Canvas poultry house with bottom ventilation 



accommodated about twenty hens each. They were ventilated from 

 below, and as the heat from the hens accumulated above there was 

 naturally too much animal heat, and this house was soon condemned. 

 The next year I invented a small open front trap nest house for fifteen 

 hens. It was arranged so that the hen was trapped in the nest and 

 could pass out into a coop after laying the egg and was there retained 

 until her number was recorded from the band on her leg. This was a 

 good little house and many times a hundred per cent egg yield was 

 gathered for the day. I was getting down to one essential in egg 

 production. Small flocks with individual attention. Trapnesting is a 

 sure but tedious way to select breeding hens, and it was not long till I 

 had evolved a better house for hens. 



The next poultry house was four feet wide and six feet long, with a 

 two-foot opening on either side through the middle. This had a 

 capacity of ten hens. In one end was the feed hopper and nest boxes. 

 In the other the perches. These were very light and were moved about 

 on the alfalfa as the house needed cleaning. These were tried with 

 light portable yards and without yard. I also made open front houses 

 the same size and tried them with and without yards. In each and 

 every experiment my hens laid more eggs in the small houses without 

 yards. 



The objection to this system was that the detail was too much. 

 Water must be carried to each coop each day. The coops must be 

 moved often. 



In rainy weather it was bad getting around from coop to coop with 

 feed and water. So while I got the largest possible number of eggs 

 the detail was so great that one man could not turn off enough work. 



It was a pretty sight to see these light canvas houses scattered over 

 the green, but it was impractical and not a system that a hired man 

 could be trusted with. In the five years on this place I changed my 

 system of housing five times, each time increasing my egg production. 



The problem that confronted me was that of eliminating the 

 immense lot of detail. If I could evolve a system that would get me 

 the eggs and still save labor, I would have a wonderful step forward. 



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