Fig. 18—A long poultry house on the White Leghorn Poultry Yards,
Waterville, N.Y.
In New York State it has been thought desirable to have warm houses for the Single Comb White Leghorns so largely kept there, and we give illustrations of one of the long poultry houses of the White Leghorn Poultry Yards, Waterville, N.Y. This house is two hundred and forty feet long by sixteen feet wide, divided into pens twelve feet square and a walk three and a half feet wide along the north side. It has a floor of seven-eighths inch matched boards throughout. The outside walls are first boarded, then covered with sheathing and clapboarded. The inside of the building is boarded up with matched boards on the inside of the studs, making a four-inch dead air space between the walls. The ceilings are made of matched boards laid at the level of the plates. In this ceiling, over the centre of each pen, is a small trap door, two feet square, opening up into the attic space above, which is designed to give diffusive ventilation.
Three ventilating cupolas cap the roof, and there are full-sized windows in each gable end. This attic space is storage room for straw, which is drawn upon from time to time, to furnish scratching material for the pen floors and opening the trap-door into the ceiling, it gives excellent ventilation without drafts. A door opens from the alleyway into each pen, and doors in the partition between the pens permit passing through from pen to pen. The roost platforms with nest boxes beneath are against the partition between the walk and pens and the plan of partitions between pens as shown in Fig. 19. The roof is covered with Paroid Roofing. A fault here is the wire netting in these partitions; a better plan would be matched-board partitions throughout.
The twelve feet square pens have one hundred and forty-four square feet of floor space each, giving ample room for twenty-five head of layers, and while a long house of this description is somewhat expensive to build, it has many advantages, which, on a large and permanent poultry plant, will more than make up for the first cost in the ease and economy of feeding, etc., and the warmth of the house and the simplicity of the ventilation. This style of poultry house has been in use on the White Leghorn farm for several years, and it has been found to be both practical and economical; it combines very completely the laying and the breeding house. On this plant they practise the alternate system of males in the pens, a small coop for the extra male being set against the partition in one corner of the pen, four feet up from the floor. One male bird is cooped up while the other runs with the hens and they are exchanged every two or three days, the change being effected at night, on occasion of the shutting-up visit.
Fig. 19—Interior, showing partitions between pens.
Fig. 20—Interior of pens, showing roosts.
MR. DUSTON’S POULTRY HOUSES
