250 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Keeping Summer Layers. 



There are men who keep poultry only a part of the year and 

 find them very profitable. They live near summer resorts and 

 buy hens in June that have been shipped from the west. On 

 arrival, they are usually quite thin and are purchased by the 

 pound. They take on flesh rapidly, lay well during the summer 

 months, and are sold early in the fall for roasters. Being fed on 

 hotel waste mostly the cost of feed is small, and, as the eggs 

 are sold to resorts at from 40 to 50 cents a dozen, the profits 

 are good. More might find this line of poultry culture profit- 

 able. 



The foregoing, with the exception of the last four, are all 

 specialized lines of poultry culture in this State. They have 

 been treated to some extent separately, not only to show the 

 opportunities in the various branches, but to show the advance- 

 ment made in this particular line of agriculture during the last 

 few years. 



There are two other lines of poultry keeping, not of a special- 

 ized nature, that should not be overlooked because the oppor- 

 tunities in them are usually much greater than in the more 

 specialized lines, especially in proportion to the size of the 

 project. I have reference to the farm and back-yard flocks. 



The Farm Flock. 



Statistics show that notwithstanding the fact that there are 

 hundreds of large egg farms in the eastern part of the United 

 States, about 90 per cent of all the eggs produced in the coun- 

 try come from general farms where poultry is kept as a side 

 line. To my notion the farm furnishes more nearly the ideal 

 conditions for poultry, and it is astonishing and also to be 

 regretted that better and larger flocks of poultry are not found 

 on all of the farms in this State. So much range can be given 

 the birds that the feed bill is cut down very considerably. The 

 farm buildings, such as barns, sheds and tool houses, as well as 

 orchards, furnish excellent protection from cold winds, so the 

 hens can range quite freely during the winter and early spring. 

 There is nothing we can do that will increase the strength of 

 the germ and therefore insure better hatches than treatment of 



