corn. 40 sacks middlings, 40 sacks 

 barley, SO sacks bran, 7 sacks char- 

 •oal, mixed with milk and meat soup. 

 He feeds 200 lbs. horse meat a day 

 which is boiled and the soup and 

 meat mixed with the meals. An- 

 other uses rolled barley, bran and 

 shorts, ground corn and beef scraps, 

 and sometimes uses horse meat in- 

 stead of beef scrap. Another uses 2 parts good shorts, 

 1 part middlings, 1 part bran, 1 part fresh horse meat 

 or cattle meat and in winter adds 1 part corn; some- 

 times a little pepper, always salt and charcoal; mixed with 

 water. 



This mash is fed in long covered troughs. If there 

 are cattle in the same field, the feeding ground is 

 fenced in. 



Early in the afternoon wheat is fed as much as they 

 will eat before going to roost in the evening. This is 

 usually thrown on the ground or fed in hoppers. On one 

 large farm a self-feeding bin is opened about one o'clock 

 and closed at night. On Mr. Roerdan's farm a boy of 

 fourteen feeds wheat to 6,000 hens in about half an hour. 

 He does it this way: At 1 o'clock he jumps on his grey 

 pony and rides over the farm of 120 acres opening up the 

 feed bins. I caught the boy with the camera as he was 

 making the rounds. He jumped ofif the horse, opened 

 the door, and jumped on again about as quick as I could 

 snap the camera, and was ofif to the next colony on the 

 lope. How long would it take a man to feed 6,000 hens, 

 carrying pails of wheat, opening doors and gates, kicking 

 the wheat under the litter, in a long continuous house? 

 The other way of feeding of 6,000 hens is a pleasant diver- 

 sion for a boy with a pony. Here is a little food for 

 thought for those who insist on keeping the chickens 

 close together on small acreage so as to economize 

 the labor. 



Incubation and Brooding 



Petaluma's poultry industry is founded on artificial 

 incubation and brooding. Its successes will be measured 

 largely in proportion to the success of the incubator and 

 brooder. In this part of the business developments have 

 been following thick and fast the past few years. To keep 

 up with the procession one must visit Petaluma about 

 every year. 



Hatching the Chicks 



Four or five years ago each farmer, and when I speak 

 of farmer I mean poultryman, for every farmer there 

 is a poultryman, each farmer four or five years 

 ago, hatched and raised his own chickens by using 

 incubators, individual brooders ranging in size from 150 

 to 500 eggs. Now the hatching has become a specialized 

 business. Men make a special business of hatching chick- 

 ens; they do nothing else. There are probably a dozen 

 hatcheries with capacities of 10,000 eggs up to 60,000 or 

 more, and though I haven't the figures I have no doubt 

 that those hatcheries during the past season, hatched con- 

 siderably over a million chicks. 

 These chicks are not all retained in 

 Petaluma. Many of them go several 

 hundred miles away as day-old 

 chicks. Many of the poultry farmers 

 buy their chicks from the hatcheries. 

 Not all of them, however. Some of 

 the most successful farmers were in- 

 cubating their own chicks, but the 

 business of the hatcheries has been 

 growing rapidly the past two or three 

 years and the past spring it was 

 hard for the hatcheries to fill their 

 orders. 



The hatcher works on a basis that 

 will give him a certain profit for his 

 labor whether he furnishes the eggs 

 or merely does the hatching of the 

 eggs. Where the farmer takes his eggs to the hatchery 

 the hatcher charges him from 3 to 4 cents for every chick 

 delivered, the price depending some on the fertility of the 

 eggs. 



When the hatcher furnishes the eggs as well as the 

 chicks, he charges from about 7 to 10 cents a chick, de- 

 pending on the price of eggs at the time. 



Brooding 1,500 Chicks in a Flock 



The farmer takes the chicks from the incubator home 

 and puts them in brooders already prepared for them, 

 but during the past season large numbers of the chicks, 

 instead of being taken home, were taken to another man 

 to raise. Here is another special business that has sprung 

 up, that of raising the chickens. This has been brought 

 about by a new system of raising the chicks, and I want 

 to prepare the poultry writers for another shock. Any- 

 one who has read poultry gapers at all has read some- 

 thing like this: "Don't put more than 50 or 75 chicks to- 

 gether in a brooder." This special business of raising the 

 chickens has grown up around the possibility of keeping 

 as many as 1,500 chickens together in a flock with a brood- 

 er stove to keep them warm. 



I saw 1,500 chicks taken out of incubators, put in 

 boxes holding 100 each, but divided into partitions hold- 

 ing 25 each; helped an old man of 72 years old load them 

 on a wagon; rode with him through the streets and two 

 miles out in the country; helped him put them in a little 

 cheap house 20x20 ft. The brooder stove had been lighted 

 an hour before and the house was warm with a brooder 

 temperature. The stove was in the center of the room 

 and has an oil burner, the fuel being engine distillate, fed 

 from a 10-gaIlon tank attached to the outside of the 

 house. The chicks were soon scampering around the 

 room, keeping a certain distance from the stove, how- 

 ever. A fence made of 1-inch poultry netting 12 inches 

 high, with burlap sewed on both sides of it, was put in a 



