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Show BV PROF P G HOLDEN ormer Dean of the Iowa Agricultural ' 1 ' College. S ! ? ' r " - J, L I -jI E - .. 'V -. : S ' 5 a.W., :x..... Vl,lj:ii . V Flock of Purebred Youngsters. ' Why not take better care of your hens tind have them working fur you during the winter instead of keeping them at a loss during this period? You can produce winter eggs. Put your hens in a warm, comfortable, well-ventilated well-ventilated bouse, give them nitrogen-ius"'food nitrogen-ius"'food and furnish water, grit and oyster shell. of course, it will be some trouble to increase your egg production. Don't expect results if you go at things spasmodically, spas-modically, doing one or two things and letting the rest go. l-'ow Is need animal protein food. Bugs and worms furnish Ibis in the summer; buttermilk and beef scrap make good substitutes in the winter. This chart gives the results of an Ontario experiment. Twenty-five hens receiving buttermilk in their ration made $11 prolit in eight months; a similar llock fed beef scrap made $10 prolit, while a flock receiving no meat or milk was kept at a loss of $.'!. A similar experiment in Indiana shows that hens fed Sur milk or beef scrap made a profit of 1 per hen annually, an-nually, while those receiving neither beef scrap or milk were kept" at a loss of four cents per hen. If you feed beef scrap, get good quality, qual-ity, testing 60 or G5 per cent protein. Be careful not to feed too much. Few people understand that eggs are almost as perishable as meat or milk. They belong to the same class of food, but just because they are inclosed In a hard shell, people think they will stand almost any kind of treatment. Government experts estimate a loss of $45,000,000 every year from bad eggs. This loss can be prevented by-better by-better handling and marketing. Loss From Shrinkage. Five ' per cent of the eggs In the United" States are lost through shrinkage. shrink-age. The shell of an egg Is porous. It Is made this way so the developing chick can get air during the incubation period. Seventy-four per tent of an egg .6 water. Whenever nn egg is in a temperature tem-perature above freezing, this water Is Chums. - evaporating through the shell. The higher the temperature and the more circulation of air there Is the faster the evaporation takes place. Eggs grow stale in warm poultry houses, In hot kitchens, on the farm or in the cupboards of the consumer. Egg dealers deal-ers count, that three stale eggs are equal to a rotten egg and pay accordingly. accord-ingly. Gather your eggs daily and keep them in a cool place. Market them as often as possible at least once a week better twice a week. $15,000,000 Annual Loss. Fertile eggs cause a great loss a loss estimated by the government experts ex-perts at $15,000,000 a year. Two years ago the United States government experts conducted an experiment ex-periment in Kansas to compare the loss from fertile and infertile eggs. How Experiment Was Conducted. Ten thousand eggs, collected from different farms, were used in the experiment. ex-periment. Half were fertile and half were Infertile, and every egg was absolutely ab-solutely fresh when it entered the experiment. ex-periment. These eggs were kept on the farm under ordinary farm conditions. Some were stored in parlors, some in kitchens, kitch-ens, some in cellars and some in pantries. pan-tries. Some were put In nests, some Under laying'he'ns and some under sitting sit-ting hens. The same number of fertile and infertile eggs were always put under un-der exactly the same conditions. In a week the eggs were collected and sold to the local grocery store where they were candled. They were then shipped : to St. Louis, where they were again candled. Results of Experiment. While on the farm 29 per cent of the fertile eggs were spoiled for fooi, as compared with only 16 per cent of the infertile ones. On the way to market 14 per cent of the fertile ones were spoiled as compared with 9 per cent .of the infertile. This makes a total of 43 per cent of the fertile eggs unfit foi food as compared with only 25 per cent of the infertile ones a difference of 19 per cent. Notice that the greatest loss in both fertile and infertile eggs is on the farm. Fresh air is as good for hens as it is for people. If you have an open front or a partly open front poultry house you need not worry about the ventilation. Fresh air does not hurt hens, but drafts are Injurious. The north, east and west sides of the coop should be tight to prevent drafts. Get the habit of cleanliness and you ; need not fear lice and poultry dls-wsea. POULTRY AND EGG CROP Almost every farmer keep some poultry. The trouble is he doesn't make the poultry keep him. Too many of them are roosters. A lot more are old hens that lay but a fe.9 eggs and then want to set. .thenew the price of eggs gets high, the old fcftis go on a strike. They lay in the hvnhouse when they please, but too nurch of the time prefer to lay their ?ggs out in the fence corners. That means they are not gathered until tby are stale and In consequence a lciv price for the eggs.. The average farmf-T considers poultry poul-try raising a "side Issue," a job for women and children a sort of necessary neces-sary nuisance in order to provide fresh eggs and a toothsome roast or fry, at after all, this "side issue" bran k of the farming business, poultry, nets an annual return in the United States of over $600,000,000 or enough mos.ey to build two Panama canals every year. The Panama canal has been written