1908. 
ONE MAN’S POULTRY JOB. 
With Everything to Do With. 
Part II. 
NOVEMBER WORK.—We will now begin No¬ 
vember with practically all of the odd jobs cleaned 
up. The incubators are getting started again as fast 
as the pullets furnish the eggs, and the youngest 
chickens in the brooder are about to pass the deli¬ 
cate age, so that three times daily is all the care the 
brooder needs, which can be done in 20 minutes each 
time. The work in the brooder now decreases about 
as fast as it increases in the incubator house, and 
the care of the horse and hens remains about the 
same the year round, but the work in the colony 
houses is gradually increasing all the time, for by 
the last of November you will have nearly all of the 
first lot of chickens (say 1,800 to 2,500) out in the 
colony houses, which means about \ l / 2 hour as soon 
as you can get to it. .The morning chores will 
now take until about 10 o’clock, and 20 minutes 
at noon, with \ l / 2 hour at night, will leave about four 
hours per day, not forgetting that good nap at noon, 
to do the regular chores, and this gives for the 
whole month about 100 hours, in which time is done 
the testing, carrying the chicks to brooder, setting 
machine, cleaning off dropping boards, cleaning out 
brooders, refilling with sand from the 
cellar, etc. The work for December is 
practically the same as November, with 
the exception of the caponizing, and al¬ 
lowing that one-half of the chicks are 
males will make from 900 to 1,£00 to 
caponize during December and January, 
and at the rate of 50 per hour (more if 
you are an expert), it will take from 
say 20 to 30 hours out of the 200 spare 
hours there are in these two months. 
BROODERS AND INCUBATORS. 
By the first of January the brooder house 
will be nearly full again, if not quite, 
with the incubators about stopped, so 
that in January while there is a little 
more work in the brooder there is less 
in the incubator house. The regular 
amount of work remains about the same 
until more chickens go out to the colony • 
houses, and during February and the 
first of March the remainder of the col¬ 
ony houses will be full, and as they fill 
the brooder grows empty, and will take 
another hour per day for the regular 
work, leaving only three hours per day 
for the'odd jobs. In the meantime the 
incubators have started again for the 
last time. By the first of March the 
oldest pullets will begin to lay and must 
be sold, and the second lot must be ca- 
ponized. The brooder is being filled 
for the last time, so that by April 1 the 
incubators are all done. The brooder 
house is full, as well as the colony 
houses, but we will now gladly devote 
two to three hours per week to selling 
off the oldest birds as fast as they get 
“ripe.” As soon as any of the colony 
houses are empty they are cleaned out 
thoroughly and refilled again with chicks 
from the brooder house. 
VACATION TIME.—By the middle 
of May the brooder house is empty and 
the regular chores begin to decrease, and 
some time in June the caponizing will be 
done, leaving just the hens and colony 
houses to see to, and the money to take in. The 
brooder houses may now be thoroughly cleaned and 
refilled ready for the next season, and there will be 
many an hour between now and August 1 to lie in 
the shade and make short pleasure trips, or get a 
neighbor to do the few chores and stay away awhile. 
I am practically doing this very tiling right here 
now, and have been doing it, only under different 
conditions which are as follows: I hire a young 
man, and he has two horses instead of one, a cow 
to take care of, an automobile to wash and shine. 
1 Ie takes all the care of the 400 hens (and we have 
not got the watering system in the henhouses) and 
the colony houses, does all the cleaning out and re¬ 
filling, in fact all of the work on the place, running 
lawn mower, haying, gardening, including strawberries, 
raspberries, asparagus, and large flower garden. lie 
also works on the wood pile, hauls all of the scraps and 
gasoline and some of the grain, about two miles. 
\ hm I am at home (and I am away quite a good 
'leal) I run the incubators and feed the chicks in the 
brooder house and do all of the caponizing, so that 
! is plain to be seen that there is not more than 
on _e_ man’s labor in “taking care of 400 hens and 
raising upward of 5,000 chickens.” Besides the above 
sold 2,800 chicks right from the incubators, and 
THE} RURAL NEW-YORKER 
about 20,000 eggs, mostly for setting. When I am 
away my wife feeds the chickens in the brooder 
house; this is all that she ever does about the chicken 
business, except cooking a pair occasionally, but sbe 
does her part in doing all of the house work, getting 
us three good square meals per day, and keeping our 
clothes in good order. 
A MODEST SI ART. —I have been asked how I 
began on small capital, working up to over 5,000 
chickens per year. In the Fall of 1893 I made a 
270-egg incubator of the hot-water type. During 
the Winter following, I hatched out three lots, and 
raised them in a 20-foot brooder house, heated with 
a four-pipe system, two flow and two return, with a 
copper boiler that would hold about one gallon, and 
used a two-wick kerosene stove for a heater. Later 
I built another 20-foot housd, to put the chicks in 
after they were large enough to go without heat. I 
averaged to hatch 133 chicks, and averaged to raise 
116 of these; part of them were soli as broilers 
and part as roasters. We only had one-third of an 
acre of land, and there was a cottage house, small 
barn and a garden on this, so in the Fall of 1894 
came on to this farm of 70 acres, but we only use 
from seven to eight acres for the poultry business, 
and about 12 acres in mowing, where we spread th 
hen dressing and get a good crop of hay. This place 
HOME OF HENRY D. SMITH, THE ROASTER MAN. Fig. 110. 
