Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
It is then divided into three fields and provided with three sets of colony houses. Coops are entirely dispensed with, and cheap indoor brooders are used in the permanent houses. The pullets stay in these same houses in the same field until the moulting season of the third year, or until they are two and a half years old.
The cost should be about twenty-five cents per hen. At least twice as many brooders as colony coops will be needed as there are hen houses, but of the lamps and hovers not over twenty-five will be required, as the chicks soon outgrow the need of this aid. The total should therefore be $3750 rather than $3775. This is a good, liberal capitalization. The business can be started with much less.
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. The chicks are summered in the corn field and the hens in the wheat or rye. Whether the latter will head up will depend upon the number of the flock.
"Those home-made brooders of ours keep the chicks quite as warm, and never peck the little fellows, or step upon them, as the old hen often does." "That's right, I allow," admitted Henry, grinning broadly. "And some hens will traipse chicks through the grass and weeds as far as turkeys. No, sir! Send the hens back to business, and let the chicks shift for themselves. They'll do better."
Everywhere lay fallen bodies, in the streets and corridors, in the dim places before the brooders and honey-cupboards. Sad was the work in the hive on that lovely morning of summer sunshine and scented blossoms. The dead had to be disposed of, the wounded had to be bandaged and nursed.
We put about a hundred together in each of five brooders, fed them cut oats and wheat with a little coarse corn meal and all the fresh milk they could drink, and they throve mightily. The incubators were filled again on the 26th, and from that hatch we got 552 chicks. On the 21st of March they were again filled, and on the 13th of April we had 477 more to add to the colony in the brooder-house.
Two most lovely chemises had gone for the two brooders that were to accompany the incubator, and it seemed hard to think that I would have to wait ten days to receive the fruits of my feminine sacrifice from the slow shipping service of the railroad. "Don't ever say that again, Nancy!
But I confess that even if the man had been a loyal subject, I have little admiration for that class; scribblers and pamphleteers, brooders over books, crouchers in the chimney-corner, who have never trailed a pike or slept under the open sky.
Mix a teacup of sulphur with enough bran or shorts for each 100 chicks, moisten with sweet milk and feed it on clean boards, what the chicks will eat up clean in some, twenty minutes. Give them one feed of this each day for three days if the weather is dry. Clean the brooders and runs daily, then dust white with air-slacked lime and cover the lime with a sprinkling of clean sand.
So far the efforts made along these lines have been clumsy and unnecessarily expensive. If the continuous house is ever made practical, I believe it will be along this line, but at present I advise sticking to the methods that are known to be successful. Individual lamp brooders in colony houses are perhaps the most generally successful means of rearing chicks on northern poultry farms.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking