The garden yard

Even the hen is intensively cultivated these days, and that makes room for her and her chicks on the small patch. It is perfectly amazing how little the ordinary farmer knows about poultry, although he has raised some, more or less, from time immemorial. The modern farmer is too wise to be caught with the extravagant stories found in some poultry papers, of the profits to be made from a hennery, though at the same time he is not wise enough to believe that with careful attention and improved methods, the hennery can be made to pay well.

It is for the benefit of the farmer who is neither too wise nor too ignorant to be taught, as well as for the villager and the intensive farmer, that this chapter is written.⁠[11]

One of the new systems, Philo’s,⁠[12] extensively advertised, makes it possible for people with but little room to keep a small flock. By this system, the hens are always kept in confinement; but with some extra care and proper treatment they do well and yield great results; which is in harmony with the modern theory of intensive culture.

The first thing to be decided is what kind of poultry to keep. Chickens are the most popular of the various domestic animals suitable for the intensive farmer. Turkeys and guineas do not thrive well in confinement and are difficult to rear in a commercial way. Farmers who have free range, especially if they are adjacent to woodland, may do well with a few of these less domesticated birds. On the other hand, ducks and pigeons do even better than chickens in confinement, but there is less demand for the product.

The first essential for success with poultry, as with crops, is to secure good stock; the very best possible. To buy fowls simply because they are cheap is poor economy. Much better buy well-bred stock at five dollars and upwards, for they will not only give more eggs, but their brood will be worth more, so that in a year you can build up a fine flock of your own.

The second essential is to keep them in small companies, not more than six hens in a pen; still better results can be had with four. These are the days of intensive culture and chicks will respond to it as surely as field crops. Like the crops, they need abundance of food, to force growth and vigor and egg production. Care must be taken in the selection of food, but you are always safe on lots of oats, wheat-bran and green stuff, with some lean beef now and then. Corn should be fed sparingly to heavy fowls, but is an excellent diet for Leghorns or for any chickens on free range. Running water, or plenty of fresh water should be furnished. An open water vessel is best, although almost any self-feeding fountain is good. Place it about ten inches from the floor that no dirt may be scratched into it.

Fresh air and sunshine are necessities, but drafts should be avoided. Cleanliness is vital; if only a few hens are kept, all droppings should be removed every morning, and sand or lime or ashes sprinkled on the roosts and boards. If the food is good and well balanced, the premises kept scrupulously clean, and the fowls protected from storm and wind you will not be greatly troubled with disease or weakness. Daily care, never slackening, is the price that must be paid for success.

The poultry house should be in a sunny spot, on a hillside sloping to the south, if possible; but no one need be kept from chicken raising if such a spot cannot be had, for many successful plants are not so well situated. A light sandy soil offers the same advantages as a southern slope. Such locations or soils are not only much dryer but also much warmer, for the snow melts and the frost leaves the ground earlier in the spring than on northern slopes or in clay soils. The advantage of this earlier season is just as real as in a more southern latitude.

One of the main defects of poultry houses has been that they were built for people, rather than for hens; being too high, they are not easily kept warm in winter. The house itself should be well built to exclude storm and wind, but the southern side should be largely enclosed with muslin, which is much better than glass, as it affords an entrance for air without draughts, and furnishes plenty of light.

The roosting room may have a ceiling close above the roosts; this can be made of round poles or narrow boards, laid an inch or more apart, and over these there should be spread a covering of hay or straw. This will give ventilation, and yet retain most of the heat, especially if a thin muslin curtain is placed before the fowls during the night.

In the warmer localities, on the Atlantic coast from New York south, and in the Mississippi Valley anywhere south of St. Louis, curtain fronts are not necessary, but, instead, a part or all of the south side of the poultry house is made of poultry netting.

