BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [P. D. 4. 



BREEDING AND SELECTING FOWLS FOR EGG 

 PRODUCTION. 



JAMES E. RICE, PROFESSOR OF POULTRY HUSBANDRY, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 

 ITHACA, NEW YORK. 



The burden of my song to-day will be the efficiency of the 

 hen, but before entering upon the discussion of this subject I 

 want to express my appreciation of the honor and the privilege 

 of returning so many times to speak before your State Board of 

 Agriculture. I think that we have made wonderful progress 

 throughout this country in very recent years in agriculture. 

 We have made greater progress, in my judgment, in the past 

 ten years than in the preceding hundred years, and that is 

 saying a great deal; and truly, poultry husbandry has, for one 

 reason or another, come out of the realm of a side issue or a 

 one-person business on the farm, and has now become a well- 

 established commercial enterprise worthy of the best men and 

 worthy of capital and confidence in the business. In other 

 words, because of our increased knowledge of how to success- 

 fully handle poultry enterprises, poultry husbandry is not now, 

 in my judgment, to be considered as one of the risky, hazardous 

 occupations, but one of the well-established, conservative and 

 profitable occupations. As an evidence of this fact we can 

 point literally to hundreds of farms in New York State and in 

 Massachusetts, and literally to thousands of them in the United 

 States, where 1,000 or 2,000 hens or more are being kept profit- 

 ably, and more profitably than most other branches of agri- 

 culture that could be followed in those same districts. I was 

 talking with one of the most successful farmers in our State 

 a few weeks ago, a man who has been so successful that his two 

 sons have been trained especially for farm work and are back 

 on the farm, in partnership with him; a man who has such a 

 big farm and is handling it so well that he has 11 miles of tile 



