At the rear of each pen, and elevated three feet above the pen-floor, is a curtained-front “roosting closet,” as it is called; this roosting closet is the “bed-room” and the whole pen the “living-room,” in this type of house.
Fig. 30—Cross-section.
It seems almost like cruelty to animals to put hens in such houses, where they have but the two cloth curtains between them and all outdoors in the very cold winters they have up in central Maine; the Maine Station is very nearly up to forty-five north latitude, about the same as Ottawa, Ontario, St. Paul, Minn., and Portland, Oregon. One of the Station bulletins, however, says: “These curtain-front houses have all proved eminently satisfactory. Not a case of cold or snuffles has developed from sleeping in the warm elevated closets with the cloth fronts, and then going down into the cold room, onto the dry straw, and spending the day in the open air. The egg-yield per bird has been as good in these houses as in the warmed one.” In a letter written by Prof. Gowell, just after an extremely cold period, he says: “This is the ninth day of weather all the way from zero to twenty-five degrees below, still the fifty pullets in the ten by twenty-five feet curtained front house with its curtained-front roosting-room have fallen off but little in their egg-yield, and both the house and scratching material on the floor are perfectly dry. There is no white frost on the walls and there will be no dampness when the weather moderates and a thaw comes.” There could hardly be a stronger indorsement of fresh, pure air in a poultry house and good ventilation without draughts. If such good results can be attained in cold Maine they can be attained anywhere in the United States and southern Canada.
Fig. 31—Maine Station Colony Brooder House.
The Maine Experiment Station has now three of these curtain-front houses, of which one is one hundred and forty feet long by twelve feet wide, divided into pens twenty by twelve feet in size, in each pen being housed fifty birds; the other is one hundred and twenty by sixteen feet, divided into pens thirty by sixteen feet, and one hundred hens are kept in each. On Prof. Gowell’s farm, two miles distant from the Station, he erected last year a house of this type four hundred feet long by twenty feet wide, divided into pens twenty by twenty feet each, and a hundred birds are kept in each pen; in the thirty by sixteen feet pens there is a floor space of four and eight-tenths feet per bird; in the twenty by twenty feet pens the floor space is four feet per bird. It is of interest to note that the one hundred birds, Barred Plymouth Rocks, penned on this four hundred square feet of floor space, do not go outdoors from the time they are put in the house in October till the ground of the yards is well dried off in spring, say about May first; this suggests the practicability of housing laying-stock in suitable convenient buildings in winter, pains being taken that ample sunshine and fresh air (through curtains) be supplied, and in the spring the birds be moved out to portable colony houses scattered about the orchard, or a wood-lot, or other convenient place, where they would be pushed for a liberal egg-yield through the summer and sold off to market before molting time in the fall. This plan supposes the rearing of another generation of pullets for layers during the summer, and these pullets go into the winter-laying-pens in October, to be removed to the colony-houses in May, to be in turn, sold off to market in September. This plan of an annual rotation of laying-stock will undoubtedly give the best financial returns from egg-farming, and as by the adoption of the dry-feeding method of handling the fowls the labor is reduced to the minimum, the results, with intelligent management of the business should be quite satisfactory; the profits will be liberal for amount of capital invested and labor engaged.
In Fig. 29 we give a single pen of the one hundred and twenty feet long house, with a door opening into each pen from the board-walk along the front. Each pen has two windows, which light the interior when the weather is stormy and it is necessary to keep the curtain closed; the curtain is open every day when the weather is fair. There are banks of nest boxes at each end of pens, and coops for breaking up broody birds above the nest boxes. The twelve by four feet curtain in the pen-front is hinged at top so it may be swung up against the roof and hooked up there; the roosting closet is up three feet from the floor, the platform is three feet wide, and the curtain which closes the front is the whole length of the pen, and also swings up against the roof, where hooks secure it up out of the way. The whole floor of the pen is open for exercise, and is an enclosed out-of-doors pen all the time.
THE CONTINUOUS CURTAINED-FRONT
SCRATCHING-SHED POULTRY HOUSE
The tendency in poultry house construction in recent years has been to more and more open up the house to fresh air and sunshine, and this opening up of the houses, and getting more and more fresh air and sunshine into them, has been a decided step in advance in poultry work. There are many modifications and adaptations of the scratching-shed plan of house, perhaps the best known of them being the “scratching-pen” plan, and the enclosed-roosting-closet plan, the latter being the one evolved at the Maine Experiment Station and illustrated on page 16. In this enclosed-roosting-closet house we see the entire floor of the pen a curtained-front scratching pen and the roosting apartment lifted up and enclosed by another curtain-front; in the one we have the shed one department and the roosting-laying department another (one a “living-room” and the other the “bed-room”), with wide range of adaptability in the way of opening up the roosting-laying room; in the other the enclosed roosting-closet, or “bed-room,” and scratching-shed, or “living-room,” are in the one apartment. Certain it is the curtained-front scratching-shed type of house that has been growing very rapidly in favor with practical poultrymen, and probably combines more advantages with fewer disadvantages than any other one style of poultry house.