Board floor colony houses are used as a protection against rats and this danger necessitates the protection of the opening by netting and the closing of the doors at night.

Cockerels must be gotten out of the flocks and sold at an early age.  Those that are to be kept for sale or use as breeding birds should be early separated from the pullets.  Coops for growing chickens, especially Leghorns, cannot be put among trees, as the birds will learn to roost in the trees, causing no end of trouble to get them broken of the habit.

All pullets save a few culls should be saved for laying.  They are to be kept two years.  They should lay sixty-five to seventy per cent as many eggs the second year as the first.  They are sold the third summer to make room for the growing stock.

Twenty-five Acre Poultry Farms.

This section will be devoted to a general discussion of the type of poultry farms best suited to Section 4 and the southerly portions of Section 7 as discussed in the previous chapter.

We will discuss this type of farm with this assumption:  That they are to be developed in large numbers by co-operative or corporate effort.  This does not infer that they cannot be developed by individual effort, and nine-tenths of the operations will remain the same in the latter case.

Suppose a large tract of land adjacent to railroad facilities has been found.  The land in the original survey should be divided into long, relatively narrow strips, lying at right angles to the slope of the land.  The farmstead should occupy the highest end of the strip.  For a twenty-five acre or one-man poultry farm these strips should be about forty rods in width.  The object of this survey is to permit the water being run by gravity to the entire farm.

The first thing is the farmstead, including such orchard and garden as are desired.  This stretches across the entire front end of the place.  The remainder of the strip is fenced in with chicken fence.  The farm is also divided into two narrow fields by a fence down the center of the strip.  This fence, at frequent intervals, has removable panels.

The year’s season we will begin late in the fall.  All layers are in field No. 1 pasturing on rape, top turnips or other fall crops.  In lot No. 2 is growing wheat or rye.  As the green feed gets short in the first lot the hens are let into lot No. 2.  Sometime in March the houses that have been brought up close to the gaps are drawn through into the wheat field.  The feed hoppers are also gradually moved and the hens find themselves confined in lot No. 2 without any serious disturbance.

Lot No. 1 is broken up as soon as weather permits and planted in oats, corn, Kaffir corn and perhaps a few sunflowers.  The oats form a little strip near the coops and watering places and the Kaffir corn is on the far side.  As soon as corn planting is over the farmer begins to receive his chickens from the hatchery.  The brooders are now placed in the corn field.  The object of the corn is not green food but for a shade and a grain crop.