No. 4.] POULTRY AND EGG PRODUCTION. 35 



February. The birds that lay the most eggs during those 

 months are almost invariably the ones that lay the most eggs 

 during the year, and that is the type of bird you want to 

 propagate. I believe it will pay anybody to separate four or 

 five birds like that and get his wife or daughter or somebody 

 to help him with the trap-nesting. It really only makes one 

 extra trip in the morning, because in April, when they are 

 laying heavily, you have got to visit them often. The only 

 way we are going to improve our poultry and get definite im- 

 provements is by knowing what the individuals are doing. 

 The poultryman has to come to it just as the dairymen have 

 come to it. 



Mr. H. B. Walter. Do you use a green feed for June and 

 July for hens that are confined? 



Professor Lewis. When we cannot get anything on the 

 surrounding land to feed to them we practice double yardage; 

 we have a yard, say, the size of this room, divided into two 

 parts, and grow peas and oats on the first yard while the birds 

 are feeding on wheat planted the fall before in the second yard. 

 As soon as the oats get up 4 or 5 inches we turn the birds 

 over into that yard and seed this other yard to buckwheat, and 

 as soon as the buckwheat gets 4 or 5 inches tall we turn 

 them over on to that and grow soy beans on the other yard. 

 That gives us an admirable amount of green feed. When the soy 

 beans get up 5 or 6 inches we turn the birds back into that 

 yard and grow wheat. We practice in this way a crop rotation, 

 and it does not take very long. We simply go in there with 

 a fine-tooth cultivator, and all except the first seeding we plant 

 broadcast, and as soon as it is high enough we put the birds 

 in. It takes a very short time to do this, and it supplies those 

 birds with green feed just as though they were on free range, 

 and, what is even better, it maintains in those yards absolutely 

 sanitary conditions. It turns under the droppings and uses their 

 fertility to grow the crops with, and has maintained cleanly 

 conditions, whereas otherwise those yards would have been 

 absolutely bare and an undesirable feeding ground. 



Question. About how much yard room have you for 100 

 hens? 



Professor Lewis. We have there from virtually nothing up 

 to free range. If I were putting up this house such as I 



