POULTRY: A SUCCESS STORY 97 



for the disease. Infected hens are culled out and 

 only disease-free chicks are hatched. They are 

 brooded on wire grating, an obvious precaution 

 that just had not been thought of thirty or forty 

 years ago, so that it is impossible for them to pick 

 at the droppings. By such means, and by using elec- 

 trically lit and heated brooders built of galvanized 

 iron wherein rats cannot creep nor lice breed and 

 corrupt, chick casualties can be cut to a trifle. The 

 difference between right and wrong brooding is 

 clearly evident in the statistics of my own flocks: 

 of birds brooded on wire in galvanized iron brood- 

 ers, eighty-eight per cent are raised to egg laying 

 maturity or to the frying pan; of those put out on 

 open ground at eight weeks, in midsummer, eight- 

 een to thirty per cent were casualties. 



I have two baby-chick brooders, each of which 

 houses a normal hatching from my eighty-egg elec- 

 tric incubator up to the time the chicks are six 

 weeks old. Thus the incubator can be kept work- 

 ing full time (in commercial poultry-husbandry 

 idle plant is a big factor in expense). It still takes 

 three weeks to hatch an egg; that is one direction 

 in which art has not yet improved on nature al- 

 though there is talk of it. When, with both brood- 

 ers full, the third setting is hatched, the first hatch 

 is six weeks old, ready to move out of the baby 

 brooder and make room for hatch three. 



At six weeks the birds go into a "finishing bat- 



