PROFITABLE EGG FARMING. 
beautifully less. We doubt whether this is to 
be regretted. The tanners demand that poultry 
manure shall be wholly free from foreign matter, 
such as land plaster, fine-sifted coal ashes or 
loam, and that means that the roost platforms 
have no absorbent spread on them. As a con¬ 
sequence they become sodden with the urine, 
and give off a poisonous odor which is certainly 
injurious. Another point is that poultry man¬ 
ure is such an excellent fertilizer it seems a pity 
to have it wasted in tanning. 
Another Profitable Egg Farm. 
A drive of a few minutes brought us to Mr. 
Prescott’s well-known egg farm. Mr. Prescott 
keeps about two thousand head of Barred Ply¬ 
mouth Rocks, his houses each have ten pens, 
10 x 28 feet each on the main floor, and below 
that they have access to two large basements, 
28 x 100 feet, opening out into an enclosure of 
an acre or thereabouts. 
Mr. Prescott’s house is a capital example of 
adapting means to ends, as the land is a steep- 
sloping, very rocky hillside, and the house is 
built around the south and southeast side of 
the hill, in somewhat the shape of a man’s arm 
with the elbow bent at an angle of about twenty 
degrees. The house is two stories and an attic 
on the clown-hill side, one story and an attic on 
the back. The main floor of each wing is 
divided into ten pens 10 x 28 feet each, and yet is 
not divided, because the pens all open into each 
other, and all the birds in each wing run together. 
When they come up from the basement or in 
from the yards to the roost pens, they fill up the 
roosting space in one pen, then go on to find 
quarters in the next, and so on until all are full. 
Mr. Prescott took a small bucket of grain and 
led the way to the basement under the west 
wing, which in a few minutes was fairly swarm¬ 
ing with a thousand head of Plymouth Rocks, 
in one room 28 x 100 feet in size. We think 
that is the largest single flock of fowls we ever 
saw, and fine Plymouth Rock pullets they are 
too. A few of them, it is true, had not reached 
laying maturity, and they, too, would pull 
down the general average profit of a flock. 
Mr. Prescott hatches his chickens wholly bv 
hens, having five hundred sitting nests, in banks 
of nests arranged in tiers, four hundred of these 
nests being in the attic space under the double 
pitch roof, the other one hundred being above 
the brooder pipes at the back of the brooder 
house. 
The central building of the plant is the cook¬ 
ing and grain house, with the owner’s dwelling 
above. The cooking is by steam in oblong 
jacket kettles, designed by Mr. Prescott for his 
special purpose. He is experimenting this 
year with feeding the cooked ration at night, 
with good results, quite a part of that cooked 
ration being whole grain. 
For meat food he buys sheep’s plucks, and 
cooks them into a soup which is mixed into the 
cooked food ration. We cannot do better than 
quote the description of the steam kettles and 
cooking from our May 1st, ’96, article: 
In the cooking room was a Mann bone cutter 
being run by windmill power, Mr. Prescott 
telling us he cut up about one hundred and 
fifty pounds of fresh bone a week. This is not 
all of the animal food his fowls get, however, as 
he buys “plucks” and at times, fish, which he 
cooks in his steam jacket kettles, adding cracked 
corn and wheat to absorb the moisture and 
cook in the surplus heat after the “ plucks, ” etc., 
are cooked and the steam turned off. 
Those steam jacket kettles merit a special 
mention, as they are of Mr. Prescott’s own 
designing, and are really “ troughs ” about five 
feet long, eighteen inches wide, and a foot deep. 
He had them made in this shape the better to 
cook the contents all through equally. One of 
those kettles will cook enough for a mash feed 
for two thousand hens, but Mr. Prescott does 
not believe in feeding much mash. He said 
he had found it very easy to overfeed it—“ and 
then look out for roup and other diseases. 
You get the fowls congested, engorged, and 
then they are a prey to disease.” Mr. Prescott 
gets one hundred and forty to one hundred 
and fifty eggs a year from his birds, and hatches 
about ten thousand chickens; a part of these, 
however, he sells, when just hatched, there be¬ 
ing quite a call for young chicks. 
The breeding stock, mostly Barred P. Rocks, 
we found in the original houses, where the first 
start was made. He keeps about twenty birds 
in a pen, and lets three pens, each having a 
rooster, run together, the gates between being 
all open, and one large yard in common. We 
asked him if one male didn’t sometimes inter¬ 
fere with another, and he said, “No, not to 
do any harm; his eggs were then running over 
ninety per cent, fertile.” Mr. Prescott renews 
about half of his laying stock each year, winter¬ 
ing about half pullets and half year-old hens, 
and that he can get so goodly an egg yield from 
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