Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 2, Number 45, DeMotte, Jasper County, 23 March 1933 — Keeping the Male Birds [ARTICLE]

Keeping the Male Birds

Farm management experts and agricultural economists have commonly insisted that a well established agricultural practice is usually sound. We like to agree with them, but are at a loss to know the advantage of keeping the male birds in the flock after the regular hatching season is over. And yet this is done on a majority of corn belt farms where male birds are carried through into spring. The lowered quality of the eggs, the feed eaten by the birds, the usual decline in their value between May or June and late fall, the trouble they cause bothering the growing stock if they can get in with them, are some of the reasons why people should sell roosters as soon as the regular hatching season is over. “Swat the rooster” campaigns have been held and much writing has been done each year, urging the adoption of an early sale program. But it has not been adopted very widely. There must be a reason. Why is it, asks a writer in Wallace’s Farmer.