If chickens are to be raised in large numbers, incubators must be used; those holding two to three hundred eggs are most commonly used. After the chicks are hatched, comes the serious question of brooding them, especially during the winter. All kinds of little chicks need air and sunshine even more than older folk, and not many buildings allow of either; consequently, we must consider brooding out of doors, where air and sunshine can always be had. Fortunately, the experimenting has been done by others, so now we may avail ourselves of the knowledge they have gained, as many successful people are doing.

With properly constructed brooders and brooder coops, it is perfectly practicable to care for chickens from hatching to full growth, out of doors, at any time of the year, without artificial heat. This does away with all danger from fire and over-heating, and gives the chickens a vigorous constitution that will enable them to withstand all the ills to which chickens are liable.

These suggestions are not given as great discoveries, but they are a brief summary of the practical points of chicken raising, and are all workable. Some of them are given by the Rev. W. W. Cox, as the results of years of personal experience in the business. He is now making a specialty of raising White Orpingtons, and is brooding out of doors, with success.

There are many branches of the “chicken-tree,” the more important ones being breeding stock, or fancy poultry; egg farming, broiler farming and roaster growing. Running a public hatchery, and selling day-old chicks, is the latest development, and is indeed so intensive that it links manufacture to farming, for the building site is the only ground required. These branches are recommended to the inexperienced poultryman in the following order:—1st, Egg farming; 2d, roaster growing; 3d, fancy poultry; 4th, broiler production.

Egg farming, properly conducted, is profitable in almost any locality. Roaster farming has proved a great success near Boston, but has not been largely introduced into other localities. Fancy poultry is a money-making game for those who are successful in winning prizes at the show, and getting well advertised as breeders. The broiler business, seemingly the most profitable branch, has in practice been a source of loss to many investors. The cause of failure in the broiler business, lies chiefly in the difficulties of artificial incubation, especially in the winter season.

Incubation is to the chicken raiser what the hot-bed is to the tomato raiser. If incubation is a failure, the whole business must fail. For the poultryman with a few dozen, or even several hundred fowls, hatching with hens is to be recommended, unless he keep Leghorns or Minorcas; these varieties not being good brooders. Convenient arrangements for setting hens in large numbers will be a more successful investment than incubators. For duck farms or Leghorn egg farms, or any poultry business on a large scale, artificial incubation is a “necessary evil.”

The Central Hatchery, only now being established here, although in use in Egypt for centuries, promises to solve this difficulty. The advantage of centralizing the hatching is that it admits of better methods than are available on a small scale, and also allows one man to devote his entire energies to this feature. Such hatcheries may be handled either by private individuals, or, as in the case of the creameries, may be co-operative institutions run for the good of the whole community.

A continuous house can be built with small compartments for each flock, and separate runs for summer use, though the colony plan is preferred by some, and has its advantages, among them being the fact that the flocks are more widely separated, so there is less danger of any disease spreading; and if any particular house becomes infected, it can be cleansed without disturbing the whole plant.

The colony plan requires considerable less expense in housing and other equipment than the yarded plan. The expense for food is also decreased, because of the greater number of insects and green food that the hens get from the range.

The following plan of poultry keeping is, perhaps, the simplest known, and for that reason, the most successful. By “successful” I do not necessarily mean the most profitable, but the surest of paying a reasonable profit. The plan is that of using inexpensive colony houses, which are located in a large yard or small field. These houses are built very light; they are floorless, and are moved frequently, either by team or by a pole-pry. By this method the droppings are distributed directly on the soil without the usual laborious work of scraping the dropping-boards.

In the poultry field some green crop is kept growing as much of the year as possible. As a general rule a crop cannot get a start in a poultry range, and so a plan of rotating the chickens in two or more fields, is desirable. No more profitable combination of “small” farming can be found than that of rotating poultry with the leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, cabbage, etc.) which utilize to the greatest advantage the rich, nitrogenous manure. Under this system, the hens are fed grain, chiefly corn, and beef scrap in hoppers, and water is supplied in the simplest way possible, preferably from a running brook. The chief point to be kept in mind is to cut down the number of necessary visits to the poultry houses, thus reducing the labor cost.

