Wow! What a great idea! Meat and eggs! And everyone loves to eat chicken and eggs. A chicken will lay about 5 eggs a week, or 250 eggs a year. Do the math! You can become a millionaire raising chickens -- just look at Frank Purdue. What could go wrong? Nothing!
Just look at how this one lone girl raises 15,000 chickens indoors and all by herself while wearing a perfect white apron and high heels. You can do it too!
The top article is about an automated, rotating chicken egg facility in Japan from the April 1960 edition of Popular Mechanics. The ad is from the July 1952 edition of Popular Mechanics, and article at bottom is from the January 1937 edition of Popular Science.
3 comments:
Um, Patrick -- capons are neutered male chickens -- great meat, no eggs.
Yikes, my great-grandmother probably would have seen the 1937 issue of Popular Science (because my grandfather would have bought it) and tossed it in the fireplace. She HATED cages for poultry and railed mightly against the "modern science" that encouraged farmers to abandon the farmyard and put their poultry in wire cages indoors.
"Chickens have to scratch in the dirt" she'd say, "Or they get funny in the head." Great-Grandmother was a no-nonsense Plain Sect farmer that lived to be 105 and didn't have a shred of sentimentality in her, but if you kept animals, you had a duty to see that they were mentally and physically healthy up until the day you ate them.
The poultry thing seems to run in the family -- my grandfather had a working chicken coop in town until the late 1950s when the town council made a personal visit to let him know that the town had grown large enough that they had to act like a "real town" and not have any of those nasty vestiages of "country life" so they were passing an ordiance to forbid the raising of chickens and they would be keeping their eye on him and fining him if the chickens didn't go.
Well the chickens went, but he kept that chicken coop in working order until he died (most unfortunately, of diabetes in the late 70s) becuase "someday, town folks are going to come to their senses and realize that everyone should raise chickens for their own use and I'm going to be ready for that day."
I regret he missed the 90s when Organic Gardening Magazine began offering hints on how to raise chickens at home under the town radar and the current days where you can buy heirloom chicks at local feed stores.
Since I run a community garden, I can't sneak in the poultry, but if we end up moving in the next two years, I've got my American Livestock Breed Conservatory lists ready!
Here is the URL:
http://www.albc-usa.org/
As y'all can tell, I'm on the only vacation those of us in agriculture get -- in another 3 weeks, I'll be starting seeds and not posting on all the blogs nearly as often -- I'm sure everyone on the dog blogs is counting the days! ;-D
Dorene
Thanks Doreen -- you got to the comments before I got to the picture on the Japanese robotized egg mill circa 1960 (some pics are on another computer).
Today, of course, almost all commercial egg production in teh U.S. is completely automated. When your hand touches an egg in your kitchen, that's almost certainly the first hand that has ever been put to that egg.
Which brings us to the issue of capons. Who neuters them? I mean think about THAT job. Now think about answering the question: "What to you do," when asked at a party. So yeah, it could be worse. In the upside, the capon guy can be happy he is not the AI semen collector at a pig farm. Another job to avoid if you can :)
Patrick
90% of turkeys in the US are produced by AI
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