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CHICKEN FARMING IN A NUTSHELL

By

CHARLES DILLON

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HIS is the by twenty-four feet, in the rear of the house. The yard was subdivided into three pens of ten hens and one cock each, the space allowed each family being forty by eight feet. At the north end of these yards, facing south, were the coops built with every regard to economy. Any man handy with tools could duplicate them with a few boards, nails, tar paper and muslin. The whole cost was less than thirty dollars, and they were far better at that than was required.

story of a girl
who made
money from
hens. It is
not an adver-
tising plot,
although the
girl's father
is in the
poultry busi-
ness, but just
the facts
showing

what she did, how she did it, and the figures to prove the result. Not every girl can do so well but the example is worth trying to emulate and ought to encourage some who have not been so successful.

In September last Miss Grace Kellerstrasse of Kansas City chose thirty prizewinning hens from her father's flocks and put them in a wire netted yard forty

June twentieth was then fixed as the limit of the test. The chickens were fed three times a day on table scraps only, with occasionally a little hot meal mash in winter. In cold weather they had warm water morning and night and precautions were taken to see that this water never froze over. This was regarded as an important point. The bottoms of the coops were kept filled with clean straw or hay, a pretext for much exercise on cold or stormy days.

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A FINE BROOD THAT KEEP CLEAN AND HEALTHY WITH SUNSHINE AND GRAVEL.

Miss Kellerstrass's principal idea was to promote the laying of fertile eggs in cold weather and this was accomplished by means of the table scraps which contained bits of meat, and the warmth of the coops. In the summer chickens get bugs and other insects which are a stimulus to egg production, but in the winter when this supply is cut off the meat, raw or cooked, is the best possible substitute.

Now for the figures: In the test term Miss Kellerstrass's hens-thirty in number-laid 4,033 eggs, or about 140 eggs to the bird. Of these 1,024 were sold in settings. In addition, 418 chickens were hatched from some remaining eggs and sold. There were others but they were used on the farm and were not inIcluded in the record. Miss Kellerstrass received a fancy price for her settingsthirty dollars, or about two dollars an egg, with a total income from this source of $2,048. The 418 chickens hatched under the hens and sold brought an average of five dollars apiece as pullets and cockerels. They were, of course, sold to fanciers. This netted Miss Kellerstrass another $2,090. The total income was, therefore, $4,138. From this sum the girl had to deduct roughly $518 for coops, yards, grain feed, advertising, shipping charges, etc., leaving a profit of $3,600 from thirty hens in ten months.

But, says the amateur-and Miss Kellerstrass is an amateur, too-few could do so well. Very good. Consider the eggs in another way. If produced by ordinary chickens in the fall, winter and spring the 4,033 eggs would have brought an average market price of thirty cents a dozen. At that figure the 3254 dozens would have brought $100.572. Suppose the producer had sold only onehalf his eggs, or fifty dollars' worth, and had raised 500 chickens from the remaining two thousand eggs. Even the greenest chicken man ought to rear that many to marketable age. If sold at only thirty cents each-and you can't get them that cheaply these chickens would have netted $150, making a total profit of $200 from chickens and eggs. And he would still have his original thirty hens and the surplus stock reserved from the hatchings of late eggs. Also he would have his coops and other fixings. Count

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ing $50 off from the total receipts for feed and deterioration the earning capacity of a hen would still remain at about $5 for ten months.

Almost everyone who owns a home with a back yard has the chicken fever at one time or another, or his wife or children have it. Many and many a family has tried it only to fail, but in every instance the failure has been proved to have been the inevitable result of no system or of carelessness, and either will kill pretty nearly any business adventure. To these two drawbacks should be added ignorance. Two kinds of persons fail in the chicken business: The man who buys a few chickens at the corner grocery or gets a setting of ordinary eggs from some nondescript brood in the neighborhood; and the city man with a little money and a suburban place. This last named man usually goes into the chicken business on a grand scale the first year, builds an expensive plant from designs taken from someone's manual, buys many expensive birds and high-priced eggs and at the end of the season has nothing except experience. He failed because he knew nothing about chickens. He would fail as quickly in Wall Street if he knew as little about stocks or bonds.

