Making Home Profitable

by Kate V. Saint Maur

Male birds need not be bought until about three weeks before the eggs are wanted for incubation. Then, if your choice should have been Wyandottes, Plymouth Rocks or Rhode Island Reds, each flock of seven hens should be headed by a cockerel. Leghorns, Minorcas and Andalusians can run fifteen hens to a flock. The male bird should be as good as you can afford, for by such means you can gradually improve your stock, until it reaches perfection. It is safer to buy the cockerels from breeders far distant from the original home of the hens, to avoid any danger of relationship.

Whenever new birds are bought, segregate them for a few days in some small house and yard, to assure yourself that they are healthy and fit associates for your birds. Catch the birds, one by one, each night, while in quarantine. Hold by the feet, the head down, and saturate the feathers with some good insect powder from an ordinary flour dredger.

The poultry house should be whitewashed about every six weeks in hot weather, and as late and early in the fall and spring as the weather will permit. Scatter dry earth or sand on the platform; clean and renew every day. Once a week paint the corners of nests, roosts and any other fixtures or roughly spliced joints in the building with kerosene oil and crude carbolic acid, mixed in the proportion of one pint of oil to half an ounce of carbolic. Leaves or whatever scratching material may be used on the floor should be raked out once a week in hot weather. All cleanings should be put into a heap under shelter, or into barrels, for poultry droppings are invaluable fertilizer for the vegetable garden.

Dry, cold weather doesn’t hurt the hens at all, but after winter rains or heavy snow they should be confined to the house, and unless the weather is exceptionally inclement, all the windows thrown open between 9 A.M. and 2:30 P.M. Very stormy days we keep them open only while the hens are busy scratching for the noon supply of corn.

It is the industrious, busy hen that produces the most eggs, so the first consideration is to keep the flock busy. We promote exercise by having the small yards at the back of the houses repeatedly dug up during the spring and summer. In the autumn the dry, falling leaves are collected, and used on the floors of the houses during bad weather. Fresh, cold water is kept constantly before them in stone vessels in summer, and in a padded-box arrangement in winter.

Boxes of clean, dry soil are placed in sunny spots in the house, to encourage the birds to take the dust baths in which they delight. Hens, having no teeth with which to chew their food, are dependent on grit to perform the office of mastication after the food has passed into the bird’s gizzard, where a sort of grinding process takes place, which reduces hard corn to a digestible compound. Being near a stone crusher, we buy the fine gravel by the load. Those not so fortunately situated will find a specially prepared mixture at any poultry-supply store, or the small flock can be supplied by smashing broken crockery and glass into pieces about the size of hemp seed. Oyster shell is a very poor substitute for grit, its value being the lime it supplies for the formation of shell.

Fowls are better off kept in yards; in fact, they must be so restrained if the highest egg records are to be reached. In way back times, it was considered a great detriment to yard fowls, but for some years past professional poultry-keepers have yarded their fowls, because they found it was the only way to reach the top notch. Even now the general farmers still adhere to the free range idea, and I am convinced that it is not purely because they think it necessary, but it saves feed and other bother. It has been estimated that a flock of common dunghill hens, such as are seen in the average farm, lay in a year less than a hundred eggs each. The figures are eighty to ninety. Farmers who have become breeders, and who thus give the hen decidedly more consideration, and still adhere to the free range system, have increased this yield to one hundred and fifty and better. Breeders who have followed the strictly up-to-date methods, and have yarded their layers, have obtained an average of one hundred and seventy-five eggs, and some have even reached the two hundred mark.

Please note that I say fowls or hens, and I do not mean this to include growing chicks. The line must be distinctly drawn between the two. The range cannot be too extended for growing stock. What we strive for in growing chicks is frame, on which later we intend to put flesh. This frame can only be built by food, and plenty of it, converted into bone and muscle by exercise. After the chick has made the frame, we can safely yard her and put on the flesh, and thus convert her into a money-earning machine.

The advantages gained by yarding stock are manifold. First of all, by confining stock to a certain space, we are sure they eat the food provided and in the quantity we mean them to have. Feeding layers to produce eggs is becoming every year a more delicate operation. Formula after formula is tried by different breeders, as an experiment, with the hope of increasing the egg yield. If we can force each hen to lay ten a year more, it means a considerable increase of the total of the flock, and a better return in dollars and cents to the breeder. Yarding stock is a means toward this end. The food fed is converted, as we mean it to be, into eggs, and not into muscle. It is decidedly more troublesome to care for stock in this way, and necessitates additional labour and expense, but we are looking for the increase all the time, and are thus continually hoping to be compensated for the extra trouble.

Fowls in yards must be supplied with everything they require, which means, all they would naturally seek if running at large. This includes, besides the grain we feed by formula, green food, meat, a scratching place and dusting spot, and grit and water. Of all these I consider green food the most necessary, and the one thing to be impressed upon the mind, because it is the one thing too often forgotten. Green food of any variety is acceptable. The ideal yarding of fowls is what is known as double yarding—a house in the middle and a yard on each side. These yards can be sown with rye or oats, and alternated so that the fowls will have a constant green run as long as the rye or oats will grow, which is until frost. Failing the double yard system, green food may be supplied by lawn clippings, whole cabbage, clover hay or sprouted oats, fed in a variety of ways. Turning up the ground of the yards with a cultivator or by shallow ploughing, will bring the worms and bugs within reach, or sheep heads cut open and fed raw can be thrown in, and this is an ideal meat food. Ground beef scraps may be mixed in mash—and last, and probably the best, cut green bone.