MAKING HENS WORK OVERTIME.

Hokitika Guardian, 14 February 1925, Page 4

MAKING HENS WORK OVERTIME.

(By Leonard Matters* in Daily Mail.) There is no telling what science will do next. On a Sussex farm, where 1 recently spent a week-end, oleetriety is . employed to keep the hens working overtime when, if they observed Nature’s time-table on these cold dark winter days, they would he spending 1(> hours of the 21 huddled together for warmth on their perches and by their slothfulness helping the profiteer to profit more. On his farm at East Grin stead, Mr R. .Borlace Matthews, who has installed electricity for every use in agriculture has adopted and improved upon the American system for keeping liens awake, attending to their real business in life, and doing their duty by society. He keeps them in warm, electrically lighted houses, and so arranges their hours that they have all the sleep they really need and the rest of the time are bustling around for food, with consequent benefit to themselves and substantial improvement to the egg output. The system adopted at Greater Eelcourt Farm is simplicity itself. Every hen house is fitted with two sets ol electric lights—dim and brilliant. An electrically wound master clock, automatically adjusting itself to summer and winter time, controls and operates the switches. An hour or so before dawn would normally come on winter days the clock turns on the dim lights in each house, and the hens begin to stir themselves. Half an hour later the brilliant lights arc in full glare, and by that time the hens are running about searchig lor lood and beginning to turn their attention to the nests long before the poultry on neighbouring farms are astir. At the end of the day the clock reverses the process. It maintains the lights in full brilliance for a couple oF hours after dusk.; then turns them off and brings on the dim glow of an artificial twilight. From, this moment the hens have ten minutes in which to get to roost and then “Lights out is the order. ft is easy to understand the ellect of this artificially prolonged day upon the poultry. The hens have several more hours of light in which to keep active—running about in search of food, getting more exercise, and thus keeping warm. Carefully kept records show that the production of eggs from a pen of 300 'White Leghorns increased |1 per cent, through the winter months, ns compared with the output from a similar pen that was not electrically lighted. There is no increase over the year’s output, but only in the production at the time when eggs are at their highest price.