into in-to the pages of history as one of the greatest achievements of modern times. In its construction our greatest minds in the science of engineering, art and medicine were employed. Y'et the farm hen with little or no care clcies her yearly account with a balim't it more than half a billion dollar. Only a very small portion of this vast sum of money is earned by the well-cared-for commercial hen. Ninety per cent of it goes to the credit of the much neglected neglect-ed flocks ranging at liberty on the farms of the country. Hen Not Appreciated. None of us half appreciate the money-earning possibilities of the hen. For example, the cottongrowing states during a recent slump On the cotton market due to the European war, joined other cotton producing states In nn appeal to congress for federal aid to tide thera over the financial difficulty. diffi-culty. The appeal was for $150,000,000 to be distributed in the South Mtrough the medium of the federa" reserve banks. If these one-crop states had reckoned with the farm hen they would have saved themselves the humiliation hu-miliation of asking Uncle Sam for help. 60 E&gs Whavthe average "iBrin hen produces We will take Arkansas to illustrate the point. The average county in Arkansas contains con-tains about 3,000 farms. If on each farm there had been 300 hens, each laying through the year eight dozen eggs, only about a quarter of an egg a day, and the eggs had sold for 20 cents a dozen, the income per farm would have amounted to $1G0. At this rate the 3,000 farms In each county would have produced $480,000. Based on these figures, the state of Arkansas with bet 74 counties, would have produced nearly near-ly a 35.000.00(-dollnr egg crop. This sum is far in excess of the money Arkansas Ar-kansas would have received as hei share of the federal loan and more than half of the value of the annua! cotton crop. This $35,000,000 distributed anion: the banks of Arkansas would have re lieved one of the most critical period? -in the economic history of the state The earning pow-er of the hen exceed! that of all other farm animals th dairy cow not excepted. Profit in Poultry. Let us not overlook this opportunity Any farmer can have poultry. He car make more clear profit out of poultry than the commercial poultryman car make. First, the care of poultry fits well Intc tte other farm work ; the Investment Is mf.il ; feed Is cheap ; the chickens con Tert the waste products of the farm lnt profits. During the greater pari : of the year the chlckeus li ye on grass, clover, surplus garden stuff, gleanings from the grain fields, litter about the I barn and feed lots, and more important j than all else, they consume weed seeds, I insect enemies to crops and other pests. Record of Eighteen Ohio Farm Flocks. Two years ago the Ohio experiment station made a study of the profits in farm poultry. Records of 18 typical farm flocks were carefully kept. These flocks ranged in number from 36 to 370, some were purebreds ; others were mongrels. They were kept, fed and tended just as the farmer had been caring for them before the experiment station asked him to keep a record. Here are the results of the investigation. investiga-tion. For the sake of comparison, we have figured the profit from each flock on the basis of 100 hens in a flock. The best five flocks yielded respectively respect-ively $247, $154, $153, $107 and $104 per hundred hens, while the poorest five flocks yielded $67, $06, $G3, $62 and $15 respectively. In no ease was there a loss. The average profit per hundred hens of the 18 flocks was $87. Poultry Profits. One hundred hens are worth a hundred hun-dred dollars just about the price of a good dairy cow. Records of the cow-testing cow-testing association in Iowa show that the average dairy cow makes a profit of $33. Which would you rather do milk two or three cows or take care of a hundred hens? Most of us fail to realize that poultry poul-try is profitable the wife pays the grocery bills and every now and then gets a new piece of furniture or a new dress with the "chicken money." But probably not one farmer in a thousand could tell just how much his chickens are paying. You probably have about a hundred hens that's the average size of t'..e farm flocks in the United States. How much profit are they producing? Am they above the average or below? Ary you getting $247 or $15? Produce Eggs When Price is High. Sixty per cent of the eggs are produced pro-duced in March, April and May. Theu the number drops gradually until only one per cent Is produced in November. Production remains low during .Tnnu- What she should produce? ary and February and increases to 12 per cent in March. The price goes down whenever the production goes tip. Why not produce eggs in the winter! Get the advantage not only, of Increased In-creased production, but of high price. In January eggs sell on an average for about 30 cents per dozen. The price decreases until in April eggs are - bringing only 18 cents. A large number of eggs are put in cold storage at this i time and this keeps tha price fairly ' high considering the grelfi amount of eggs produced. The price drops to 17 ! cents during the summer months be- - cause there is such a large number of poor eggs on the market. In Septem- 1 I WHY NOT PRODUCE EGGS WHEN PRICE IS HIGH JAM APR. fl'-'G. . W C ' " fn H, l 1 f FOPW HOUSING -v z 1 1 ' NITHOGCNOLIS fOOC I : A WTm&RlT I j 1- , 1 WILL DO IT ' , I ! 1 I I 1 I I ber the price begins to rise and In-i In-i creases gradually but rapidly until II ; reaches 29 cents in December. |