CHAPTER XV 
EXPERIMENT STATION WORK 
Our entire scheme of agricultural education and experi- 
mentation is new. The poultry work at experiment stations 
is very new. Ten years will about cover everything worthy 
of a permanent record in the poultry experiment station files. 
Stations Leading in Poultry Work. 
Among the earliest stations to begin poultry work in this 
country were Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut and 
Maine. Rhode Island conducted the first school of poultry 
culture. The two stations of New York State were also early 
in the work, and Cornell now has the leading school of poultry 
culture in this country. 
West Virginia has always maintained a considerable poultry 
plant. Outside of the states east of the Appalachians, the 
first poultry work to be heard of was that of Prof. Dryden at 
the Experiment Station of Utah. Prof. Dryden’s work was of 
a demonstrative nature. His early bulletins were forceful and 
well illustrated, and did much to call attention to poultry 
work. 
In all this early work the great Mississippi Valley, where 
four-fifths of the nation’s poultry is produced, entirely ignored 
the hen. The writer began his work with poultry at the Kan- 
sas Station in 1902, but his chickens were housed in a dis- 
carded hog house, and no funds being available, little was 
accomplished. In the last three or four years these experi- 
ment stations are rapidly falling into line and a number of 
poultry bulletins have recently been issued from _ these 
younger schools. 
A few of the early landmarks in experiment station work 
was as follows: 
The Utah Station clearly found that hens laid about 65 per 
cent. as many eggs in the second as in the first year, and that 
to keep hens*for egg production beyond the second year, was 
unprofitable. 
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