POULTRY FARMING IN LANCASHIRE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 45, 17 November 1936, Page 6

POULTRY FARMING IN LANCASHIRE

2000 Eggs a Day in Mill Lancashire holds the world’s record for the number of laying liens kept per acre, and is proud of it. Tq-day, within a 10-mile radius are to be found such strange features of poultry-farming as: An old cotton mill turned into an egg factory, where in 16in. square cages ranged round the walls 3000 hens produce 2000 eggs each day. As the eggs ’ are laid they roll down a sloping floor into a gully, where the attendants collect them. Two thousand laying hens in a mill hand’s back garden, producing hundreds of eggs daily in big poultry houses which he built in his spare time. A poultry-farmer who, coming into (he business as a novice without capital 12 years ago. now has a big factory, vast flocks, of birds, and a fortune. Cockerels liere are at once destroyed. Lancashire poultry-farmers are concerned only with egg production, and rear only pullet chicks. But the great fight which Lancashire’s poultry industry has to make is against the spread of diseases fowl paralvsis. tuberculosis, adult eoccodisis and the like—winch are ruining so many of the smaller farms. ! Scores of the poultry-farmers, prosI perotis six years ago. are now so deI pressed bv the heavy losses from dis- ' ease that they are buying pullets from the smith of Ireland to ensure winter egg production. An authority said that more than 100.000 had been imported into Lancashire during the past month.