The custom of raising chickens on fresh ground every year is of value to the farm, but the one disadvantage has always been the expense of fencing. In a recent issue the Rural New Yorker told of the plan of one wide-awake chicken raiser which can be followed by anybody. His plan is to sow sunflower seed with a drill, at the earliest possible moment in the spot where you wish the fence to be; then drive stakes at intervals along the row and stretch two-foot chicken wire over them. Even the wire will confine the chicks when they are small, and by the time they have grown big enough to get over that, the sunflowers have grown up and made a “chicken-tight” combination. Hens are too stupid to think of flying over such a barrier, yet the poultry raiser can come and go as if there was no barrier.

This is not only a cheap fence, but it affords the necessary shade for the fowls in hot weather. They lie about among the stalks scratching in the cool earth and getting a dirt bath at any time in the day. Then late in the season the sunflower heads are cut down and the pullets do the harvesting of that crop in short order. No other variety of fence can be used for food when its usefulness as a barrier is past. You could easily put up this sort of a fence yourself, and as the sunflower is a very hardy plant, you might even try sowing the seed in the fall, so as to get an early start in fence building in the spring.

You must be willing to give your time and attention if you are to succeed. One man who has had a good deal of experience writes me about the new method of chicken raising as follows:—“No doubt it is a valuable contribution to the subject of intensive cultivation of poultry. It involves, however, the most intensive and persistent labor, to which very few men are willing to subject themselves, and I am one of that class. I have had enough. Still, I need more income, and I am thinking, just a little, of Indian Runner ducks, which demand cheaper buildings and less care than chickens. Yet I cannot raise much enthusiasm on the subject, and I shrink from the constant attention to details which even they require.”

But even if you are not prepared to raise fowls after this fashion, there is no reason why you should not keep a few hens and raise a few chickens for your own family use. If you hatch in incubators, use eggs that are laid the day you put them to hatch, and with good management practically all of them will produce vigorous chickens that can be induced to lay early, if pullets, and can be fed for market, if cockerels.

Eggs are more profitable than chickens, especially if you can produce them out of season, and this depends upon the time of hatching, the feed and care. A flock of 25 fowls will produce eggs and chickens enough to add a tidy sum to the income, if you feed and house them right. And the feeding need not be much of an expense, if you save the table scraps and give corn, cabbage and other green stuffs, buying whatever wheat and oats you can’t raise. In winter, change their drinking water frequently and see that it is slightly warmed. If you cannot provide running water, then you must give them clean water many times a day all the year around.

As a matter of fact, the amount of effort expended is pretty closely related to the profits to be derived. Whether you raise hens, ducks, geese, squabs, or any of the many animals now raised for profit on the home acre, you must study their needs just as you must study plant needs, if you are to succeed. Only by the use of intelligence can you expect to reap profits, and to natural intelligence must be added study. A man could not expect to be a successful teacher of mathematics unless he had studied all the authorities in his special line, and kept himself in touch with all the new theories as they were advanced. So it is with the farmer. If he does not read the papers that deal especially with his calling, he cannot keep in touch with the improvements and discoveries constantly made in his line. He should take in at least two standard agricultural papers. In a community where there is no public library, the farmers might agree among themselves to take one or more different papers each, and then exchange. In this way they could keep in touch with all, at the expense of only one or two.

It will not be worth while for anybody to take up this work with any hope of success, who expects to go at it with “a lick and a promise” idea. It is only by thorough, careful, intelligent and persistent effort that anything worth while can be accomplished. For the person who will undertake the task in that way, there is an opportunity; but he will need to have patience and some money while getting started and learning the business. By all means, start in a small way, and find out a lot of things which only experience can teach you; after that you can gradually increase your plant with comparative safety.