1 
7ht RURAL NEW-YORKER 
937 
• Making a Living by Keeping Hens 
A PESSIMISTIC VIEW.—I was amused by Prof. 
Massey’s article on page 915. Evidently lie 
thinks poultry keeping a precarious means of sup¬ 
port. My own experience gives me a different view. 
Part of that experience may be interesting to R. 
N.-Y. readers. 
1IOW A CITY MAN STARTED.—I was city born 
and bred, and always lived and worked in a city; 
had never plowed a rod, nor milked a cow: knew 
nothing of farm work. When the panic of 1S93 
closed the factory in Brooklyn, N. Y.. where I was 
shipping clerk, my thoughts turned to 
the safety and security of a farm. As ._ 
my wife had always wanted to live 
on a farm there was nothing to hin¬ 
der, so we bought an 89-acre farm up 
in the Connecticut hills: 15 acres 
cleared, the rest woodland. It was a 
stony- run-down farm, and I 57 years 
old. in poor health, never a physically 
strong man. with no boys to help, fam¬ 
ily consisting of wife and two grand- 
daugliters. A man could hardly start 
farm life worse handicapped than 1 
was. 
FROM COWS TO IIENS.—We com¬ 
menced with cows, selling butter as the 
money crop, but it didn’t take me long 
to sec that the hens were paying at 
least three times the profit that the 
cows were, in proportion to capital in¬ 
vested. So we sold part of the cows, 
and each year increased the number of 
liens, until I bad 500 layers. All the 
eggs were shipped by express to a 
dealer in Worcester, Mass. Eggs were 
15 cents a dozen in Summer in those 
days, and seldom over 40 cents in Win¬ 
ter. All the grain was bought, but the 
bens paid a profit of $1.50 to $12 each 
per year even at those low prices. 
That meant from $750 to $1,000 a year. 
As the farm produced practically 
everything we used except flour and 
sugar, and flour was $5 a barrel and 
sugar 5c per lb., there were a few hun¬ 
dred dollars to put in the savings bank 
each year. 
BROADENING ACTIVITIES. — As 
experience increased I became a writer 
on poultry subjects, an institute work¬ 
er and lecturer, raised only purebred 
poultry, and sold most of the eggs for 
hatching and fowls for breeding 
stock, increasing the income many fold. 
It is :27 years since I began writing 
for The R. N.-Y. Little did I think then 
that iu my eighty-sixth year T would 
still be writing for it. In our 20 years 
on that farm there never was one hour 
when we would have gone back to the 
city to live. Nature (its men for dif¬ 
ferent occupations. Some are born 
horsemen, some cow men, some editors, 
some poultrymen. I doubt if Prof. 
Mhsse.v would succeed as a poultry- 
man, but as a gardener he is certainly 
a brilliant success. 
RETURNS FROM POULTRY.—As 
to the profit iu poultry keeping, I quote 
from a letter from a friend in New 
York State who has kept poultry all 
liis life. Two years ago. when prices 
were the highest, he wrote me: “I 
have 2,400 White Leghorn pullets and 
am getting 1,400 eggs a day. The profit 
above cost of feed is $80 a day." I 
would like to ask Prof. Massey how 
that compares with gardening? 
A Business in Winter Broilers 
Can you advise me what difficulties T would run iufo 
raising Winter broilers? I figured getting chicks the 
ming 
latter part of August or September. The price on 
chicks now seems to be very low. I have had good 
luck with haby chicks in the Spring. 
New York. 
had 
w. E. e. 
T HERE is no question but what there is a profit 
to be made from buying day-old chicks in Au¬ 
gust or September and growing them into broilers 
for Fall and Winter use. especially when a person 
has a local market for a fancy article, or some 
special trade to supply without, letting them go 
rainy well, out sometimes the losses will he rather 
heavy in spite of the best precautions against them. 
To make the best success iu this work the chicks 
should he put iu clean colony houses and moved 
onto new ground where do chicks have previously 
run during the season. This soil should be light 
sandy or gravelly loam, and preferably a clover or 
Alfalfa sod, which will furnish the chicks green 
feed until freezing weather. The feed should be 
practically the same as for .Spring chicks, with milk 
in some form added to the ration. About two weeks 
before marketing the chicks should be confined in 
roomy pens and fed heavily on a fattening ration, 
with moist mash at least once a day. 
— The age at which to sell depends upon 
your market requirements, although 
it usually pays best to grow them up 
to 2V. or 3 lbs. per pair. Up to this 
size the White Leghorns make very 
satisfactory broilers, but for heavier 
birds some of the larger breeds would 
be better. c. s. greene. 
,4 Basket of Star Apples from Southern Xetr Jersey 
The picture shows a basket of the Star apple grown on the farm . f F. II. Bateman. 
Hamden County. N. .f. This is a local apple, rarely grown north of Trenton, but 
unite extensively planted iu some sections of Southern New Jersey. It is not a 
high quality apple, but very good for sauce and pies, and during its early season 
usually sells well. This year the price is low. The variety is very susceptible 
to lire blight, and growers are giving it up for that reason ; but where it can be 
veil grown it is a profitable early variety, not generally known away from the 
sectiou around Philadelphia.. This section of New Jersey was hit hard by the 
late frosts this year. 