Another thing: The average amateur doesn't know that fresh store eggs are

A COMMON SENSE. SANITARY, AND CHEAP CHICKEN HOUSE.

seldom good for hatching purposes. People in the business of egg producing for market do not keep roosters; the chanticler isn't needed in that hennery; just as many eggs are laid without his presence and they are better eggs-for market purposes.

It will pay, too, to remember that people do not send hens to market nowadays that are any good as layers; so don't buy such poultry expecting to start a chicken ranch. If you feel that life will be a blank unless you have hens and raise chicks and good eggs and get into the game generally put down these fundamental rules:

Clean out the old shed or barn and make it vermin-proof with tin, stone or

cement.

Fence the yard with chicken netting.

It won't cost much to make the yard tight and it will save scenes with the neighbors.

Be certain you know the source of the eggs you buy. Don't buy cheap eggs; you'll regret it. Any good setting will cost from five dollars up to twenty or thirty dollars-usually the five dollar kind are good enough; buy a good brood hen or a pen of the best chickens you can afford.

Feed your chickens three times a day, a well-ordered ration and change it from time to time. Keep clean, fresh water always at hand. Be sure the food is clean. Keep the yard dry and drained. Dampness causes ninety-nine per cent of all chicken maladies.

Give your chickens a chance to dust for mites and lice. Mix in a box about one-half its capacity of road dust and six ounces of powdered sulphur and six ounces of naphthaline. If your chickens are white substitute flour for road dust. Keep this box where it will be dry and where the chickens can always use it.

Give the chickens plenty of air and exercise. Never shut them up in a tight barn. Cut windows and cover them with netting. Keep the chicks warm and away from dampness. Make all chickens scratch for their food.

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ELECTRIC AUTO AS

WIRELESS STATION

By CHARLES GLEASON

N interesting experiment in wireless telegraphy was tried recently in Los Angeles when an electric automobile was used to

supply power for flashing mes

sages from a portable wireless station. The little car was run up the steep grade of Lookout Mountain in the outskirts of the city, and a thirty-foot steel mast was speedily erected and rigged with the necessary guys and wires. Then the operator took his place at the keyboard and sent out a call which brought responses from amateur stations in various parts of the city and from Point Loma station more than one hundred miles away.. These answers were disregarded, however, as operator Ryan was trying for the United Wireless station in the center of the city, which answered within a short time. Then the following message directed to Mayor Alexander of Los Angeles was flashed: "Have pleasure of sending you the first message ever transmitted by portable wireless station using electric automobile via United Wireless from Lookout Mountain."

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THE ANSWER RECEIVED.

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M

DREADED PEACH ROT

By

R. A. SANBORN

R. J. H. HALE of Georgia and Connecticut, the greatest grower of peaches in the world, commanding over 1,000 acres of orchard, paid his respects to the brown-rot in the following terms: "The brownrot is so great a factor for evil in the raising of peaches for the market that in a few years more it would have accomplished the complete failure of my orchard plant in the state of Georgia. We can master or control every other enemy of the peach by up-to-date methods and precautions but until now we have had no weapon that would touch the brown-rot fungus." And then he continued to say that, "The use of the self-boiled lime-sulphur spray, as a foliage treatment for the peach-tree, recently discovered by Mr. W. M. Scott of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, alone would swing the future status of my fortune from failure to success."

In the spring of 1909 Mr. Hale offered the orchard of the Hale Georgia Orchard Co. at Fort Valley, Ga., as a demonstration and proving ground of this spray

mixture of the usefulness of which Mr. Scott was then pretty well convinced. Experiments on small plats had been made in 1907 and 1908. While the great plant of the Hale company had had the best of care and was otherwise in good condition, it had in recent years become so infected with brown-rot that in 1908 the crop was largely lost.

Two other enemies of the peach were allied with the rot to encompass the ruin of the orchard, namely, the scab and the plum curculio. The former is also a fungus but of not so malignant a type as the brown-rot. It serves as an accomplice to the latter by cracking and spotting the fruit thus giving the deadlier fungus an easy entrance. The curculio beetle damages the peach by puncturing the fruit for the purpose of laying its eggs within the skin. It is a troublesome creature but its rate of speed as a worker of destruction is to that of the brownrot as a slow-match to a prairie fire. Its worst crime is in making the punctures that give the rot free entree.

Mr. Scott and his chief assistant, Mr. Willard Ayres, conducted the spraying

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