Not one particle of poultry manure is to be removed from either style of house.  Instead, the houses are removed from the manure, which is then scattered on the neighboring ground with a fork, or, if desired to be used on a field in which poultry may not run, it may be loaded upon a wagon together with some of the underlaying soil.

There have been books and books written on poultry houses, but what I have just given is sufficient poultry-house knowledge for the Dollar Hen man.  If he hasn’t enough intelligence to put this into practice, he has no business in the hen business.  Additional book-knowledge of hen-houses is useless; it may be harmful.

If you are sure that you are fool-proof, you may get Dr. Feather or Reverend Earlobe’s “Book of Poultry House Plans.”  It will be a good text-book for the children’s drawing lessons.

The Feeding System.

Oyster shells, beef scraps, corn, and one other kind of grain, together with an abundance of pasturage or green feed, is the sum and substance of feeding hens on the Dollar Hen Farm.

The dry feeds are placed in hoppers.  They are built to protect the feeds from the weather.  The neck must be sufficiently large to prevent clogging, and the hopper so protected by slats in front that the hen cannot toss the feed out by a side jerk of her head.  These hoppers may be built any size desired.  The grain compartments should, of course, be made larger than the others.  Weekly filling is good, but where a team is not owned, it would be better to have the hoppers larger so that feed purchased, say, once a month, could be delivered directly into the hoppers.

Water Systems.

The best water system is a spring-fed brook.

The man proposing to establish an individual poultry plant, and who after reading this book goes and buys a tract of land where an artificial water system is necessary, would catch Mississippi drift-wood on shares.  But there are plenty of such people in the world.  A man once stood all day on London Bridge hawking gold sovereigns at a shilling a-piece and did not make a sale.

Next to natural streams are the made streams.  This is the logical watering method of the community of poultry farmers.  These artificial streams are to be made by conducting the water of natural streams back of the land to be watered, as in irrigation.  It is the problem of irrigation over again.  Indeed, where trucking is combined with poultry-growing, fowl watering should be combined with irrigation.

It may be necessary to dam the stream to get head, sufficient supply or both.  In sandy soils, ditches leak, and board flumes must be substituted.  The larger ones are made of the boards at right angles and tapered so that one end of one trough rests in the upper end of the next lower section.  The smaller, or lateral troughs may be made V-shaped.

The cost of the smaller sized flume is three cents a foot.  Iron pipe costs twelve cents a foot.