132 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[Aprix, 
true plan is to prevent disease by inducing con- 
stant exercise by scratching, by allowing sun, 
air, good food, and breeding from vigorous stock. 
The office and "watch-house" (fig. 2) con- 
tains a room below for a business desk, and 
above are sleeping apartments. Lights should 
be kept burning all night, to show thieves 
that vigilance is main- 
tained. Dogs, small 
and great (in-doors 
and out), are valu- 
able aids (account- 
ing for the kennels 
in the figure), but 
in the day time they 
should be yarded in a 
strong inclosure made 
on purpose, or chain- 
ed where they can 
not frighten the fowls. 
The eggs design- 
ed for hatching are 
J;ept iu a closet on the 
first floor, so situated 
with respect to the 
fire (maintained day 
and night in a small 
base-burner coal stove 
during cold weather), as to be kept at a constaut 
and even temperature of about' 50 degrees. 
[Note. — In the January article, p. 12, the 
types made us say 10° instead of 20" as the dif- 
ference between the inside and outside tempera- 
ture of our fowl-houses. — In the description of 
the house for sittere in our fifth article it should 
have been mentioned that about one third of the 
south roof i3 glazed, the windows being partially 
darkened as warm weather approaches. — In the 
eighth article, fig. 1 should be denominated 
■" Nests for Sitters," not " House for Sitters."] 
A. tract of land, 100 x 100rods=62i acres, will 
contain ten rows of houses for the laying stock, 
arranged on the quincunx plan, ten in a row, as 
stated in the initial article. These one hundred 
buildings will each contain 50 birds, or 5,000 in 
nil. In addition there must be 500 of the sitting 
Btock, and 500 at the breeding and experimental 
yards, or a total of 6,000. The 5,000 layeis 
comprise 3,000 yearlings, and the rest are two- 
year-olds. To replenish the laying stock, 
there must be raised 7,500 chickens yearly 
(for three out of five are cocks and in- 
ferior pullets to be rejected). To replenish 
the sitters and also the breeders — iu the latter 
class much "weeding out" being necessary— 
2,500 chickens more must be raised. That is, 
about 10,000 chickens must be reared annually. 
Now, when fowls are kept under the ordinary 
system pursued by the family living in a village— 
by which we mean that there is a fowl-house 
and yard to accommodate a flock, and then, if 
the number is to be increased, another yard is 
made, and so on — one man can take care of 600 
fowls without the aid of a team. He can take 
off all the produce in the cars, and distribute to 
his city customers from a basket carried upon 
his arm ; can spade up the ground in the yards, 
keep the fowls out of mischief by setting them at 
work scratching, clean the houses regularly, pre- 
pare the food, build a fire, and cook for his 
charge every day, giving a variety, meat, vege- 
tables, pounded shells, etc., and keep his stock 
young by raising enough chickens, so as to have 
on hand 400 pullets every autumn, after killing 
the supernumerary cocks and inferior pullets. 
Bat one man can not take care of more than 
this, and do it well, under the ordinary domestic 
or small-scale plan. If he attempt to manage 
1,000 or 1,500, market their produce, raise the 
needful number of chickens, etc., he will slight 
the work, and so sure as it is slighted, there will 
be loss. He can keep 600 adult fowls, and make 
$600, and no more. If he is not skillful, vigi- 
lant, patient, and persevering, he will not make 
that. We mean reckoning ordinary market 
HOSPITAL FOB EGO FAllJi. 
rates for produce (not selling live fowls, or eggs 
for hatching, at high rates), and supposing that 
he raises some early chickens, but only as many 
as may be while distributing his labor evenly 
throughout the year, and allowimg the value of 
the manure to exactly offset the interest upon 
the land and buildings, and the repairs and de- 
preciation in value of the latter. 
