96 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



light on my maturing pullets: instead of starting 

 to lay they started to molt. I missed the high-priced 

 egg season a mile, and landed in the red with a 

 dull, grinding jar. But having only a small farm 

 flock I was not utterly undone. 



The hatching of day-old chicks is a big busi- 

 ness in itself, and like many another big business 

 it is founded on the sands of the fallacy that it is 

 cheaper to buy it than to make it yourself. House- 

 hold and home-farm methods never attain factory 

 efficiency. Yet with boughten hatching eggs that 

 must certainly be sold at something more than 

 production cost, since I buy them from a middle- 

 man, I can hatch chicks cheaper than I can buy 

 them in my kind of quantities, and then run way 

 ahead in the saving on casualties incident to trans- 

 ferring the birds from the incubator to the brooder: 

 a job that must most often be done in freezing 

 weather. 



When I was a child we hoped it is an exagger- 

 ation to say we expected to raise one-half to one- 

 third of all the chicks hatched, whether brooded 

 artificially or under hens. Chicken fanciers knew 

 their greatest scourge was the disease called "white 

 diarrhoea" but they had not learned how to com- 

 bat it. It is transmitted by the carrier hen through 

 her egg to her chick, and once developed spreads 

 through the infant flock by way of the droppings. 

 Today all first-class breeding flocks are blood-tested 



