148 EGGS A YEAR.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXIX, Issue 46, 17 January 1913, Page 8

148 EGGS A YEAR.

INTENSIVE FOWLS

The intensive cultivation of hens is about to be taken up in England on a great scale. In America, which provides the model for the largest of these ventures, 4500 birds are called ..a unit a-nd are "culti\ntod" on as little as 12 acres. Each of these units consists of three houses, in which 1500 birds are kept. Singlecomb will it© Leghorns are the favorite bird; and in a recent experiment they yielded the extraordinary average of 140 eggs per bird within the year, or 219,000 eggs to 10,000 birds. A very considerable farm is being taken on the Wiltshire Dowus in order to try the system, the hens being at first imported from the American farm. Tin? houses are astonishingly simple and cheap, being only 7ft iu front and oft at the back. Occasional "half-way partitions" of tho sort seen in some school dormitories are fixed at intervals and this is almost the only extra equipment.

One of the prime advantages of this new intensive system is that it can be worked on a small scale in a town garden or on the vast scale practised in New Jersey with such remarkable results. Plenty of light, plenty of straw and the rejection for laying purposes of all hens 10 months after they have first begun to lay—these are given as the prime necessities of the system.