Our Domestic Birds: Elementary Lessons in Aviculture

by John H. Robinson

Intensive Poultry Farms

Fig. 108. Colony houses in foreground; sheds for ducks beyond. (Photograph from Bureau of Animal Industry, United States Department of Agriculture)

Reasons for concentration. In the early days of the poultry fancy in this country the tendency was for each fancier to keep as many different varieties as he could find room for or could afford to buy. Most of these fanciers were city people who thought that, as they kept their fowls in small flocks anyway, they might just as well have as many different kinds of poultry as they had separate compartments in their poultry yards. When rich men with large estates became interested in fancy poultry, they usually built large houses containing many small pens, each with its small yard, and bought a few of each known variety. By far the greater part of the choicest poultry was kept in small inclosures, and the flocks that laid remarkably well were usually city flocks that were given good care. This seemed to a great many people to prove that fowls did not need the room and the freedom which for ages they had enjoyed on farms, and that the limit of the possible extension of the city method of keeping fowls in small, bare yards depended in any case upon the business capacity of the poultry keeper.

Concentration not profitable. Very few people who have not had experience in growing large numbers of poultry under both good and bad conditions can be made to understand how futile industry and business methods are when many other things which affect results are unfavorable. Even when the obstacles to the application of intensive methods on a large scale are pointed out to them, most novices imagine that the difficulties are exaggerated for the purpose of discouraging them. They think that the successful poultry keeper wishes to discourage competition, and that the person who has failed does not want to see any one else succeed, and so warns others to let such projects alone. Those who have been very successful in their first efforts in a small way seldom lack perfect confidence in their ability to make good on any scale if once they are in a position to devote themselves entirely to this work.

Fig. 109. Commercial laying house at New Jersey Experiment Station. (Photograph from the station)

For some seventy or eighty years, but more especially for the last thirty or forty years, the most conspicuous phase of the poultry industry in America has been the widespread and continuous movement to develop large plants of this character. There has been no time, for a quarter of a century, when poultry plants of this kind, which to the uninitiated appeared to be highly profitable, have not been numerous. The owners of many of these plants have claimed that they were making very large profits, and their claims have led others to engage in the business, following in every detail the methods in use on some large plant which they suppose is very successful. So, while well-informed poultry keepers know that these methods are not practical on a large scale, except in a few limited lines of production, there is in the business a constant succession of newcomers who try to operate egg farms and breeding farms and combinations of various lines by methods that are not suited to their purpose.

Fig. 110. Interior of a compartment in commercial poultry house, United States Government farm, Beltsville, Maryland. (Photograph from Bureau of Animal Industry)

Common type of intensive poultry farm. The ordinary special poultry farm is a run-down farm upon which have been erected the buildings necessary for the accommodation of from four or five hundred to two or three thousand fowls kept in comparatively small yards. The buildings are nearly always neat and substantial, the fences strong and durable. The arrangement of the plant is orderly, and, when well stocked with fowls and kept clean, it presents a most attractive appearance. The houses and yards for adult stock, the incubator cellar and the brooder houses, the barns and sheds, and the dwelling of the owner or manager occupy but a very small part of the farm—usually from one to three acres. The young chickens are grown year after year on the nearest land not occupied by the permanent buildings and yards. In most cases the land is so heavily stocked with them that they secure almost nothing by foraging.

The routine of work on such a farm is very exacting. The fowls can do so little for themselves and require so much extra care that the poultry keeper knows from the start that he cannot make his business pay unless he gets a very high production. So all his efforts are devoted to this end. He uses labor-saving appliances, carefully systematizes his work, and by great effort often succeeds in making a fair profit for a few years. It is at this stage of his progress that the poultry keeper of this class does the boasting which misleads others. Then things begin to go wrong with his stock. His eggs do not hatch well, because his chickens, while nominally on free range on a farm, have really been no better off than chickens reared under ordinary conditions in town. His chickens do not thrive, because they are weak and the land is tainted. He himself is worn out with long hours of work and no holidays, and if he does not realize his mistake and close out the business in time, it is only a question of continuing until his income and credit combined no longer suffice to keep the business going.

This in brief has been the history of all special poultry farms where intensive methods were used, except the duck farms and the several classes to be described farther on in this chapter. By no means all succeed to even the extent described, because a great many people who go into the business have so little capital that they have to give up the business before they have been able to make it show a profit. When the owners have capital, plants are sometimes operated for years at a loss, but it is very rare indeed that a poultry farm of this kind (except in the classes to be described later) is continued for more than seven or eight years, and few of them last five years. Those who wish to make a poultry business permanent must adopt other methods.