Practical Farm Buildings: Plans and Suggestions

by Andrew Frederick Hunter

Fig. 8—Ground Plan.

An excellent plan of colony-house is given in Figs. 14 and 15, and comes from the Connecticut Experiment Station; this combines the advantages of the curtained-front scratching-shed with that of the small colony-house. This house is sixteen feet long by six feet wide, is six feet high in front and four feet high at the rear; the roosting apartment being 7 × 6 feet and the scratching-shed 9 × 6 feet in size. A muslin curtain 4 × 8 feet, tacked to a light frame which is hinged to the top of open space, closes the front on cold nights and is kept closed in stormy weather.

On page 17 we show a type of colony-house which is well adapted for a portable brooder house, an “in-door” brooder being placed in each end and fifty to seventy-five chicks being put in each brooder. When the chicks are large enough to do without artificial warmth the brooders are removed, the chicks being left till such time as it is well to separate the sexes, when the cockerels can be removed and the pullets left to grow to laying maturity. On page 42 we show an illustration of thirty of this pattern of colony brooder house in use on the “Gowell Poultry Farm,” Orono, Maine; a few over four thousand chickens were put into these thirty portable houses in the spring of 1905, nineteen hundred and eighty-five cockerels were sold off as broilers, some sixty more raised for breeding males, and a few over two thousand mature pullets taken from them in October and moved into the 400 feet long poultry house which had been erected during the summer. When the pullets were occupying them, in midsummer, they were turned about to face north and lifted up to about a foot and a half height above the ground by stones about a foot in height being put under the ends of the runners; this gave the pullets the much-needed shade of both the inside and underneath the house, a simple device, but decidedly helpful.

In Fig. 11 we show a type of colony-house such as used on the large colony poultry farms about Tiverton and Little Compton, R. I. These are usually about ten by sixteen feet in size, six feet high to the eaves when built with double-pitch roof, seven feet high in front and five feet at back when shed roof. These houses are very simple in plan and construction, there being three roost-poles about three feet above the ground at the back, five or six nest boxes, food trough, water dish and hopper for shells and grit. The houses hold about forty fowls, are placed about a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet apart in locations convenient to drive to with the feed and water-wagon, and on some of the large farms as many as fifty to a hundred of these colony-houses may be seen. The capital needed to equip a colony farm of this kind is very much less than where long houses and yards are erected; the labor charge of caring for the flocks is very much greater, however, so that what is saved in capital is expended in labor.

Fig. 9—A lean-to poultry house.

Fig. 10—Implement house with scratching-shed attached.

Poultry farmers in America have generally preferred the continuous-house plan of keeping fowls, and the resulting poisoned ground of the yards has no doubt been the cause of many a failure in the poultry business. An eminent English lecturer is authority for the statement that the portable-house plan has been the saving of the poultry business in England, and bringing the small (portable) houses together near the other small buildings in winter, then moving them to convenient locations out in the fields in the spring, has solved the difficulty of extensive poultry farming over there. It would be well to carefully consider these points while taking up the continuous-house plans which we give in following pages.

An objection to the scattered “colony-house” plan, as seen on the large poultry farms in Tiverton and Little Compton, R. I., has been the great labor of feeding two or three times a day—one of the feeds being a cooked mash. By adopting the modern method of feeding the food dry and keeping a supply of food constantly before the fowls a considerable saving in labor is effected, and it is practicable to successfully keep a large number with but one visit a day to the several flocks; this would be an afternoon visit, for rinsing and refilling the water fountains and collecting the eggs. By having the food-hoppers sufficiently capacious to hold a supply of food for a week but one visit a week would be made for filling them.