Part 2

Of similar pattern is the “Mushroom Poultry House,” from Southern California. These houses may be built any size, but are usually made four or five feet square. They set up from the ground about eighteen inches, and the closed sides are three feet, the posts being four and one half above the ground. There is no floor used, the air circulating freely beneath. When built of boards no frame is needed, the boarding being nailed to the posts. The roof goes up from all four sides, in pyramid form, and is made water-tight. The roosts are placed about fifteen or eighteen inches above the bottom, as shown by the dotted lines, and a walk or ladder is provided which leads from the ground to the rear roost. This is made movable, so that it can be taken down at night, thus protecting the fowls from marauding animals.

Some of the houses are built of iron advertising signs, and have the common double-pitch roof; in some cases the sides are made of burlap tacked on to furring, which is nailed to the posts. This burlap is then painted with crude oil, distillate, and Venetian red, to make it wind-proof. Lumber is very expensive in that section, and the burlap, when water-proofed, makes a cheap and quite desirable house.

A much better wind and water-tight construction would be Paroid for the roof, and Paroid or Neponset Red Rope Roofing for the sides.

THE ADVANTAGE OF DOUBLE YARDS

When fowls are kept in the confinement of houses and yards an important question is how to keep the yards sweet. The ground becomes tainted in a couple of years or so, and then is a fruitful source of disease. Unless grass can be kept growing so as to keep the ground free from the poison of the droppings there is no alternative but to change the ground. It is well to have two runs, using each alternately, and by planting the one vacated with some quick-growing crop it can be made ready for occupancy again in a few weeks. An excellent crop for this purpose is Dwarf Essex Rape, which makes one of the best summer-green foods for fowls confined to houses and yards; or such garden crops as squashes, melons, etc., can be grown. After these rye or oats can be sown, to furnish green food in the fall.

It is a comparatively simple proposition to have the yards divided into two sections, by setting the house in the middle, having half (or two-fifths or three-fifths) of the length of yards north of the house; these north yards being used three or four months in summer, a crop of some suitable kind being grown in the vacant yards south of the house in the meantime.

In Fig. 17 we give a plan for such house and yards. In this plan we suppose the yards to be one hundred and twenty-five feet long by eighteen wide, and have placed fifty feet of length of yards north of the house and seventy-five feet of length south of it. There are lift-off gates next to the house in the fence south of the house, the second gate in illustration being shown as lifted off and leaning against the next panel of fence. These gates give access to all the yards, for plowing, harrowing, and cultivating a crop; also for driving up to the front of the pen with a cart to haul away the fouled earth of the floor of the house. The usual access to these yards is through the house itself and a gate opening out of the scratching-shed; for ordinary visits to the north yards there are small, swinging gates next to the house, and then lift-gates which will admit a team for plowing, etc. There should be a row of fruit trees set in each yard, to give the needed shade, and the trees give the owner a second source of profit.

Desiring a poultry house which would give closed pens or could be opened up to admit the air and sunshine at will, Dr. C. Bricault, Andover, Mass., adapted the well-known “Dutch Door” to his purpose, putting the door in the middle of the front of each pen, and so arranging it that the whole door could be open day and night, in warm weather, or the lower half of the door shut and the top half open, or the top half could be closed by a curtain in quite cold weather, and in severe storms the whole door closed. The size of the pens are ten by twelve feet, the frame and building plan being substantially the same as in the preceding house-plan, the doors in the front of each partition giving a passage through the entire length of the house. There are two windows in the front of each pen; the roosts are set up against the partitions between the pens, and the trap-nests are set on a platform against the north wall. The building is covered with a cheap sheathing paper, then with sheathing quilt, then Neponset Red Rope Roofing; a better construction would be Paroid Roofing on the roof and Neponset on the sides.

Fig. 17 gives an interior view of one of the pens showing roosts and trap-nests.

A POULTRY HOUSE 240 FEET LONG

In New York State it has been thought desirable to have warm houses for the Single Comb White Leghorns so largely kept there, and we give illustrations of one of the long poultry houses of the White Leghorn Poultry Yards, Waterville, N.Y. This house is two hundred and forty feet long by sixteen feet wide, divided into pens twelve feet square and a walk three and a half feet wide along the north side. It has a floor of seven-eighths inch matched boards throughout. The outside walls are first boarded, then covered with sheathing and clapboarded. The inside of the building is boarded up with matched boards on the inside of the studs, making a four-inch dead air space between the walls. The ceilings are made of matched boards laid at the level of the plates. In this ceiling, over the centre of each pen, is a small trap door, two feet square, opening up into the attic space above, which is designed to give diffusive ventilation.

