At Little Compton, R. I., is a very similar parallel of the South
Shore district in the shape of egg farms. Here we find within a
radius of two miles about one hundred thousand Rhode Island Red hens
owned in flocks of two thousand or less. The methods used throughout
the community are all alike and are simple in the extreme. There are
no incubators, no brooders, no poultry houses, no long houses, no
dropping boards to be scraped every morning, nothing in fact, but
board-walled, board-roofed, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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