IQ2 t 



OTO DOMESTIC BIRDS 



over the farm. Sometimes these houses were placed in pastures 

 not suitable for mowing or for cultivation and remained there 

 permanently, but as a rule they were moved from time to time 

 to suit the rotation of crops on the farm. As the number of 

 these houses on a farm increased, and they were spread over a 

 larger area and sometimes placed in fields and pastures a long 

 distance from the farmhouse, the work of caring for the fowls, 

 even by the simple method used, became too heavy to be done 

 by man power alone, and a horse and cart .was used in carrying 

 food and water, collecting eggs, and moving chicks and fowls 



FIG. 101. Collecting eggs on Rhode Island farm. The little girl is in the box 

 in which dough is carried in the morning 



from one part of the farm to another. Thus the work was put 

 on a very economical basis, and keeping fowls by this method 

 became a common feature of the farming of this section of 

 Rhode Island. The methods used here have changed little, if at 

 all, since the system was started sixty or seventy years ago. The 

 system is so primitive that people who are familiar with more 

 elaborate methods often imagine that the Rhode Island farmer, 

 who does so well by his simple methods, would certainly do very 

 much better if he applied more of the modern ideas . But the test 

 of time has demonstrated that this simple colony system is easily 

 made permanent, while most of the more ambitious and complex 

 systems either fail utterly or have but a transient success. 