SCENES IN THE TOBACCO REGION OF KENTUCKY. Fig. ill 
had just a house and barn on it, and we made sev¬ 
eral changes in both before we could begin the 
poultry business. We moved the above two houses 
and also a small henhouse from the old place down 
here. My family consisted of a wife, two boys, aged 
13 and 15 years, and myself, and we were all enthu¬ 
siastic in our new work. By planning the work 
right, taking the hardest and most difficult parts my¬ 
self, we were about if not quite equal to three men, 
and my wife did her part in do’ng the housework, 
and keeping us three hungry ones filled up, stockings 
darned, etc. We moved here on August 14 and we 
began by stoning up an incubator cellar and putting 
a roof on it, 12x14 feet. We set the one incubator 
September 1; then it was my stent to make an in¬ 
cubator each week and set it, and by the time I had* 
the fourth one made, the first one was hatching, so 
we had to hustle and fix up the brooder that we 
moved here. Instead of a kerosene stove we used a 
gasoline burner, and ran a pipe to it right from an 
elevated gasoline barrel, and afterwards connected 
another brooder house nearby to the same barrel. 
Each one of these houses was 20x10 feet, and they 
were all the brooders we had the first season. By 
October 1 we had the four 270-egg incubators all 
going, and ran them as fast as those two brooders 
26S 
could take care of the chicks. This made lively work 
necessary and gave us a very good start with the 
chicken crop. 
BUILDING UP THE PLANT.— In the mean 
time we had built a henhouse 15x100 feet out of box 
boards, and covered it with paper, and with a few 
pens in the barn cellar and the little henhouse we 
brought, we put the 150 pullets that we also brought 
with us into their Winter quarters. We were so 
hard pushed with work at this time that we bought 
seven 6x8 feet colony houses, second hand, and we 
could move one here every two hours. Then during 
the \\ inter we built 12 colony houses in the barn, 
and then let the horse drag them to their places, 
where we put them up some 8 or 10 inches on 
stones, then boarded them down to the ground on 
the inside of the sill, and watching our chance, filled 
them up with gravel when the weather conditions 
would permit. \\ e had to buy most of our eggs, 
and in fact we always have had to until last year 
and so far this year. The next year we built two 
more brooder houses, same style as the others, and 
some more colony houses, and then I bought some 
box boards and built a 60-foot brooder house and 
workshop. In the brooder I put eight one-inch pipes 
and a coal heater with a hot water regulator for 
regulating the heat, and board hovers over the pip.s 
as a temporary arrangement. 
ALTERATIONS AND IMPROVE¬ 
MENTS.— We ran in this way for about 
two years, when I took the hovers off 
and had an open-pipe system, and at 
the same time plastered it overhead, and 
made an electric regulator that keeps the 
temperature practically perfect. We then 
went into the woods and got the lumber 
out for another henhouse 120 feet long, 
which we built the coming season, and 
made some more colony houses each 
year. Then we got out some more lum¬ 
ber (the only money put out being for 
the sawing) and built a 100-foot addition 
to the brooder house with another heater. 
Next we enlarged our incubator house 
to 12x26 feet and made more incubators, 
and finally changed these for a popular 
make of hot air incubators, so that we 
now have eight 400-egg machines. We 
extended the 100-foot henhouse to 120 
feet, so that we now have on the place 
besides the dwelling house and the barn 
the incubator house 12x26 feet, with an 
egg capacity of 3,200, and there is room 
for two more machines, which would 
make it 4,000 eggs; two henhouses 15x120 
feet each, a brooder room 60 feet and 
another 90 feet long by 14 feet wide, both 
in a house 182 feet long, having a work¬ 
shop on one end. In this brooder house 
I put from 2,000 to 2,500 chicks at a 
time, and I intend to fill it three 
times a season. Then there are 50 
colony houses holding 50 chicks each 
from after they leave the brooder until 
I sell them as roasters, and the four old 
gasoline brooder houses 10x20 feet and 
another house of about the same size 
that the boys used to keep pigeons in. 
These last five houses I put 100 chicks 
in each, and use them same as colony 
houses, making a colony house capacity 
of 3,000 chicks, which can be used tw ee 
full in a season, making really room for 
6,000. 1 he last 2,000 are in the brooder 
house until the oldest ones are sold. Last but not 
least is an automobile house. The number of chickens 
raised for the 13 years that we have been here is 
about as follows: 700, 1,000, 1,200, 1,500, 2,000, 2,500, 
.3,000, 4,200, 3,200, 4,200, 5,000, 5,100 and 5,200, and I 
have 3,400 on hand now (January 25). I hope and 
expect to get a good 2,000 more before this season 
is gone. henry d. smith. 
Massachusetts. 
Last Spring a western man wanted a herd of 
cattle. His fancy ran to Jerseys, and he was pre¬ 
pared to pay large prices for good stock. The de¬ 
tails of this Dawley-Rogers case frightened him. He 
waited and waited for the case to be settled, but it 
was not. He reasoned like many others that if there 
had been nothing in it the case could not have been 
kept alive. He finally began to study the Guernsey 
breed, and what was more important, the papers that 
went with the cows. When he found that every trans¬ 
fer is checked up he was satisfied, engaged a good 
judge of Guernseys and sent him out to buy. This 
is a true case, and there are many more like it. 
What is more, every day of delay in facing the music 
and definitely setttling this case right makes this thing 
grow like a snowball. 
