SUCCESSFUL POULTRY KEEPING 



structing the students or inmates in practical poultry work, with 

 a view to qualifying them for earning their living and taking up 

 poultry production as a business, either in the employ of others, 

 or independraitly. All this is "something new under the sun," 

 and clearly points to a bright future for the poultry industry in 

 its several branches. 



STANDARD-BRED POULTRY 



Where 30 or 40 years ago poultry exhibitions were seldom 

 heard of, now they are common. In the neighborhood of five 

 hundred winter shows are held annually at the present time, 

 while thoroughbred, or standard-bred poultry is exhibited every 

 summer and fall at not less than a thousand state, district and 

 county fairs, the exhibits ranging from a few specimens in an 

 open shed to three or four thousand choice birds shown in uni- 

 form coops and housed in buildings, each costing 110,000. to 

 $25,000. that have been built by the fair associations, often at 

 state expense, expressly for poultry. Long lists of cash pre- 

 miums are offered, some of the state fair associations appro- 

 priating one, two and three thousand dollars each for this pur- 

 pose, while of late years the great winter poultry exhibitions, 

 like those held regularly in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and 

 Chicago, have offered as much as five and six thousand dollars 

 in cash pren^ums at a single show, besides nearly equal amounts 

 in medals, prize cups and other valuable trophies. 



THE POULTRY PRESS 



Not one whit less remarkable and important than the fore- 

 going has been the development of the poultry press. Today 

 more papers in the United States are devoted exclusively to 

 poultry than to any other branch of live s'tock; in fact, we believe 

 there are more poultry papers than there are horse, cattle, sheep 

 and swine papers taken together. We may be mistaken in this, 

 but we do not beheve we are. There are between sixty and 

 seventy poultry papers and we doubt if there are as many other 

 exclusively live stock papers all told. Furthermore, nearly 

 every farm paper, in fact, practically every one of them that has 

 a large circulation, now conducts a regular poultry department, 

 giving it, as a rule, as much space and attention as are given to 

 j^attle, horses, sheep or swine. There is no need to apologize, 

 at this time, and under present conditions, for being interested 

 in poultry, or for being in the poultry business. 



DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE PLANTS 



Ten and fifteen years ago one had to travel far to find half 

 a dozen successful poultry plants that were being conducted on 

 independent lines, while now two or thi'ee dozen of them can be 

 visited in a week's journey if one knows where to go. Travelers 

 riding by train or electric car through the New England states 

 are prone to remark that about every fourth farmer or villager 

 seems to be in the poultry business, for on either side of the 

 "right of way" are to be seen poultry plants varying from two 

 or three small houses to a dozen long ones built on the continu- 

 ous-house plan, each house being one, two or three hundred feet 

 long, with attractive parks filled with hundreds of standard-bred 

 White Wyandottes, White Leghorns, Plymouth Rocks, Brahmas, 

 or first crosses. 



Even persons who consider themselves well posted are 

 frequently surprised to learn of some extra large plant that has 

 sprung up unheralded and become an established success before 

 its existence was discovered by the poultry papers or the writers 

 on poultry topics. Men of perseverance started them on a small 

 scale and added to them little by little, thus building up large 

 and profitable businesses on a safe and solid basis. 



With the speciahzing of the work of poultry production, the 

 dividing of the business into branches and the development of 

 large specialty plants, there has come a natural and highly im- 

 portant improvement in the quaUty of the product. Twenty to 

 thirty years ago no one had heard of "green ducks," meaning 

 ducklings eight to twelve weeks old that have been specially fed, 

 producing a most toothsome morsel, while now thousands of 

 tons of them are marketed in the eastern cities every spring and 

 summer. On Long Island upwards of a hundred thousand of 

 these duckhngs are produced within a radius of ten miles 'of the 

 httle village of Speonk. The Spring Lake Poultry Co., C. A. 

 Stouffer, president, Harrisburg, Pa., produces forty-five to sixty 

 thousand ducklings each season, besides several thousand broil- 

 ers, and Messrs. Weber Bros., of Wrentham, Mass., now have an' 

 annual output of over forty-five thousand ducklings. Broiler 

 plants are in successful operation, with capacities ranging from 

 ten to twenty-five thousand broilers per. season; "winter chick- 

 ens," or roasters, are produced by the ton in different sections 

 of New England, New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania 

 and Maryland, and capons, or "Philadelphia chickens," as they 

 were originally called, are being produced in rapidly increasing 

 quantities in New Jersey, New England and the middle west. 

 Chicago is now a reliable capon market, and the poultrymen and 

 farmers of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri are 

 turning their attention more and more to the production of 

 capons. 



Visible signs of the rapid development and present impor- 

 tance of the poultry business are to be met on every hand, es- 

 pecially in the states east of the Mississippi river, where the 

 population is greatest. The farther east one goes the more 

 numerous become the poultry plants, small and large. New 

 England has been called "the cradle of the poultry business" in 

 this country, and for good reason. Massachusetts and Rhode 

 Island probably lead the Union in the production of poultry, 

 area considered, but New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, eastern 

 Pennsylvania and Ohio are following closely, while the great 

 agricultural states of the Mississippi valley, notably Illinois, Iowa, 

 Missouri and eastern Kansas and Nebraska, are producing vast 

 quantities of poultry and eggs, as shown by the census returns 

 of 1890 and 1900. These large and fertile agricultural states 

 have the credit of producing more poultry and eggs than the 

 eastern states, but this is not true in proportion to area. Further 

 more, in the Mississippi basin the immense quantities of poultry 

 and eggs are produced mostly in the old-fashioned way, on the 

 ordinary farm by the farmer's wife and children, while farther 

 east numerous poultry plants have sprung up "whereon the pro- 

 duction of poultry and eggs is steadily being reduced to a science. 



NOW HAVE BETTER TOOLS 



While we are giving credit to the fanciers for increasing the 

 number of varieties and developing the utility as well as the 

 beauty points of the more popular breeds, while we are praising 

 thei poultry press and acknowledging the importance of poultry 

 exhibitions, let us not overlook the fact that the improvement in 

 the tools used by the poultryman has been invaluable to him in 

 his work and progress. Poultry on a large scale, while not im- 

 possible without the use of popular-sized incubators and re- 

 liable brooding apparatus, is, nevertheless, impracticable, for if 

 the hen has to be relied on to do the hatching she will not sit 

 until she gets ready, and then not in sufficient numbers to give 

 the business the necessary elements of certainty and proper 

 management. Worse still, if the hen had to be relied on to 

 brood the chicks or ducklings, her instinctive habits and erratic 

 conduct would soon limit the ambitious poultryman to a com- 

 paratively small plant and would make his life a burden to him 

 on account of numerous uncertainties. The great duck ranches 

 are proof positive of this general statement. They do not use 

 as much as one hen for incubating. They use incubators ex- 



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