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The Corning Egg Farm book, by Corning himself cover

The Corning Egg Farm book, by Corning himself

Chapter 137: CHAPTER XXX The Original Thirty Hens
By Edward Corning
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About This Book

A practical history and manual recounts the farm's founding and lays out a systematic approach to large-scale egg production. It explains housing layouts, the large-flock system to reduce costs and labor, and sanitary methods for preparing eggs for market. Breeding advice emphasizes selection of prolific white Leghorn stock, line-breeding to preserve type without close inbreeding, and producing unrelated cockerels for mating. Incubation and brooding guidance stresses uniform temperature, ventilation, and producing livable chicks, while feeding chapters prioritize succulent green foods (notably sprouted oats), mineral supplements, and animal-food substitutes. The work also covers watering systems, coal ash use, fixed routines for feeding and egg collection, and farm security and pest control.

CHAPTER XXX
The Original Thirty Hens

The egg production of the Original Thirty Hens on The Corning Egg Farm is an interesting story, but, of course, it must be remembered that this record is of one hundred and fifty-three days, the banner days of the year for eggs from yearling hens.

The Biddies arrived in different lots, the last days of February, our record beginning with March first, and ending with July 31st. During that period they laid 2466 eggs, and at the end of the third month we lost two of them. The cause of death we were unable to tell, for, at that time our experience was not of sufficient duration to have made even a close guess.

The average for the birds, it will be noted, was eighty-five eggs per hen. Had we been better posted as to feeding methods, doubtless the hens would have been capable of producing eggs in numbers considerably greater than the figures show.

PULLETS IN LAYING HOUSE NO. 2, FALL OF 1911

The record, however, for real yearling hens (and these were real yearling hens, because when they started to lay with us they were fully eighteen months of age), was very far from a poor one, and the novice who succeeds in caring for his breeding stock in such a way that he does not fall short of this average, may consider that he has done very well.