just why some of the eggs did not hatch. He laughed till I was pro- 

 voked and told me that the old hen herself could not beat that record. 



To this day my brother-in-law likes to joke me about that first 

 hatch of chicks and how disappointed I was in not being able to bring 

 out all the chicks. I had hatched 82 per cent of all eggs placed in the 

 machine, and of the many thousand eggs hatched in after years seldom 

 have I ever beaten that first record. We had located the incubator in 

 the best place possible, in a cellar house with walls two feet thick and 

 not too dry. This kept an even temperature. Then we kept the 

 temperature very even and turned the eggs carefully, always washing 

 our hands before turning them so that no oil would get on the shells. 

 Then the eggs were from breeding stock of proper age and good mating, 

 and this made vigor. From this hatch of 197 chicks we raised 193, 

 losing only four, and these were drowned in a rain storm. This made 

 me somewhat conceited and of course I knew then and there all about 

 the poultry business. I had large dreams. I could hatch and raise 

 them and of course there was no limit to the fortune to be made. We 

 hatched several hundred brown Leghorns that Spring and also some 

 Barred Rock, Black Langshang, Buff Cochin, White Javas. We had 

 fine luck with the brown Leghorn, but soon found that we did not 

 know it all in hatching and rearing the heavier breeds. There was a 

 great difference in the vitality from the different eggs. It took years 

 for me to find out that good vigorous breeding stock was the first 

 requisite in rearing the young chicks. This first year, however, was a 

 pretty successful year as a whole, and we placed something like seven 

 hundred fine Leghorn pullets and two hundred Barred Rock pullets in 

 our long laying house. This new laying house was about twenty feet 

 wide and about one hundred feet long. This was divided into three 

 pens with dropping floor and nest boxes. It was built close with ceiled 

 walls and windows to the south. It looked like a perfect house for 

 comfort in that cold climate. 



We soon began to have our trouble, for the house being so tight 

 and ventilation so badly arranged that the walls gathered moisture 

 and were even covered with frost on cold mornings. The pullets 

 began to catch cold and then swelled head which turned into roup. 

 We tried dusting them with lime and fumigating with coal tar and 

 every remedy we could hear of, and nothing seemed to do any good. 

 Father's ardor for the poultry business began to cool quite perceptibly. 

 We pulled them through the winter without much loss and had a fair 

 yield of eggs, but we began to realize that the poultry game was not 

 so easy as we had at first thought. We did not know at the time that 

 our houses were built entirely too close and that fresh air is absolutely 

 necessary for poultry, and that hens must not be crowded for best 

 results. 



Open Front Poultry Houses were unknown in those days and we 

 were making the same mistake that thousands were making of housing 

 the poultry too close and in too crowded quarters. But when the 

 sunny days of Spring came we soon forgot our Winter troubles and 

 began to dream big dreams. We would build more incubators, and 

 more long houses, and hatch them out by the thousand and make a 

 famous poultry ranch. So we built a large incubator cellar with thick 

 walls filled in with sawdust. In this we constructed a 3000-egg 



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