colony houses, scattered over the grass fields and similar though smaller fields covered with coops for hens and chicks.  Feeding is equally simple; a mash of meat, vegetables and ground grain mixed once a day and hauled around in a one-horse cart and hoppers of whole corn exposed in the houses.  The houses are cleaned twice a year.  Little Compton is, indeed, a community where all the rules of the poultry books are regularly violated, and yet a larger number of successful egg farms can be seen from the church spire at Little Compton Corners than most poultry writers have ever seen or read about.  Strange it is, as Josh Billings puts it, that “some folks know things that ain’t so.”

An illustration published in a recent issue of the World’s Work tells a remarkable story.  A pile of egg shells as big as a straw stack certainly indicates “something doing” in the chicken business, and it is a very proud monument to Mr. Byce who, some twenty odd years ago, established an incubator factory at the town of Petaluma.  Petaluma is in Sonoma County, California, forty miles north of San Francisco.  In the census year of 1899, Sonoma County produced more eggs than any other county in the United States.  To-day there are in the Petaluma region close to one million hens.

Like the Little Compton district, Petaluma is a one-breed community, White Leghorns being the breed used.  The individual flocks range larger than at Little Compton, chiefly because the milder climate, smaller breed, and establishment of the central hatchery enables one man to take care of more birds.

When I asked Mr. Byce for a list of the people in his neighborhood keeping over one thousand hens, he replied by sending me a list of twenty-two men who keep from 8,000 down to 2,500 each, and said that to give those keeping from one to two thousand, would practically be to take a census of the county.  The methods of housing and feeding used are simple and inexpensive like those at Little Compton.

The chief reason why Petaluma shows a more advanced development in the poultry community than the eastern poultry growing localities, is to be found in the climatic advantages which favor incubation (see Chapter on Incubation) and the consequent development of the central hatchery.  Outside of this, the location is not especially favorable.  The temperature is milder in the winter than in the East, but the Petaluma winter is one of continual rain which develops roup to a greater extent than we have it in the East.  The prices received for high grade eggs in San Francisco is in the winter about equal to the top prices in New York.  In the spring and summer New York will give more for fancy goods.  The cost of corn on the Pacific Coast is about 40 cents a hundred more than on the Atlantic Coast.  Wheat, however, is cheaper than in the East, but not cheap enough to substitute for the more staple grain.

The eggs from the Petaluma region are at present marketed largely through a co-operative marketing association.