33 



adding new litter as required, must give no little time to that item 

 of work the year round. In most parts of this State all fowls are 

 confined to the houses much of the time during winter, and are 

 better off if made to take some exercise. But fowls which have 

 good range get all the exercise they need, foraging over it through 

 eight or nine months every year, and during those months the 

 keeper does not need to make special provision for exercise for 

 them. 



Besides the things just mentioned which must be done directly 

 for the fowls, whoever keeps poultry in close confinement needs to 

 keep houses clean and to turn over the earth in the yards at fre- 

 quent intervals, and in small yards this work has to be done 

 mostly with spade or fork. In all these ways the average time 

 per fowl devoted to the care of a flock of poultry is increased ; so 

 that, while we find many poultrymen using intensive methods fully 

 occupying their time with the care of 400 to 500 hens, we find 

 farmers keeping hens on large farms on the colony plan doing the 

 routine work of caring for 1,200 or more hens as a part of the 

 morning and evening chores, and making more money actually, 

 and very much more for time consumed than intensive poultrymen 

 do, though the latter can show averages per fowl that make the 

 common averages by colony methods look small. 



Another point of difference between the two systems which 

 should be emphasized in this connection is that, to be successful, 

 intensive methods require much greater skill and more experience 

 than are needed to make poultry keeping profitable under less arti- 

 ficial conditions. So it happens that, while the poultryman using 

 intensive methods finds that, even with land, capital and the wish 

 to extend operations indefinitely, he is limited by the difficulty, 

 often amounting to impossibility, of getting help it will pay him 

 to use ; while the colony farmer's operations are, generally speak- 

 ing, limited only by the number of fowls his land will carry by his 

 •system. He uses ordinary farm help, — men who do the poultry 

 work as " chores," and work in the fields through the day. Some 

 of these men are, of course, better " hands " with the poultry than 

 others ; but the advantages of natural conditions offset all ordi- 

 nary consequences of inefficiency to such an extent that the close 

 supervision required on intensive poultry plants where help is 

 employed is not necessary, and the average farm hand makes an 

 average good poultryman. 



I have given this extended illustration of differences between 

 the system appropriate for the poultryman under necessity of 

 keeping fowls in close confinement and that used by farmers who, 

 with only such modifications or elaborations as the scale of opera- 



