39 



higher than another and no droppings board has been provided for. 

 Figure G is a wall arrangement for trap nests when they cannot be 

 provided for underneath the droppings board. Figure H is an open 

 wall nest, but is not desirable because the fowls roost on it and it is 

 not secluded enough. 



POULTRY HOUSES AND FREE RANGE. 



(Prof. James E. Rice, Cornell University.) 



The question of the construction of the poultry house and the 

 question of giving free range to stock is but one of the many exceed- 

 ingly important factors in maintaining vigor. The modern system of 

 poultry husbandry, to my mind, is one that combines the growing of 

 crops and the raising of poultry, and that the old idea of merely 

 keeping a flock of chickens on a bare yard and calling that poultry 

 farming, is all wrong. It is "barnyard" poultry keeping. People 

 undoubtedly can continue this method by .exercising the greatest of 

 care and going to a large amount of labor, and especially if they go 

 outside for new farm-reared stock for new blood every few genera- 

 tions. But where they are dealing with the large problem of keeping 

 fowls by the thousands, the system of poultry farming that eventually 

 will survive and pay is one that will enable the hens and the chickens 

 to run in orchards and fields, where they will be enabled to get the 

 natural conditions of a farm. Instead of charging up to the hens the 

 use of the land we can charge it to the crop we are producing and 

 ii'ivc the hens credit for helping to grow the crops. They also get 

 plenty of free range and sunshine, etc. 



Then let the hens live in houses where they are always in fresh 

 air. Perhaps there has been no one thing happened in recent years in 

 the history of the development of poultry husbandry that has been so 

 important and so epoch-making as our information in regard to the 

 housing of our poultry. We thought at one time that the one great 

 difference between summer and winter, when hens did lay and when 

 hens did not lay well, was a difference in temperature, and as a re- 

 sult we built our houses with the one idea of keeping the heat in. We 

 attempted to make the houses warm, with double-boarded walls, and 

 in some instances double-glazed windows, in order to keep the cold 

 out and to keep the heat in, and as a result we secured bad air, lost 

 vitality and lost fowls by roup and other diseases because we found 

 that the evil of breathing impure air and living in a humid, damp air 

 was vastly more injurious than cold, pure air. So modern poultry 

 houses are built at less than one-half of the former cost and provide 

 for the house to be open most of the time, or never closed. There the 

 hens can get accustomed to fresh air and they are not breathing im- 

 pure air, and they are not undergoing the violent changes of being 

 first kept in a warm, damp place, then a cold, damp place and getting 

 a violent contrast in temperature. 



Recently we have been running some experiments to find out how 

 important the factor of close confinement during the summer and 

 winter would be in the matter of getting stronger fertility and stronger 

 hatching power and better chickens. The experiment was started by 

 the following observation : Two years ago we were getting forty 

 weak chickens for every 100 eggs that we put into our incubators 



