The Great Chicken Confinement Debate

Having noticed several articles on this subject lately, and believing that a further discussion along this line might prove beneficial, I take the liberty to say something in regard to it, writes a practical poultry raiser. Like everything else in chickendom, continued writings on the necessity of free range for fowls has caused most people to believe that all the hard luck experienced with a flock of fowls arises from confinement. In this way people with small quarters handling mongrel stock continue to handle any old thing in the chicken line, for, as they believe, their quarters are insufficiently large to give pure-bred fowls ample room. And getting the idea that they do from reading the many articles on free range, they figure that high-bred fowls must necessarily have plenty of free range, so that it is not in their power to handle that kind of stock except at a loss. Another idea continually harped upon, mostly by the manufacturers and dealers in all kinds of mixtures of poultry foods, that they claim are absolutely necessary to have on hand for fowls in confinement, make the keeping of fancy chicks to their mind too expensive for consideration. This erroneous idea, as I previously said, has been written about so much that it is time to let the novice or amateur know that it is not more necessary to feed any of the different poultry foods to the fowls than it is to buy the fancy feeds for horses, cattle or hogs that are kept in confinement most of their time. And while it is true that you must take good care of any stock that you wish to make profitable, nevertheless it does not follow that you must use costly prepared foods. Nature does not require anything of this kind, if proper care is taken with home-grown foods.