Small flocks, well fed and kept in close quarters in a sanitary way, 

 brought unbelievable results. Philo was the pioneer of this new 

 movement toward smaller flocks in close quarters. But his system 

 partially failed. Soon the back yards of the whole world were piled 

 full of empty Philo coops, big piles of junk marked with memories of 

 long days of routine in carrying heavy pails of water from coop to 

 coop, lugging pails of feed down long rows of tiny houses, lifting roofs 

 and scraping dropping boards from coop to coop, reaching into a 

 hundred pens to gather eggs. True, you got the eggs, but oh, t he- 

 detail ! Yes, this was the way to produce eggs, but could any mortal 

 stand the strain of this terrific detail and attain the degree of happiness 

 to which he aspired? Philo was on the right track; he found out the 

 secret of producing the maximum number of eggs from a given feed. 



Philo's system was weak in one point. It was cumbersome in 

 detail. The detail was so great that the day's routine was slavery for 

 one who performed his own work, and unprofitable for one who hired 

 it done. 



Soon after the Philo system there came another known as the 

 Corning system. This filled all the poultry journals of the land with 

 printed matter and illustrations of wonderful long houses whereby 

 one thousand hens were kept in one long house without outside runs, 

 thus eliminating with one stroke the awful detail in the Philo system. 



The whole poultry world erected long houses. Small houses were 

 sledged to the corners of the yards and fields or split up into kindling. 

 Miles and miles of long houses, with their flat shed roofs, stretched out 

 on every horizon. What a terrific waste of energy, lumber and 

 capital! The Corning book is a thing of the past. The Corning sys- 

 tem failed. 



It was against all reason to put one thousand hens in one long 

 house, compelling them to breathe the dust kicked up from the 

 straw-covered floor and to roost at night fifteen or twenty feet back 

 from the fresh air,, crowded up against the low roof, with the stench 

 from fresh droppings arising from the dropping board just below, 

 filling their nostrils till morning. I say this is against all human 

 reason and the Corning system is a failure. True, there are some yet 

 today that will not admit it, but they are only young in the game and 

 time will correct the error. 



One thousand hens packed in between dropping boards and low 

 roof at night with the awful stench from below and the foul air from 

 one thousand pairs of lungs to breathe and re-breathe through the 

 long, uncomfortable night, is it any wonder that the hens come down 

 from their clammy quarters in the morning with watery eyes, and 

 running noses, and swelled head, and roup, and canker, and chicken 

 pox? It is no wonder that the hens get the tubercular germs and waste 

 away and drop off, day after day. It is a mystery how they can exist 

 so long as they do and be able to even pay their feed in eggs. 



It is producing eggs at a tremendous loss of hen flesh. One by one 

 the hens drop off, and at the end of the year when the final reckoning 

 is made the balance is not what we expected. 



The pendulum had swung from the detail extreme to the other 

 extreme. 



44 



