[ CHAPTER XV ]
EXPERIMENT STATION WORK
Our entire scheme of agricultural education and experimentation is new. The poultry work at experiment stations is very new. Ten years will about cover everything worthy of a permanent record in the poultry experiment station files.
Stations Leading in Poultry Work.
Among the earliest stations to begin poultry work in this country were Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine. Rhode Island conducted the first school of poultry culture. The two stations of New York State were also early in the work, and Cornell now has the leading school of poultry culture in this country.
West Virginia has always maintained a considerable poultry plant. Outside of the states east of the Appalachians, the first poultry work to be heard of was that of Prof. Dryden at the Experiment Station of Utah. Prof. Dryden's work was of a demonstrative nature. His early bulletins were forceful and well illustrated, and did much to call attention to poultry work.
In all this early work the great Mississippi Valley, where four-fifths of the nation's poultry is produced, entirely ignored the hen. The writer began his work with poultry at the Kansas Station in 1902, but his chickens were housed in a discarded hog house, and no funds being available, little was accomplished. In the last three or four years these experiment stations are rapidly falling into line and a number of poultry bulletins have recently been issued from these younger schools.
A few of the early landmarks in experiment station work was as follows:
The Utah Station clearly found that hens laid about 65 per cent. as many eggs in the second as in the first year, and that to keep hens for egg production beyond the second year, was unprofitable.