THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 29 January 1913, Page 3

THE POULTRY INDUSTRY.

January Work. It should be useless to remind readers that January is a good month, for cleaning the plant, and over-hauling incubators and brooders. Dirt means vermin, and vermin means poor re~ turns. It is bad to overstock a plant with poultry, but it is worse to overstock it with insect-life. The cleaning oi houses should be particularly thorough where it is intended to remove old stock from them in order to make room for young birds. I would recommend in these cases that the insides of the houses should receive a good coating of tar, so that all crevicps and posbible hiding places for vermin may be covered up, and thereby render subsequent spraying work thoroughly effective. Much of the spraying done is largely nullified by the pest life being out of its reach in crevices and cracks. I have scon myriads of red mite under "blisters" formed in whitewasli in a fowlhouse which to the eye was a picture of cleanliness. There is no hotter spray than a strong sheepvdip solution.

Birds it is intended to breed from should be kept in the best of health, and there is nothing more conductive to this than a good range, co that, ample exercise may be secured. Confinement, indeed, is bad for all classes of stock, except, of course, birds being prepared for market. This statement should not be confused with the management of the heavy layer in the cold months of the year, whon to obtain the best results the layers should be confined in a spacious open-front house on cold, wet, and windy days. January is a good month to detect the hens not worth keeping a second season. Any birds indicating that ikey are on tbo eve of a long rest should be marketed at once. A sure sign of this is the apparent shrinkage of the comb, with, of course, the bloom of this gone. Then the egg-basket also shrinks, till the point of the bresWbone comes so near the contracted pelvic bones that the expert in " systems " would hardly credit the bird having any oapaouy to lay at all. The man who never tires of studying his birds, and thereby develops* his powers o1; observation, should be able to detect at a glance the bird that is failing in egg-production, a failing which, as often aa not, is the result of a, weak constitution.