Concrete Floors Mean Dampness
An added menace in this double style of construction is the concrete floor generally used. It is almost impossible, with the greatest care and forethought, to produce a piece of concrete which does not constantly take up and give off moisture, and one thing to be absolutely avoided in poultry houses, little or big, is dampness.
The dollars saved in the construction of double houses are usually dollars which would have been made ten times over by the expenditure necessary to build a proper house.
The chick yards on The Corning Egg Farm are sloping, and are twenty feet long, and correspond in width with the hover runs inside the house, which vary from three to four feet in width. The diameter of the hover varies with the size of the run, from 26 to 30 inches. The sloping runs of the Brooder yards are covered with Anthracite Coal ashes, which have been found to entirely eliminate the much talked of danger of contamination of soil, the surface being constantly renewed as the ashes are consumed by the chicks.
Each hover is numbered, and directly back, on the north wall of the Brooder House, is a corresponding number, and a nail, on which is hung the record card. When the chicks are carried up in baskets from the Incubator Cellar, they are carefully examined, all weaklings being excluded, and counted into the hover compartments. Careful selection and the “survival of the fittest” begin at this point with the stock on The Corning Egg Farm.
Before speaking of the number of chicks carried in the hover compartments, it must be understood that running along the north wall of the Brooder House is a coil of hot water pipes, capable of maintaining a temperature of 85 degrees, three feet from the floor, and in zero weather.