130 The Truth About the Poultry Business 



I next established a poultry farm at another place. This 

 was the most fortunate occurrence of my life, for here the 

 conditions were as bad as they could possibly be. The wind 

 blew ninety-nine days out of a hundred during the summer 

 months, and you can understand what a splendid opportunity 

 this was to study roup. At other places the draughts in 

 the buildings were so small that I had a very hard time 

 finding them, and they existed only on certain days when the 

 wind would be blowing, which as a rule would not be very 

 often. But here I had the wind, day after day, and a hard 

 wind at that. I did not have any little draughts such as I 

 had at other places, but a draught of tremendous proportions, 

 and I had to solve it or quit the poultry business. 



I bought about 1,200 hens that, as far as I could see, were 

 entirely free from roup. These were put into a building that 

 had just been built. I was very careful not to buy from 

 any flock in which roup existed, and I refused more than one 

 good flock, of hens because there was roup among them. In 

 a short time the hens I put in this new building began to 

 cough, They would try to get out of the draught into one 

 corner, and their eyes began to get watery. 



I put in partitions and tried one method of ventilation and 

 then another. If there is any method of ventilation that I 

 have not tried it is because my imagination has its limita- 

 tions, although I have never yet been at a loss to think of 

 something different. Nothing I did seemed to help the hens. 

 Their heads began to swell, and I lost over 200 of them in 

 a very short time. These hens began to get big canker sores 

 in their mouths, and I had what was positively the worst 

 flock of hens that I ever had in my life. By opening the 

 doors of the partitions inside the building, I would create 

 a draught so great that it would seem that the house was 

 a chimney made for draught instead of a building made for 



