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BULLETIN OF 

 MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



THE MANAGEMENT OF POULTRY ON SMALL FARMS. 



By John H. Robinson, Editor Farm-Poultry, Bosto7i, Mass. 



A large farm offers the best opportunity to keep poultry with 

 little labor and comparatively large profits, but the owner of the 

 large farm is not often much interested in poultry. It is the small 

 farmers, under necessity of making the most of every opportunity 

 to make money on their land, who are attracted by the possibilities 

 of poultry culture. As personally and through correspondence I 

 have for the last six years come in contact with owners and renters 

 of small farms in the eastern States, and especially in Massachu- 

 setts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, who are trying to make a 

 specialty of poultry, I have found that the most troublesome im- 

 pediment to the development of their plans was the want of a 

 method suitable to their circumstances. 



A very large percentage of the small New England farms are of 

 such dimensions and proportions that the fowls kept cannot be 

 given liberty except at the risk of their trespassing on the land of 

 neighbors. Because of this, many small farmers interested in 

 poultry have adopted the intensive methods which small poultry 

 keepers in towns often find necessary, but which large poultry 

 keepers and farmers ought to avoid. 



Intensive methods make the care of poultry a grind and drudgery, 

 monopolizing the keeper's time to such an extent that it is almost 

 fully occupied in caring for a few hundred fowls. Indeed, I have 

 seen a great many people keeping poultry by such intensive 

 methods that they hardly dared leave home for an hour for fear of 

 disarranging their carefully balanced system, and could never by 

 any possibility make a living by their methods if it became neces- 

 sary for them to try to make their living from poultry. Many 