Three ventilating cupolas cap the roof, and there are full-sized windows in each gable end. This attic space is storage room for straw, which is drawn upon from time to time, to furnish scratching material for the pen floors and opening the trap-door into the ceiling, it gives excellent ventilation without drafts. A door opens from the alleyway into each pen, and doors in the partition between the pens permit passing through from pen to pen. The roost platforms with nest boxes beneath are against the partition between the walk and pens and the plan of partitions between pens as shown in Fig. 19. The roof is covered with Paroid Roofing. A fault here is the wire netting in these partitions; a better plan would be matched-board partitions throughout.

The twelve feet square pens have one hundred and forty-four square feet of floor space each, giving ample room for twenty-five head of layers, and while a long house of this description is somewhat expensive to build, it has many advantages, which, on a large and permanent poultry plant, will more than make up for the first cost in the ease and economy of feeding, etc., and the warmth of the house and the simplicity of the ventilation. This style of poultry house has been in use on the White Leghorn farm for several years, and it has been found to be both practical and economical; it combines very completely the laying and the breeding house. On this plant they practise the alternate system of males in the pens, a small coop for the extra male being set against the partition in one corner of the pen, four feet up from the floor. One male bird is cooped up while the other runs with the hens and they are exchanged every two or three days, the change being effected at night, on occasion of the shutting-up visit.

MR. DUSTON’S POULTRY HOUSES

One of America’s most successful poultrymen is Mr. Arthur G. Duston, South Framingham, Mass., and as he has recently established himself on a new farm, to secure necessary room, the type of poultry houses he decides are the best for him is of interest. He is building seventeen houses of five pens each, and uses some thirty odd of his well-known colony-houses (Fig. 23). The five-pen houses are raised from the ground from two to three feet, the space beneath being utilized as scratching room. Each house is fifty by twelve feet, the pens being ten by twelve feet each, and there is a window and door in the front of each pen; doors in the front of partitions allow passing through from pen to pen. The roosts are at the back, with nest boxes beneath the roost platforms.

This house has a short hip-roof sloping south, which is open to the objection of carrying part of the roof-drip to the front of the house,—a fault which can be mitigated by a gutter along the front, but that increases the cost without always giving complete relief from the drip; we decidedly prefer the single-slope roof.

Mr. Duston’s “colony,” or portable, houses are justly favorites, the distinctive feature of them being the double door, or wire netting door covered with a second door. These “colony” houses are ten by five feet on the ground, five feet high in front, and four feet high at the back, and have board floors.

THE STRAW-LOFT POULTRY HOUSE

In New York state, especially, the Single Combed White Leghorns have long been the preferred variety, and, as they have rather thin single combs, which are considered to be susceptible to frost in cold weather, it has been a problem to house them so that they shall be protected from freezing. Many different types of houses have been tried, some of them with a stove in one end and a long pipe running through to the chimney at the other, thirty or forty feet away; a decided disadvantage with this was the having to keep the house shut quite tight to conserve the heat, and the consequent dampness from the moisture of the breath of the birds.

To get over this difficulty diffused ventilation was devised by Mr. H. J. Blanchard, of Fairview Farm, Groton, N. Y.; this ventilation was obtained by stowing straw (or swale hay) in the loft in the gable, and this permits a slow diffusion of air upward through the cracks of the floor and out of the small doors in each end of gable. This straw-loft poultry house has been widely adopted all over the United States; a good example of a long house of this type is shown in the illustration on page 12.

Mr. Blanchard’s houses are forty feet long by sixteen feet wide, and divided into two pens twenty by sixteen feet each; about fifty birds are wintered in each pen. The walls of the house are made double, boarded on both sides of the studs with a dead air space between; in some cases the walls are packed with saw dust or planer shavings, at the well-known Van Dresser farm, in Cobleskill, N.Y., they are packed with straw. The floor is double boarded, with a good sheathing paper between. Overhead, on the plates, two by six inch stringers are laid, and a loose floor of rough boards, with inch to inch and a half cracks between, is laid. A one-third pitch roof is laid on shingle laths nailed to the rafters six inches apart, and on this a good sheathing paper covered with two-ply Paroid. In each gable a door is cut, as large as will swing under the roof. On the attic floor is put some twelve to fifteen inches of loose straw.

