THE DOLLAR HEN FARM 
business. There is a lot of work about it that cannot be got- 
ten rid of. Little chicks must be kept comfortable and their 
water and feed for the first few days must needs be given 
largely by hand. They are to be early led to drink from the 
regular water vessels and eat from the hoppers, but this takes 
time and patience. 
The feeding of chicks I will discuss in the chapter on 
“Poultry on the General Farm,” and as the same methods 
apply in both cases, I will refer the reader to that section. 
After chicks get three or four weeks old their care is the 
simplest part of the poultry farm work and consists chiefly of 
filling feed hoppers and protecting them from vermin and 
thieves. 
Board floor colony houses are used as a protection against 
rats and this danger necessitates the protection of the open- 
ing by netting and the closing of the doors at night. 
Cockerels must be gotten out of the flocks and sold at an 
early age. Those that are to be kept for sale or use as breed- 
ing birds should be early separated from the pullets. Coops 
. for growing chickens, especially Leghorns, cannot be put 
among trees, as the birds will learn to roost in the trees, 
causing no end of trouble to get them broken of the habit. 
All pullets save a few culls should be saved for laying. 
They are to be kept two years. They should lay sixty-five to 
seventy per cent. as many eggs the second year as the first. 
They are sold the third summer to make room for the growing 
stock. 
Twenty-five Acre Poultry Farms. 
This section will be devoted to a general discussion of the 
type of poultry farms best suited to Section 4 and the souther- 
ly portions of Section 7 as discussed in the previons chapter. 
We will discuss this type of farm with this assumption: 
That they are to be developed in large numbers by co-operative 
or corporate effort. This does not infer that they cannot 
be developed by individual effort, and nine-tenths of the opera- 
tions will remain the same in the latter case. 
Suppose a large tract of land adjacent to railroad facilities 
has been found. The land in the original survey should be 
divided into long, relatively narrow strips, lying at right angles 
to the slope of the land. The farmstead should occupy the 
highest end of the strip. For a twenty-five acre or one-man 
poultry farm these strips should be about forty rods in width. 
The object of this survey is to permit the water being run by 
gravity to the entire farm. 
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