The Dollar Hen

by Milo Hastings

The Feeding System.

Oyster shells, beef scraps, corn, and one other kind of grain, together with an abundance of pasturage or green feed, is the sum and substance of feeding hens on the Dollar Hen Farm.

The dry feeds are placed in hoppers. They are built to protect the feeds from the weather. The neck must be sufficiently large to prevent clogging, and the hopper so protected by slats in front that the hen cannot toss the feed out by a side jerk of her head. These hoppers may be built any size desired. The grain compartments should, of course, be made larger than the others. Weekly filling is good, but where a team is not owned, it would be better to have the hoppers larger so that feed purchased, say, once a month, could be delivered directly into the hoppers.

Water Systems.

The best water system is a spring-fed brook.

The man proposing to establish an individual poultry plant, and who after reading this book goes and buys a tract of land where an artificial water system is necessary, would catch Mississippi drift-wood on shares. But there are plenty of such people in the world. A man once stood all day on London Bridge hawking gold sovereigns at a shilling a-piece and did not make a sale.

Next to natural streams are the made streams. This is the logical watering method of the community of poultry farmers. These artificial streams are to be made by conducting the water of natural streams back of the land to be watered, as in irrigation. It is the problem of irrigation over again. Indeed, where trucking is combined with poultry-growing, fowl watering should be combined with irrigation.

It may be necessary to dam the stream to get head, sufficient supply or both. In sandy soils, ditches leak, and board flumes must be substituted. The larger ones are made of the boards at right angles and tapered so that one end of one trough rests in the upper end of the next lower section. The smaller, or lateral troughs may be made V-shaped.

The cost of the smaller sized flume is three cents a foot. Iron pipe costs twelve cents a foot.

The greater the slope of the ground the smaller may be the troughs, but on ground where the slopes are great, more expense will be necessary in stilting the flumes to maintain the level, and the harder it will be to find a large section that can be brought under the ditch.