In very cold weather, when the house is tightly closed save for a muslin curtain in one or two windows of each pen, the vapor thrown off in the breath of the fowls will pass up through the cracks in the loft-floor and be absorbed in the straw above, instead of being condensed on the walls and roof in the form of frost. On mild days in winter the doors in the gable may be opened wide, or if it is very windy the door in the leeward end may be opened, which permits the air to draw through over the straw, drying it thoroughly, without any draughts upon the birds on the floor below.

In warm weather the gable doors may be left open night and day, and the draught through the loft, together with the ventilation through open doors and windows in the house below, keeps the birds cool and comfortable. These houses are thoroughly practical in every way and will be found very desirable for use on any large farm. A few such scattered in convenient localities will give good opportunity to rotate crops and poultry, and so gain a two-fold profit from the land and at the same time avoid all danger of the soil becoming poisoned by accumulation of the droppings. At Fairview Farm Mr. Blanchard combines fruit growing with poultry keeping, a combination which it would be difficult to better for double profits, and a combination which should be better understood by poultry growers. The advantages of combining fruit and poultry growing are many, not the least of the advantages being furnishing the shade which Prof. Rice tells us is so essential in summer. For the permanent yards there is nothing to equal apple trees, but as they are of somewhat slow growth and need large space when full grown, it is well to set apple trees about forty feet apart and set plums or peaches (or both) in the spaces between; the plum and peach trees will mature, produce a few crops of fruit and break down, before the apple trees will have grown to a stature to require all the room. A few years ago plum trees were strongly recommended for poultry yards, but experience has demonstrated that they cannot be depended upon for but a half dozen years or so, hence the wisdom of setting apple trees for permanent shade.

Plantations of small fruits, such as grapes, blackberries, and raspberries, serve admirably for range and semi-shade for growing chicks, and it is a mistake to imagine that the chicks damage the crops of fruit; if they touch any it will only be the lower (and always inferior) stems that they reach. There are such substantial benefits accruing from the presence of little chicks about the small fruit plantations, or the mature birds about the apple, plum, and peach trees—such as the destruction of hosts of worms and insects and keeping the surface of the ground stirred, that every consideration urges the combination of fruit and poultry growing. At the Vernon Fruit and Poultry Farm, Vernon, Conn., we saw last summer Baldwin apple trees that were six inches through at the butt, yielded an average of a barrel of choice apples each in the fall, and had been set only six years. They began bearing the second year after setting, had borne increasing crops every year, last season averaged to be about six inches through and gave their owner a barrel of apples each. These apple trees were part of an orchard which was occupied by colony poultry houses having fifty layers each, and set sufficient distance apart so that there were about two hundred birds to the acre; the owner told us he had never seen a borer or any evidence of borers about those trees.

THE CURTAIN-FRONT, CURTAINED-ROOSTING-CLOSET, POULTRY HOUSE

As stated elsewhere, the tendency in poultry house construction today is to more and more open up the houses to fresh air and sunshine, and the most advanced type of the fresh air poultry house has been developed at the Maine Experiment Station, Orono, Maine. This consists of a house-front about half open, a little more than a fourth of each pen-front being closed by a cloth curtain only, two windows and a door making with the curtain about half of the whole front of each pen.

At the rear of each pen, and elevated three feet above the pen-floor, is a curtained-front “roosting closet,” as it is called; this roosting closet is the “bed-room” and the whole pen the “living-room,” in this type of house.