This picture shows how a young apple orchard may be utilized while it is coming 
into bearing. Mr. Elmer Coon of Dutchess County. N. Y„ sends the picture. He 
has planted strawberries between rows of one-year apple trees. The culture is 
1 lean, and no doubt the berry plants are well fertilized. On a small place where 
good land is scarce it is necessary to crowd things and grow as much as possible 
on every acre. I uder such conditions small fruit in the young orchard will pay. 
Who Shall Kill the “Lice 
Killer”? 
As one of your readers who makes his 
living from a small poultry farm. I 
would greatly appreciate it if you could 
enlighten me a> to reliability of lice kill 
remedies given in certain advertisements 
in supposed reliable farm papers. I would 
not want to harm my hens by giving them 
iu their drinking water these mineral tab¬ 
lets said to render fowls' .skins immune 
to lice or mites, yet the time and trouble 
saved by this method of ridding a flock 
of lice tempts one to try it. What does 
M. B. D. think of the inclosed advertise¬ 
ment.' I wrote to the paper and they 
said they were going to try it out. but 
said the remedy would nor hurt the hens. 
1 he reason I appeal to you for advice be¬ 
fore buying this stuff is that it is not ad¬ 
vertised iu your paper. The R. N.-Y. is 
so strict in its admission of advertise¬ 
ments that I always order my supplies 
and stock from its advertisers, having 
faith in their integrity and reliability, 
and I have always had satisfaction since 
I have done so. The other paper I have 
taken for 20 years, hut of late years have 
been "stung" in try dealings with some of 
its advertisers—not swindled, bur stung. 
I used sodium fluoride in dusting my 
hens, but it is a lengthy process and ex¬ 
cites the fowls. w. B. K. 
New Jersey. 
A CCORDING to this advertisement, 
these "mineral tablets.” added to 
the drinking water of fowls, will for¬ 
ever free them from the ravages of lice 
and mites and. what is still more re¬ 
markable, ‘'Little chicks that drink 
freely of the water will never be both¬ 
ered by mites or lice." It is hard to 
speak with any degree of patience of 
such advertisements, or to speak .>f 
them at all without, first, condemning 
in the most vigorous possible language 
the publishers who are willing, for a 
share in the loot, to filch dollars from 
the readers of their papers. If is idle 
for them to say that they are not aware 
of the fraudulent character of such ad¬ 
vertisements: they cannot help but be 
aware of it, for it is a part of their 
business to know the nature of the ad¬ 
vertising that is admitted to their col¬ 
umns. and the advertisement in ques¬ 
tion is such as to require no investiga¬ 
tion at the hands of any farm journal 
publisher. If the publishers to whom 
you wrote knew enough about the min¬ 
eral tablets to know that they would 
not hurt the hens to which they were 
given, they also knew that they could 
not by any possibility rid fowls of lice 
and mites, much less protect little 
chick for a lifetime. And what about 
HOI NTR\ PLEASURES.—Just a word about 
tbe joy Of country life. In those early days on tlie 
fa rut, working in the field, with the warm, brown 
Mother Earth under my feet, a brown thrush in the 
big hickory tree at the corner singing a song that 
imitated every bird that flies, the "bob white" cry 
°i- the quail down in the meadow, even the spring¬ 
ing grass with its spires pointing heavenward, all 
combined to make one thank the Divine for mere 
existence. No such feeling ever came to me in the 
city. And the independence of it: no one could fire 
Mm out of your job. There was a coal strike in 
those days, but I could look at my woodlot and 
smile; my family would be warm whether coal were 
mined or not. I realized that the only independent 
American citizen is the farmer. 
Connecticut, george a. cosgkove. 
through the regular channels of trade iu competi¬ 
tion with Western boxed broilers, which are crate 
fattened and held a short time in cold storage, and 
sold at a very low price to the wholesale trade. 
Probably the worst features of this business arc 
that weather conditions are not the best for grow¬ 
ing and fattening broilers during the late Fall and 
Winter months, and artificial heat must be con¬ 
stantly supplied. Spring being the natural growing 
season for chicks, this Fall work must be consid¬ 
ered as going somewhat against nature, all of which 
lias a tendency to increase cost of production, so, 
unless you have a good market, there is not much 
chance for profit. It is possible to buy baby chicks 
for this purpose from many of the large hatcheries 
advertising in The R. N.-Y. at reasonable prices, 
and with good houses and care they should grow 
subscribers to papers whose publishers 
aie willing to aid in "obtaining mono.' under false 
pretenses i These papers cannot exist without sub¬ 
scribers. Is there no responsibility resting upon 
one who aids iu the support of a journal that is 
willing that money shall be filched from him? 
M. B. D. 
Hellebore Poisoning at Pasture 
There have been deaths among dairy eo\vs at pasture 
in this vicinity which the local veterinarian ascribes to 
the eating of the flowers of the American white helle¬ 
bore. or Indian poke. This wild plant grows in abund¬ 
ance along the creeks and in wet places in hill pas¬ 
tures and. ordinarily. is not touched by the cattle, 
ihough ouo of t h<* first to sond out its grorn louvos nuil 
flowering stalk in the Spring. The panicle of greenish 
flowers at the top of a single stem several feet in height 
appears each iu the season and might easily tempt 
hungry cattle, if eatable. Books of reference ill speak 
of the poisonous nature of the root of this plant, but 
