No. 4.] EGG PRODUCTION. 67 



SOME PRACTICAL POINTS IN THE MANAGEMENT OE 

 POULTRY FOR EGG PRODUCTION. 



PROF. JAMES E. RICE OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y. 



What I shall say this afternoon will bear directly upon 

 the farmers' poultry problems, because the great bulk of 

 the poultry products always have been and probably always 

 will be produced on the farms and not on little bare yards 

 of congested poultry plants. Poultry husbandry is an animal 

 industry. It is a part of a general farming system. Any 

 one who undertakes to establish an individual poultry- 

 producing enterprise, strictly for poultry and on a very lim- 

 ited amount of land, as people have been accustomed to think 

 they could do, will see that he is handicapped beyond all 

 measure as compared to the man who keeps poultry on a 

 farm, and for the very same reason that he would keep cows 

 or sheep or hogs, because it is live stock, and because poultry 

 should be kept as a part of a well-balanced system of rota- 

 tion of other stock and other crops on a farm. He is the 

 man who in the end will get the most money and the most 

 satisfaction, with the least risk and with the least amount 

 of labor. That is good, sensible, business poultry farming. 

 We must adopt in this country a system of poultry farming 

 that will enable us to keep 500 or 1,000 hens on farms where 

 farmers have been accustomed to keep only 50 to 100. We 

 can do this and still let hens have the benefit of the fields 

 and orchards where crops are growing, so that instead of 

 charging up a given amount of land to the hens, the hens 

 will be credited for having occupied the land, because the 

 good that they do to the farm crops, to the orchard, to the 

 asparagus bed, etc., is so much clear gain from the j^ro- 

 ductive standpoint. Therefore, instead of being a damage 

 for which we must charge the hens for the land, they are 



