The Corning Egg Farm Book
CHAPTER I
The Building of the Corning Egg Farm
Having determined, in 1905, to engage in some business connected with the feathered tribe, we decided to try out the squab proposition versus market poultry. After searching over a period of many months, in various parts of the country, with the idea of finding a place where the existing buildings might be utilized for our needs, we finally were obliged to abandon this idea and purchased, early in the year 1906, twelve and a half acres of land, now known as Sunny Slope Farm. This property lies about two miles west of Bound Brook, New Jersey, which town is reached by the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Baltimore & Ohio, the Philadelphia & Reading and the Lehigh Valley Railroads, and the Farm is most accessible, as it is on the trolley line which connects Bound Brook and Somerville.
In the early Spring of 1906 we began our buildings, erecting a house, for raising squabs, which would accommodate five hundred pairs of breeding birds, a hen house of the scratching shed variety, capable of accommodating some two hundred and fifty hens, and a work-shop with living apartments for the resident man.
We also sunk a well one hundred and seventeen feet deep, erecting over it a sixty foot wind-mill tower, which carries an eighteen hundred gallon tank. From this pipes were laid to convenient parts of the property.
Three hundred pairs of Homer pigeons were placed in the house built for that purpose, and we went diligently to work to prove that this was the quick and easy way to wealth which the ingenious writers of squab literature proved so conclusively on paper.
On the chicken side of the experiment we seemed to lean (possibly because of the fact that squabs take one into the slaughter house business) towards one or more of the market breeds, and, to meet the needs of this part of the business, we understood that any of the “Rock” family were best for the purpose.
Started with 60 Buff Rock Eggs
We purchased an incubator with the capacity of sixty eggs, being fearful of attempting the operation of a larger machine, because, like a great many novices, we had the feeling that an incubator was a very dangerous thing, and that anyone without a vast amount of experience should not attempt to handle it. We placed in this diminutive machine sixty Buff Rock eggs, and obtained a very fair hatch. With daily contact our fear of the machine decreased, and we exchanged it for one with a capacity of one hundred and twenty-five eggs, and this, in turn, was exchanged for one holding two hundred and fifty eggs.
