40 



from our plant stock, which are chickens kept for student instruction 

 in the laying house with little bare yards, each one about 12x30 feet. 

 We moved out of these houses and yards about 150 of these hens and 

 put them in colony houses down on the north pasture slope and let 

 them run. We fed them precisely the same ration, etc., and we saw the 

 fertility and hatching power of these eggs go up and up until within 

 a few weeks we were getting seventy strong chickens from the same 

 hens instead of forty weak ones, and the difference was very marked. 

 We were rearing nearly all of our seventy strong ones and losing 

 nearly all of our forty weak ones. In the following fall we divided 

 up some of these hens that were down on the range, left thirty-five 

 down there running out, never shutting them up at all during fall or 

 winter. We brought thirty-five up and put them into a house similar 

 in every w r ay and fed them the same kind of ration, the only differ- 

 ence being that two of the flocks we shut up in November and did not 

 let them outdoors until following spring, when the ground was bare. 



If you find it necessary to confine your poultry to small yards during the breeding 

 season, release them for the remainder of the year and give them free range. 



Then when they were let out they were allowed to run only on a re- 

 stricted bare yard and were fed each day some sprouted oats for green 

 food. The thirty-five pullets that were allowed to run on the free 

 range laid 164 eggs each per year. The pullets shut on bare yards 

 laid 147 eggs. The cost to feed the pullets on the range per year was 

 $1.17. Those in confinement, $1.16. Notice that there was only one 

 cent difference in the cost of feeding these pullets on the range as 

 compared to the bare yards, and yet there was a difference in pro- 

 duction of seventeen eggs in favor of the pullets on the range. These 

 eggs were sold at Ithaca market prices, and the net profit per hen 

 over and above cost of feed, labor, interest on investment, etc., was 

 for the pullets on the range, $3.25; for the pullets in confinement, 

 $2.50, a difference of seventy-five cents per hen in favor of the pullets 

 that had never been shut up summer or winter, but allowed to run 

 out on the snow or grass, as the case might be, and fed similar to their 

 sisters. From these pullets on the range we hatched seventy-one per 

 cent of the eggs. From the pullets in the bare yards forty-nine per 

 cent. From the pullets on the range we reared ninety-two per cent 



