Adopted White Leghorns
We had also been studying the condition of the egg market, so far as New York and vicinity was concerned, and had found that this market paid a premium for a white shelled egg. This, then, was the determining factor in the selection of the breed of fowls, and after gathering all the information we could regarding birds which laid white eggs, we were satisfied, taking everything into consideration, that for an Egg Farm, the Single Comb White Leghorn, was the only fowl.
In the Spring of 1907 we collected a breeding pen, from different sources, of thirty Single Comb White Leghorn yearling hens, and three strong, vigorous cockerels. We purchased an incubator holding three hundred and ninety eggs, and three out-door brooders, and built a number of small Colony Houses to move the birds into as soon as they were large enough to be transferred from the brooders. The hens chosen for the initial breeding pen of the Farm were most carefully selected, for even then we had in mind the result which we intended to reach, as to the ultimate type of layer on the Farm. We placed the resulting eggs from this breeding pen in the incubator, using a primitive turning machine to keep them in proper condition until the requisite number was acquired to fill the incubator. Our hatch was a very good one, and we succeeded in raising a fair number of the youngsters hatched.
During the Summer we erected what is now known on the Farm as the No. 1 Laying House. This was built one hundred feet long, by twelve feet wide, and on the same twenty foot section construction which has proved to be so successful a plan for poultry houses. The one mistake in this house was its width, and that has now been remedied by widening it to the standard, sixteen feet in width, and sixty feet in length have been added to it.
The youngsters on range grew rapidly. We marketed the cockerels at between eight and ten weeks of age, and they weighed from one and a quarter pounds to a pound and three quarters. These were sold “on the hoof,” as we had decided for the future to do nothing in the slaughter house line, and to this decision we have strictly adhered, shipping alive also all culls and birds of any age showing imperfections, the majority of our stock finding ready market for breeding purposes when we are ready to dispose of it.
As a correct record of the mortality of our hatching, and the number of cockerels marketed, had been kept, we found that we should have in the Colony Houses about two hundred and twenty-five pullets to place in No. 1 House.
In catching up the birds we found that the number figured on was about right. These two hundred and twenty-five birds went into the House, October 31st. They were already laying on the Range.