The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884: A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and FiresideVarious
Science
The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884: A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside
Various
Agriculture -- United States -- Periodicals; Farm life -- Periodicals; United States -- Rural conditions -- Periodicals
Her farm is only a bit of land, some thirty acres, but for the last five
years she has made from ten to twelve hundred dollars a year from it,
and most of the money came from the ducks. She sells eggs for hatching,
and ducks for breeding and for exhibition, but the main object is ducks
and feathers for market. She thinks ducks are less trouble and quite as
profitable as hens. She keeps twenty-four stock ducks, eight males and
sixteen females, through the winter. The ducks commence laying from the
middle of February to the first of March, and lay from 100 to 125 eggs
each in a season. The first laid eggs are set to get ducks to sell for
breeding stock and for the early summer market. For this purpose the
eggs from the ducks that are two or three years old are used, and when
hatched the ducklings from those eggs are marked by punching a small
round hole in the web of the feet. She thinks, and rightly, too, that
the eggs from the older ducks procure larger and more vigorous birds
than the first eggs from the young ducks.
As soon as the weather gets warm enough to ship without danger of
chilling on the way, she sells eggs for hatching at $3 per dozen, and
finds no difficulty in disposing of as many as she cares to spare at
that price. Her sales of eggs for hatching amount to about $100 yearly.
Besides the eggs used and sold for hatching she generally sends a
twenty-four-dozen case to New York just before Easter. These large,
finely-shaped, pure white eggs sell readily for Easter eggs, and bring
from forty to fifty cents per dozen.
From the eggs set on her own place during the season she raises from ten
to twelve hundred ducks each year. The ducklings are hatched from the
first of April up to about the first of August. Most of the ducklings
are raised by hen mothers, and she keeps some fifty hens for that
purpose. The hens are all pure Buff Cochins, and are kept until they are
two years and a half old. Besides raising two broods of ducks each
season, each hen pays her owner an average profit of seventy-five cents
a year from the sale of eggs for market. When fattened for market at the
end of the second season, these Cochin hens are large and heavy, and the
carcass of the old fowl generally sells for enough to pay for a pullet
to take her place. No chickens are raised on the farm; the pullets are
bought of a neighbor who keeps the Buff Cochins.
She aims to set several hens and the incubator at the same time; when
the eggs hatch the incubator ducklings are divided up among the hens;
one hen will care for twenty ducklings until they are old enough to care
for themselves. The eggs hatch well--those in the incubator quite as
well as those under hens, and when the incubator ducklings are once
mixed up with the others she finds it impossible to distinguish "which
from 'tother."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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