When the range near their coops ceases to afford them good picking, the coops should be moved to a place where the food to be secured by foraging is more abundant.
Large Stocks on General Farms
When farmers in America began to keep larger stocks of fowls, the most common practice nearly everywhere was to increase the general flock until there were far too many fowls on the land that they would usually forage over. Under such conditions fowls on the farm were not profitable. They damaged every crop to which they had access, and made the farm most unsightly in the vicinity of the dwelling house. Then some farmers would reduce the flock and return to the old practice of keeping only a few dozen hens, while others would adopt the city plan of building houses with many compartments and keeping the fowls yarded in small flocks. This plan was usually abandoned within a few years, because, while it worked very well in the winter, when the farmer had time to give the hens extra care, they were not as well off in the summer, when the farmer had to give attention to his field crops first. Such was the usual course of development of farm methods of managing fowls.
Fig. 98. Stone poultry house about two hundred years old, on farm of F. W. C. Almy, Tiverton Four Corners, Rhode Island
Fig. 99. Rhode Island colony poultry house for thirty-five fowls