During the Summer, we had built the No. 2 Laying House, sixteen feet wide by one hundred and sixty feet long, and in this house the first fifteen hundred pullets were installed, the balance going into No. 1 Laying House.
A number of visitors had called at the Farm during the Summer of 1908, and we had listened to the different stories of the ease with which five thousand laying pullets were produced annually, but at the end of this season we had much more respect for the number five thousand than we ever had before, and realized very fully what it meant to produce that number of females each year.
With the placing of these fifteen hundred pullets in this House of one hundred and sixty feet in length by sixteen feet wide, without being divided into separate pens, each hen having the entire run of the House and no more (that is, she did not leave the house for a yard, but stayed right in that space and did her work), we accomplished what, from the standpoint of all authorities on the subject of Poultry, was an impossible thing to do, and have the hen produce anything. And yet each hen had only two and one third square feet of floor space, which included the dropping boards.
The secret of being able to work the hen successfully in such a limited space per bird is in the length of the house. In reality, every bird has one hundred and sixty feet by sixteen feet in which to exercise and roam.
The four hundred and fifty-three pullets which were placed in No. 1 Laying House were given the entire run of this house, of one hundred feet by twelve feet, and yet the Egg Record for the ten months, in which these birds never left either house, is rather in favor of the house containing the fifteen hundred pullets. The average number of eggs per pullet in these houses, from December 1st, 1908, to September 30th, 1909, was 143.25. Many people who had seen the No. 2 House filled with the fifteen hundred pullets could hardly believe what they saw.
The Great Flock System Succeeds
The extreme health and great vigor of the birds was evident to anyone who looked in through the wire doors. Articles were written in numerous papers stating that the thing was impossible, and that, before many months, absolute failure would result. But in spite of all the prophecies the great flock system, in the Corning style House, proved by its great success, that a decided forward step had been made in economical management and housing of poultry.
We had gone ahead handling poultry in just the same way that any business would be handled, plus the scientific study of the anatomy of the hen, and what it was necessary to breed in order to accomplish a great success as a producer of large, white, uniform eggs, with the ability added to that formula, of turning them out in large quantities.
Callers at the Farm brought very forcibly home to us the fact, then quite unappreciated by us, that the methods employed, and the results obtained, were very remarkable from the standpoint of anything done in Poultry Culture up to that time. It was pointed out that in almost every other case it was not known by the poultryman just where he stood at any time of the year, let alone being able to tell where he stood every day of the year. The success of The Corning Egg Farm really has that feature as its foundation stone.
Before the close of the ten months of laying of the 1953 pullets we had received a number of overtures to put our methods and results into a book, and, after a time, such a book was written. The tremendous sale and success of that book is now a matter of history, and the great number of people who were helped to better things in poultry, and the still greater number of novices who were started on the road, were enabled, through this book, to reach a success which, as many of them testify, would have been impossible without it. In eighteen months over one hundred and forty thousand copies of this first book were sold. Hundreds of people came to the Farm to find out for themselves whether or not the statements in the book were true, and these people found everything, down to the smallest detail, just exactly as represented.