It seems almost like cruelty to animals to put hens in such houses, where they have but the two cloth curtains between them and all outdoors in the very cold winters they have up in central Maine; the Maine Station is very nearly up to forty-five north latitude, about the same as Ottawa, Ontario, St. Paul, Minn., and Portland, Oregon. One of the Station bulletins, however, says: “These curtain-front houses have all proved eminently satisfactory. Not a case of cold or snuffles has developed from sleeping in the warm elevated closets with the cloth fronts, and then going down into the cold room, onto the dry straw, and spending the day in the open air. The egg-yield per bird has been as good in these houses as in the warmed one.” In a letter written by Prof. Gowell, just after an extremely cold period, he says: “This is the ninth day of weather all the way from zero to twenty-five degrees below, still the fifty pullets in the ten by twenty-five feet curtained front house with its curtained-front roosting-room have fallen off but little in their egg-yield, and both the house and scratching material on the floor are perfectly dry. There is no white frost on the walls and there will be no dampness when the weather moderates and a thaw comes.” There could hardly be a stronger indorsement of fresh, pure air in a poultry house and good ventilation without draughts. If such good results can be attained in cold Maine they can be attained anywhere in the United States and southern Canada.

The Maine Experiment Station has now three of these curtain-front houses, of which one is one hundred and forty feet long by twelve feet wide, divided into pens twenty by twelve feet in size, in each pen being housed fifty birds; the other is one hundred and twenty by sixteen feet, divided into pens thirty by sixteen feet, and one hundred hens are kept in each. On Prof. Gowell’s farm, two miles distant from the Station, he erected last year a house of this type four hundred feet long by twenty feet wide, divided into pens twenty by twenty feet each, and a hundred birds are kept in each pen; in the thirty by sixteen feet pens there is a floor space of four and eight-tenths feet per bird; in the twenty by twenty feet pens the floor space is four feet per bird. It is of interest to note that the one hundred birds, Barred Plymouth Rocks, penned on this four hundred square feet of floor space, do not go outdoors from the time they are put in the house in October till the ground of the yards is well dried off in spring, say about May first; this suggests the practicability of housing laying-stock in suitable convenient buildings in winter, pains being taken that ample sunshine and fresh air (through curtains) be supplied, and in the spring the birds be moved out to portable colony houses scattered about the orchard, or a wood-lot, or other convenient place, where they would be pushed for a liberal egg-yield through the summer and sold off to market before molting time in the fall. This plan supposes the rearing of another generation of pullets for layers during the summer, and these pullets go into the winter-laying-pens in October, to be removed to the colony-houses in May, to be in turn, sold off to market in September. This plan of an annual rotation of laying-stock will undoubtedly give the best financial returns from egg-farming, and as by the adoption of the dry-feeding method of handling the fowls the labor is reduced to the minimum, the results, with intelligent management of the business should be quite satisfactory; the profits will be liberal for amount of capital invested and labor engaged.

In Fig. 29 we give a single pen of the one hundred and twenty feet long house, with a door opening into each pen from the board-walk along the front. Each pen has two windows, which light the interior when the weather is stormy and it is necessary to keep the curtain closed; the curtain is open every day when the weather is fair. There are banks of nest boxes at each end of pens, and coops for breaking up broody birds above the nest boxes. The twelve by four feet curtain in the pen-front is hinged at top so it may be swung up against the roof and hooked up there; the roosting closet is up three feet from the floor, the platform is three feet wide, and the curtain which closes the front is the whole length of the pen, and also swings up against the roof, where hooks secure it up out of the way. The whole floor of the pen is open for exercise, and is an enclosed out-of-doors pen all the time.

THE CONTINUOUS CURTAINED-FRONT SCRATCHING-SHED POULTRY HOUSE

The tendency in poultry house construction in recent years has been to more and more open up the house to fresh air and sunshine, and this opening up of the houses, and getting more and more fresh air and sunshine into them, has been a decided step in advance in poultry work. There are many modifications and adaptations of the scratching-shed plan of house, perhaps the best known of them being the “scratching-pen” plan, and the enclosed-roosting-closet plan, the latter being the one evolved at the Maine Experiment Station and illustrated on page 16. In this enclosed-roosting-closet house we see the entire floor of the pen a curtained-front scratching pen and the roosting apartment lifted up and enclosed by another curtain-front; in the one we have the shed one department and the roosting-laying department another (one a “living-room” and the other the “bed-room”), with wide range of adaptability in the way of opening up the roosting-laying room; in the other the enclosed roosting-closet, or “bed-room,” and scratching-shed, or “living-room,” are in the one apartment. Certain it is the curtained-front scratching-shed type of house that has been growing very rapidly in favor with practical poultrymen, and probably combines more advantages with fewer disadvantages than any other one style of poultry house.