The Hot Water System for heating the air supplying the Hovers has also been installed, and the Brooder House now has a capacity of some 12,000 youngsters, before it is necessary to move any of them to the Range.
The Breeder House has again been enlarged, and, with the addition, a year hence, of another Breeding House, which is planned to be 180 feet long by 16 feet wide, and a larger house for the breeding of unrelated cockerels, The Corning Egg Farm will have reached the limit planned for since the inception of the Farm. We shall then have a capacity of 4500 sterile pullets, 3500 yearling hens for breeding purposes, and housing for 1200 cockerels.
Why Great Farms Fail
One reads of Poultry Farms carrying anywhere from twenty to forty thousand layers. Experience has taught us that the plant that gets beyond the size where those financially interested can supervise and know the condition of the Farm from one end to another daily, falls down of its own weight, as it is impossible to find men, unless financially interested, who will look after the endless details, which spell success or ruin on a large poultry plant.
The planning and designing of all buildings on The Corning Egg Farm was done by ourselves, and all the construction has been done under our personal supervision. In the first two years we did not contract even the labor, employing simply “handy men” who worked with us under our instructions. Latterly, with the large amount of routine and office work pressing upon us, we found it to be wise economy to contract the labor, ourselves supplying the material and supervising the work.
The buildings, with the arrangement of all equipment, are built in accordance with ideas thought and worked out by ourselves, on lines which seemed to us common sense, and economical in time and money for the handling of Poultry.
Until within the last two years we had never seen another poultry farm, and those we have seen have only strengthened our conviction that no serious error has been made in laying out The Corning Egg Farm Plant.
CHAPTER II
Egg Farming the Most Profitable Branch of Poultry Keeping
The profits are surer and larger. The reason this is not more widely known is because, in the past, few people have been able to resist the temptation of attempting to cover a number of the different branches of poultry culture. They have tried to get into the “fancy,” and have dreamed of taking a blue ribbon at Madison Square Garden, or at some other large Show. Then the broiler branch has engrossed their attention, and from that they have gone on to soft roasters, and the other phases of the slaughter house side of poultry for market purposes, and they have endeavored to cover all the different branches from which money is made in poultry, while entirely overlooking the fact that this is an age of specialization, and that the person who would succeed in any business must make up his mind to follow one branch of it, and bring that branch up to the highest efficiency.