ARTIFICIAL POULTRY RAISING.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2213, 30 March 1881, Page 3

ARTIFICIAL POULTRY RAISING.

A prominent dealer in poultry, Mr H. W. Knapp, of Washington Market, New York, gives a discouraging opinion of the probable success of chicken-raising by artificial means. Ho said recently, when questioned on the ■ubjeot :

I went to Franco to study the matter, for if it can be made to succeed it will make an immense fortune, as it has already done in Paris. I was delighted at what I saw there, and the matter at first sight seemed to bo so fascinating that £ do not wonder that new men are always ready to take hold of it. Even clergymen and actors are bitten with the desire to transform so many pounds of corn into so many pounds of spring chicken. The now successful manager, Maokaye, spent about a thousand dollars in constructing hatching machines and artificial mothers in Connecticut, but he found that the stage paid better, and hie expensive devices may now be bought for the value of old tin. Enthusiasts will tell you that by the new discovery chickens may be made out of corn with absolute certainty. In Paris this has been done ; but the conditions are entirely different here. There the land is valuable, and they cannot devote large fields to a few hundred chickens ; the French climate ie so uniform that the markets of Paris cannot be supplied from the South with produce which ripens or matures before that of the neighbourhood of Paris ; the price of chickens is so high and labour so cheap that more care can bo given with profit to one spring chicken than one of our poultry raisers could give to a dozen. Here we have plenty of land ; the climate south of us is so far advanced in warmth, that even with steam wo cannot raise poultry ahead of the South, and the margin of profit is so small that one failure with a largo batch of chickens sweeps away the profit from several successful experiments. When persons wanted me to go into the project I declined, and was called an 1 old fogey.’ One man spent a fortune on the enterprise in New Jersey, and at first was bailed as a public benefactor. What was the result of all his outlay and work ? He managed to batch quantities of young chickens every February ; but although bo could fatten them by placing them in boxes, and forcing a fattening mixture down their throats, he could not make them grow ; they had no exercise ; they remained puny little things, and another defect soon appeared —though fat, they wore tough and stringy. The breeder sent lots of them to me, and they looked fat and tender j but my customers complained that they could not be young, for they were tongh and tasteless, and that I must have sold them aged dwarfs nnder the name of spring chickens. It was found absolutely necessary to let them run out of doors as soon as the weather allowed it ; and by the time that they were ready for market, the southern chickens wore hero, and could be sold for leas than these. The upshot of the business is that this breeder has sold out, and_ another c man has now taken hold of a small part of his old establishment to try other methods of making it a success. An to raising turkeys in that manner, it will fail more disastrously than the chicken business. Size and weight are wanted in turkeys j and that reminds me, continued Mr Knapp, that the newspapers ought to impress the country people with the necessity of improving their poultry stock ; breeding in-and-in is mining poultry ; every year the stock we receive is deteriorating, and this is the cause. I could give you ■oat striking examples frstn my experience of forty years in the business. Some years ago we poulterers thought that ducks were going to disappear from bills of fare altogether ; they were tasteless, worthless birds, which people avoided. On Long Island a farmer made experiments in breeding with an old Muscovy drake, tough as an alligator, and the common duok. The result was superb, and has changed the whole duck industry. It the farmers of Northern Now Jersey, the sandy country best suited to turkeys, would bring from the west a few hundred wild turkeys, we should have an immediate improvement. I see no such turkey now as we had twenty years ago. The breast is narrow and the body runs to length; it is all neok and legs, and can be bought by the yard. Bhoda Island sends us the best tnrkoys, but they are not what they used to bo. If, instead of attempting to beat Nature at her own game, the rich men who havo money to spend would devote it to better breeding, there would bo an improvement. I do not yet despair of seeing immense farms wholly devoted to raising better poultry than we yet have.