Poultry Appreciate Electric Light

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 35, 14 March 1930, Page 27

Poultry Appreciate Electric Light

MAN Y practical poultrymen are using electric light in their laying houses to maintain and increase egg production. It is usually concentrated on hens that are not to be kept as breeders. The purpose is to get as many eggs as possible, and to dispose of the birds as soon as they stop laying. >On a farm in Virginia, the poultry house was divided into two equal sections by a wire partition equipped with a canvas curtain to be rolled down at night. One section was wired for lights. The flock was divided into two group of 160 each. In a seven-day laying test made before the lights were turned on, the flock to be left in the lighted section laid an average of seven eggs less a day than the flock for the unlighted section. The lights were turned on at 4.30 each morning during the test period, November 15 to March 31, and the hens in the lighted pen were kept at work about thirteen hours a day, as compared with about ten hours for the other birds. Both groups were fed alike, so that there was no extra cost for feeding. The birds in the lighted pen laid 18,409 eggs during the period, those in the unlighted pen only 9253 eggs. The lights therefore gave an increased production of 4156 eggs. At an average price of forty cents, the increase due to the lights, netted over £27, as the cost of current at 5d. per Filowatt hour was only jtist over 12/-. Had: the whole flock of 320 birds, been under light. and assuming the. sime rate of gain, the increased egg production would have netted over £56, or more than enough to pay the entire cost-45/10/-of connecting and wiring the whole of the farmstead, and that in a little over three months.