IN THE POULTRY YARD. 133 
In all my chicken raising, disease has been my great dread, and 
perhaps it has been on account of my dread of it, that I have suc- 
ceeded so well in avoiding it. With me the “ounce of preven- 
tion” has been always greatly preferred to the “pound of cure.” I 
believe that, for man, it is exceedingly dangerous to eat raw vege- 
tables that have been raised on ground manured with night soil, or 
sewage, or even the excrements of pigs, and it is my belief that 
many obscure cases of disease in our large cities arise in this way. 
And if possible, I would never allow any animal to feed directly off 
ground that had been manured with the excrements of others of 
of its kind. 
Especially is this true of chickens. The proper crops to grow 
on ground that has been manured with night soil or sewage are 
the cereals—wheat, barley, oats, rye, etc. Lettuce, cabbage, tur- 
nips, etc., should never be grown on such ground. 
‘The reader will now appreciate my reason for keeping all the 
chicken manure by itself. ‘To utilize it I determined to grow corn, 
while my stable manure I applied to the clover crop. It was evi- 
dent that while these minute but destructive parasites might readily 
. adhere to the moist and succulent clover, or even to the foilage of 
com grown for soiling purposes, they could hardly reach the ker- 
nels of the corn. The washing rains of spring, the scorching 
suns of summer and the drying winds of autumn, would give them 
but a slight chance compared to that which they would have on 
the moist clover, always moist from its proximity to the ground. 
And, here came in one great advantage of the portable fence. 
I could plow up a corn patch of any size and allow the chickens 
to revel amongst worms and grubs to their heart’s content. ‘Then 
it could be fenced in, planted to corn and cultivated until the corn 
was high enough to admit broods of small chickens which were 
easily colonized in it. As soon as the corn was harvested, the 
fence was removed, and the hens allowed to pick up all that was 
left and rummage the whole patch for bugs and worms. 
There is no manure, that I know of, that will produce a better 
crop of corn than will hen manure. We always had plenty of it, 
and we tried to put in as much corn as possible, for in addition to 
