THE DOLLAR HEN FARM 
The plot around the house is set in permanent crops, such as 
berries, fruit trees, asparagus, rhubarb, etc. Of the other three 
yards, at least one is keptin growing marketable crops. Every 
inch is cultivated, and crops of the leafy nature, as lettuce, 
cabbage, kale and spinach, are chiefly grown, as they utilize 
the rich nitrogenous poultry manure to the best advantage, 
and the waste portions, or worthless crops, are utilized for 
the poultry. The method of supplying the fowls with green 
food is entirely by soiling. This means to grow the food in an 
adjoining lot and throw it over the fence. The above men- 
tioned crops are all good for the purpose. Rape, which is not 
grown for human food, is also excellent. 
Kale is one of the very best crops for soiling purposes. It is 
planted in the fall and fed by pulling off the lower leaves dur- 
ing the winter. In the spring the hardened stalks stand at a 
considerable height and the field may be used for growing 
young chicks, giving shade, and at the same time producing 
abundant green feed, witnout any immediate labor, which 
means a great saving in the busy season. 
A set of panels or netting stretched on light frames is pro- 
vided. They are of sufficient number to set along the longest 
side of one of the fields. A strip along the fence, four or five 
feet wide, can be planted to sunflowers, corn, rape, kale, or 
other rank growing crop and the panels leaned against the 
fence to protect the young plants from the hens. In this way 
the fence rows can be kept provided with the shade of grow- 
ing crops, which relieves the otherwise serious fault of this 
plan of poultry farming, in that the hens would be required to 
live in absolutely barren and sunburned lots, for we propose 
to keep five or six hundred hens on one and a half acres of 
Ailes and no green things could get a start without protec- 
tion. 
Rotate the houses from field to field as often as the crops 
allow. Never permit hens to run in one bare field for more 
than six months at a time. Always keep every inch of ground 
not in use by the chickens, luxuriant in something green. If 
you have a crop of vegetables which are about matured, drill 
rape or crimson clover between the rows; by the time the crop 
is harvested and the hens are to be moved in, such crops will 
have made a good growth. The hens will kill it out but it will 
be a “profitable killing.” 
By this system of intensive combination of trucking and 
poultry farming, we have a combination which for small capi- 
tal and small lands cannot be beaten. The hens should yield 
better than a dollar profit per head on this plan; the one and a 
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