We have kept accurate accounts for five 
years, and though we have iu oue year cleared 
$2 per head on an average, and sometimes on 
single flocks as high as $2.75 per head, yet it is 
unsafe to count on more than $1 per head profit 
upon each adult fowl, all losses and expenses 
considered. Now let it be remembered that 
the skill and incessant care and industry neces- 
sary to clear $600 in the case supposed above 
would, employed at some other business, earn 
$800 or $900, for a bungler can not keep fowls 
as a business, and we see why it is that during 
the past fifteen years so many persons who have 
tried to enlarge their poultry business on the 
ordinary " family fowl-house and yard " plan 
have failed and quit in disgust. What is need- 
ed is the reduction of the amount of labor. 
This must be accomplished by employing a team 
in every operation where it can be done, and 
by usiug movable buildings. The movable 
houses and no yards (necessitating the system 
of indirect feeding) are the central features re- 
lied upon in our " egg-farming " to crowd down 
labor to the minimum. All the other features 
are subordinate. 
Five hands (with two horses) can attend to 
the whole establishment of 6,000 adult fowls, 
and the excess of produce over feed will be 
$5,000 for the laying stock of 5,000 birds. 
Nothing is said about any income from the 
breeders and sitters, they are supposed to be 
as much a necessary evil as anything ; or about 
income from crops or manure, that being an 
offset, and a fair offset, as our experience and 
laborious accounts show, against the interest on 
land and buildings. The help can some of it 
be of the cheaper sort — boys of fifteen, if intelli- 
gent and steady. Oue hand worth $800 at 
the top of the scale (there's no use in reckon- 
ing a princely salary at any rural occupalion), 
the "right-hand man" at $700, No. 3 at $600, 
and two apprentices at $350 each, and there is 
$2,800 for labor, to which $-100 must be added 
for the maintenance of team, including wear 
and tear of vehicles and harness, and sundries. 
As our eggs are only partly hatched, we can't 
count all the chickens, but our readers have a 
right to figures enough to get a fuir understand- 
ing of our enterprise. 
There are only three systems of fowl-keeping 
possible. There are many modifications of 
these, it is true, but to one genus or another of 
the three following they may all be referred. 
Oue is the highly artificial or bird-cage plan 
of Mr. Geyelin as detailed iu his "Poultry- 
Keeping iu a Commercial Point of View," a 
book which is, after all, oue of the most valu- 
able repositories of information for fowl-keepers 
ever written. But the cage plan fails, because 
there is not enough exercise for the birds, and 
altogether too much for the attendant. 
Another is the ordinary plan of the villager or 
the fancier, given iu poultry books and agricul- 
tural papers iu endless variations of one tune, 
and that tune a "house and yard adjoining." 
A good plan for the family who make no account 
of the labor involved, and who have odd bits ta 
spare from their table, or for those expecting t» 
sell blooded fowls or early chickens at high 
prices (minor branches iu which a few can and 
do make fortunes), and a good plan too for get- 
ting a start in operations on a large scale, but a 
money-losing plan if it is attempted to supply 
city markets with table fowls and eggs at or- 
dinary market rates. 
The remaining one is that pursued by nature 
before fowls were domesticated, and the one 
under which they have been mainly kept since, 
during a period antedating history aud continu- 
ing to the present ; by giving them their free- 
dom in the daytime and a shelter by night. 
Nature gave a thicket for a roost ; the farmer, 
from the barbarian down, gave a shed — that is 
about all the difference. Spite of neglect, the 
farmer's poultry at large is more free from 
disease than that kept yarded under average 
management. As the wild fowls need no at- 
tendant at all, so by arrangements as near like 
theirs as possible the least labor is demanded. 
Fend off storms and wind and the summer 
suu by the simplest shelter that can be made, 
dodge the labor of house-cleaning by plowing 
and moving buildings, and make the mutual 
antagonisms of neighboring flocks take the 
Fig. 2.— OFFICE AND WATCH-HOUSE. 
place of yard fences just as among wild jungle 
fowls, and the maximum of thrift and the 
minimum of labor and expense will be secured. 
Our ambition has beeu and is to demonstrate, 
not how to raise blooded fowls nor mainly 
early chickens, capons, or any other article 
with a view to high prices, but to change one 
staple, grain, into another, eggs, by the most 
economical method possible. The industrial 
problems which concern the masses are the 
most important. 
