Page 44

THE SECRET OF MAKING $1,300 A
YEAR FROM 700 HENS
MR. O. D. WELLS of Somerset County,
Me., is making $1,300 a year from
his floc of 700 hens, and has after only
four years' experience had remarkable success
in raising his chickens. This year from a flock
of 1,200 chickens he has lost practically none.
How he has accomplished this is simple.
He has a brooder hous that is 100 feet long
by 12 feet wide. It is divided into three euqal
parts, each having its own yard. These occupy
about an acre. In this house he runs his incubators,
of which he has three. He runs these
three times, starting about February 15th. The
first hatch is put into the west end of the house
and the second into the centre. When the
third lot is hatched he takes the brooders from
the olest chicks and sets them up in the third
section, taking away the incubators entirely.
Here is where Mr. Wells claims that he has had
his greatest success. While the chickens are
hathing he has his yards plowed and seeded to
oats. By the time the chickens come from their
brooders the oats are up, and teh chicks are
turned into the yards and feed upon the green
stuff. This is the salvation of the little chicks.
They begin to stock up and show a growth and
healthy look that is seldom equalled. He
ususally starts the chicks on commercial chick
food. At the end of the first week he adds dry
mash, and after the chickes are three weeks old
the food is gradually shifted to cracked corn and
hard grains. As long as the market keeps up he
continues to kill of the cockerels as broilers.
After that those remaining are put into a special
yard and finished as roasters. The pullets remain
in the brooder house until October.
The breeds which he has found the most satisfactory
and which he now keeps are the Rhode
Island Reds and the Barred and the White Plymouth
Rocks. All the pullets he keeps each
year for layers. Also 250 of the best year-old
hens he puts into pens by themselved in the fall
for breeding purposes. in this way when it is
time to breed, all there is to do is to put in the
cockerels, three being run with each pen of
twenty-five hens and four with the larger pens.
New blood is introduced every third generation
through purchased males.
In September the other hens are all killed off
and sent to a wholesale marketman in Boston
where Mr. Wells always sells all of his poultry
and eggs. He finds this very satisfactory, for
he strives to maintain the high quality of his
products and received in return the highest
prices of the market, though having to ship a
distance of 230 miles. He has too much stuff
to sell to bother with uncertain local markets and
besides gets better prices in teh "Hub." This
killing of the old hens lasts about a month.
Then when the hen house is ready for occupancy,
the new pullets are shifted to their permanent
places in it from the brooder house where the
first half of their lilves has been spent. Mr.
Wells has a hard and fast rule never to move his
hens about more than is absolutely necessary.
An accurate account of what each pen of
hens is doing is kept though no trap nests are
used to determin the layers, as Mr. Wells believes
that a vigorous pullet must lay if given
the proper food to make eggs. From the first
year of his poultry business he has ben able to
tell just what the cost and the profit of running
his business amounted to. He now uses the
same hen house he started with, it being of the
open window-front type with curtained roosting
closets. It is 15 x 263, and is divided into ten
pens 15 x 20 ft. and four pens 12 x 15 ft., with
sixty birds in the larger and twenty-five in the
smaller pens. One hudred-foot yards for each
pen extend ot the north of the house.
By carefully watching the effect of different
feeds he has constantly increased his profit,
though never increasing the number of hens.
He feeds regularly several times a day and
never loafs away from home when feeding time
has come. Dry mash forms the mainstay of
the hens' food. In the morning and at night
they have hard grains, either corn, wheat, or
otas, in deep litter, the amount of grain bieng
determined by the weather, the egg yield, and
the condition of the hens; to get the best results
is a science of itself. About noon, winter and
summer, they are fed some kind of green stuff.
In early spring it is rye, from which, as he sows
it thick, he is able to cut three crops before it
becomes too tough. Later, clover and alfalfa
are used, and last of all mangle beets and other
vegetables. All of this green stuff he raises on
his poultry farm, which is quite remarkable
when you consider that he has only three acres
for house, barn, poultry house and brodder,
and cultivation, and besides raises stuff for a
horse and couw and has a vegatable garden. he
does this by keeping most of the land in cultivation
all the time. He places a good deal of
emphasis on green food to increase profit
One thing in Mr. Well's favor is the kind of
soil on which his farm is situated. It is sandy
loam, perfectly drained. His spring sowing of
oats in teh checken yards sweetens the soil there
yearly. He has never had much trouble with
vermin. His preventative measures are to spary
the roosts regularly with crude petroleum. The
brooder are alos sprayed, and ample opportunities
for dust batsh take care of other
parasites.
John E. Taylor