Alleged Poultry-Farm ln Chili. 103 



corn-field. Bf.-sides this refuse, his poultiy eat about a bushel of corn a day in winter, and half a 

 bushel in summer. He raises large crops of corn, because he has strong manure to feed his crops 

 with, his calculation being that about four acres of corn go to feed and fatten his poultry. 



" During summer his poultry have a wide range, and scour the fields for half a mile or more, 

 consuming grasshoppers. His turkeys nearly make their weight on grasshoppers and beetles, with 

 a handful of corn night and morning. One man has little to do in spring and summer but to take 

 care of chickens and young turkeys. In winter they require but little attention, and this man 

 then attends to the calves and lambs. 



" It has been said again and again in this Club, and in farm journals, that there is no use in 

 trying to keep more than about fifty hens ; that if one goes deeper into the poultry business there 

 is backset from lice, and roup, and gapes, and cholera, and the sudden death of hens and chicks 

 from causes unknown. This is a fallacy. In the manner above described, by the wise use of smoke, 

 and lime, and ashes, and a fire, by cleanliness, and a wide range in mild weather, we find 

 Mr. Leland taking about 4,000 feathered animals through the season, for year after year, without 

 calamity or loss, and on an expense that is very trifling, and unfelt on a large farm." 



Eggs are not much depended on by Mr. Leland ; he considers it pays better to set them and 

 rear the chickens ; hence the reason wliy his stock of 3,000 in summer is reduced to 300 in winter. 

 Of late his operations have become still more extensive, so that in one season, as we have learnt 

 from private sources, he has turned out 5,000 young, birds for the use of his own family and 

 the large hotel. 



In the summer of 1871, Mr. C. F. Pearce, Freetown, Massachusetts, published in the Rural Nczv 

 Yorker an account of a large poultry-farm " at the southern extremity of Chili, South America." 

 Si.x thousand fowls were stated to be kept on this farm, in flocks consisting of fifty hens and two 

 cocks apiece, each of which had a house of its own placed two hundred feet apart from others. The 

 sales for one year were stated as 72,000 dozen of eggs and 20,000 chickens and fowls, and the 

 year's profit as 11,000 dollars. We do not repeat more details, having a strong belief that 

 the whole must be a hoax ; for not only does the very vagueness of the locality afford ground 

 for strong suspicion, but when we come to the natural inquiry of where " at the southern extremity 

 of Chili, in South America," the alleged proprietor can possibly find a market for such an immense 

 produce, the story appears to " settle " itself at a very quick rate, and may safely be consigned to 

 the realm of invention, along with the " De Sora" and similar narrations. 



More deserving of attention are. a series of twelve articles which appeared in one of the highest- 

 class agricultural periodicals in America, from the pen of Mr. H. H. Stoddard, of Hartford, Connecticut, 

 and of which the concluding one of the series was only published in April, 1872. Mr. Stoddard's 

 principles and conclusions differ in so many respects from those already stated, and are in some 

 particulars so remarkable, that we cannot avoid giving as clear a summary as possible of his views. 



Having observed that " some plans upon a large scale have secured small separate flocks 

 without freedom, and others have secured freedom without separate flocks," Mr. Stoddard says that 

 on the first plan the wants of the fowls can only be supplied by an amount of labour which eats 

 up all profits; while under the other "an unnatural mob" is formed, and laying is checked. He 

 then observes that when flocks of fowls are attached to separate houses in villages, the separate 

 roosting-houses may be as near as even six rods* without much danger of the birds straying ; which 

 is " because the neighbour's premises have a different look," and various landmarks enable them to 



* In America the word "rod" is almost always used to express the "rod, pole, or perch" of our school-boy days, 

 measuring 5 J yards. 



