84 



POULTRY CULTURE 



limitations of intensive systems began to be widely recognized was 

 any general interest shown in the Rhode Island colony system. 

 Nowhere else are extensive methods applied so consistently and on 



so large a scale as in 

 the Little Compton 

 district. Interest in the 

 system elsewhere takes 

 the direction mainly of 

 seeking to apply fea- 

 tures of the system as 

 practiced here in modi- 

 fication of the intensive 

 system. Points relat- 

 ing to this will be con- 

 sidered in their place. 

 Ordinary town poultry keeping is by the intensive method, i 

 Few town people who keep fowls are willing to give up to them as 

 much land as the flock needs for range, even if they have the land. 

 The townsman especially interested in poultry almost invariably 

 wants to keep all the poultry that his land will carry by any known 



Fig. 86. View on an intensive plant (no system) 



Fig. 87. An intensive plant (good system). (Photograph from E. T. Brown, 

 London, England) 



method. The average flock contains from twelve to fifteen or 

 eighteen hens, is housed in a building having a floor surface of 



1 This book does not treat at all the ultraintensive methods of the mushroom 

 " systems," widely exploited for a few years but now dying out. The actual de- 

 velopments of such systems are insignificant. 



