RANKIN'S DUCK BOOK 



to crust and the heat to decrease. Others .of nervous tempera- 

 ment will open their machines every fifteen minutes during 

 the day and get up many times durimj £he night to do the 

 same thing, necessarily creating a great variation in the tem- 

 perature of the machine. Now, all these, when repeated often 

 enough, mean disaster and grief. One man who had been very 

 successful, said he liked the hatching very well, but there was 

 too much confinement growing chicks and ducks, and he was 

 not going to make a slave of himself any longer. 



Another very young man who was uniformly successful, 

 and was running four large machines, said that the hatching 

 and care of incubators was nothing, as he simply looked at 

 his machines twice per day, but that the care of the chicks 

 and ducks was hard work ; but there was more money in it 

 than anything else he could do, and he should stick to it. 

 Another man, because his machine did not run to suit him, 

 threw his boot at it, knocking the regulation all off, which he 

 called upon me to duplicate. (This man has done better since 

 and increased the number of his machines). So the reader 

 will see that there are cranks even among the poultry men, 

 and that many of them enter the poultry business simply 

 because they are looking for an easy job, — a sad mistake on 

 their part. I have always noticed that the man who knows 

 the least, but is willing to acquire knowledge and follow in- 

 structions implicitly, is the man who generally succeeds. 



Best Place for Incubators 



Having secured a good machine, the next thing is to 

 locate it where it will give you the least trouble to run it, 

 and at the same time do you the most good. The best place 

 for this is either in a barn or house cellar or in some building 

 partly under ground, for obvious reasons. Though a good 

 machine can be regulated to run in any temperature (provided 

 it can generate heat enough), yet constant thermal changes 

 of 30 or 40 degrees between night and day will necessitate 

 regulating to meet them, — as the amount of flame required 

 to run a machine in a temperature of 40 degrees, will be far 

 in excess of that needed to run it in one of 70 degrees, for, 

 though the change will be very slow in a nicely packed double 

 cased machine, yet in time even that change will affect. 



This, of course, could be easily overcome with a little 

 tare, yet it is just as well to avoid all unnecessary care and 

 trouble in the beginning; there will be still enough left to keep 

 you thinking. In a common building above ground during 

 the winter months it will often freeze around your machine, 

 and in turning eggs in a freezing atmosphere do it as quickly 



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