THE POULTRY PRODUCING COMMUNITY 
grass fields and similar though smaller fields covered with 
coops for hens and chicks. Feeding is equally simple; a mash 
of meat, vegetables and ground grain mixed once a day and 
hauled around in a one-horse cart and hoppers of whole corn 
exposed in the houses. The houses are cleaned twice a year. 
Little Compton is, indeed, a community where all the rules of 
the poultry books are regularly violated, and yet a larger 
number of successful egg farms can be seen from the church 
spire at Little Compton Corners than most poultry writers 
have ever seen or read about. Strange it is, as Josh Billings 
puts it, that “some folks know things that ain’t so.” 
An illustration published in a recent issue of the World’s 
Work tells a remarkable story. A pile of egg shells as big 
as @ straw stack certainly indicates “something doing” in the 
chicken business, and it is a very proud monument to Mr. 
Byce who, some twenty odd years ago, established an incu- 
bator factory at the town of Petaluma. Petaluma is in 
Sonoma County, California, forty miles north of San Francisco. 
In the census year of 1899, Sonoma County produced more 
eggs than any other county in the United States. To-day 
there are in the Petaluma region close to one million hens. 
Like the Little Compton district, Petaluma is a one-breed 
community, White Leghorns being the breed used. The in- 
dividual flocks range larger than at Little Compton, chiefly 
because the milder climate, smaller breed, and establishment 
of the central hatchery enables one man to take care of more 
birds. 
When I asked Mr. Byce for a list of the people in his neigh- 
borhood keeping over one thousand hens, he replied by send- 
ing me a list of twenty-two men who keep from 8,000 down to 
2,500 each, and said that to give those keeping from one to 
two thousand, would practically be to take a census of the 
county. The methods of housing and feeding used are simple 
and inexpensive like those at Little Compton. 
The chief reason why Petaluma shows a more advanced de- 
velopment in the poultry community than the eastern poultry 
growing localities, is to be found in the climatic advantages 
which favor incubation (see Chapter on Incubation) and the 
consequent development of the central hatchery. Outside of 
this, the location is not especially favorable. The temperature 
is milder in the winter than in the East, but the Petaluma 
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