Fig. 26—West Virginia Experiment Station Colony-house.
Plantations of small fruits, such as grapes, blackberries, and raspberries, serve admirably for range and semi-shade for growing chicks, and it is a mistake to imagine that the chicks damage the crops of fruit; if they touch any it will only be the lower (and always inferior) stems that they reach. There are such substantial benefits accruing from the presence of little chicks about the small fruit plantations, or the mature birds about the apple, plum, and peach trees—such as the destruction of hosts of worms and insects and keeping the surface of the ground stirred, that every consideration urges the combination of fruit and poultry growing. At the Vernon Fruit and Poultry Farm, Vernon, Conn., we saw last summer Baldwin apple trees that were six inches through at the butt, yielded an average of a barrel of choice apples each in the fall, and had been set only six years. They began bearing the second year after setting, had borne increasing crops every year, last season averaged to be about six inches through and gave their owner a barrel of apples each. These apple trees were part of an orchard which was occupied by colony poultry houses having fifty layers each, and set sufficient distance apart so that there were about two hundred birds to the acre; the owner told us he had never seen a borer or any evidence of borers about those trees.
Fig. 27—Colony poultry house
at Connecticut Experiment Station.
Fig. 28—Ground plan.
THE CURTAIN-FRONT,
CURTAINED-ROOSTING-CLOSET,
POULTRY HOUSE
Fig. 29—The curtain-front, curtained roosting-closet, poultry house.
Maine Experiment Station.
As stated elsewhere, the tendency in poultry house construction today is to more and more open up the houses to fresh air and sunshine, and the most advanced type of the fresh air poultry house has been developed at the Maine Experiment Station, Orono, Maine. This consists of a house-front about half open, a little more than a fourth of each pen-front being closed by a cloth curtain only, two windows and a door making with the curtain about half of the whole front of each pen.