Cacklefest

Half a century ago a short, canny, sandy-haired young farmer named James Edward Rice decided to put his hens to a test. He built a sort of coop which trapped each hen and kept her there until he let her out and scored an egg or a blank. At year's end his flock's batting average was only about 65 eggs a year per hen, about the U. S. average. Into the stewpot went hens who didn't make the laying grade. Up went the batting average of Farmer Rice's flock.

Today an average hen produces only 100 eggs a year, but a good hen lays 200, and 300 is no longer a marvel. Champion Te Kawau Princess (Australorp), of New Zealand, who died in 1933 in Holland, Mich., set a world's record in 1930 by laying 361 eggs in 364 days.

To Farmer Rice and his crude trap-nest goes credit for starting the scientific breeding of hens that has made modern egg production possible. The poultry business is today close to a billion-dollar-a-year industry (fourth after cattle, hogs and dairying in U.S. agriculture's gross income). To Professor Rice, founder (1903) and retired (1934) head of Cornell's first U. S. poultry school, goes credit, too, for fathering poultry breeding as an agricultural science.

Last week he saw one of his pet dreams come true. For 18 years Jimmy Rice tried to persuade the U.S. Government to finance a world's fair of poultry. When the Government began saying no, he organized in 1921 the first world's poultry fair at The Hague. Last week, backed by a $100,000 Federal subsidy, the seventh World's Poultry Congress opened in the great halls of Cleveland's 1936-37 Great Lakes Exposition (left standing for the occasion). It was the biggest convention to be held in the U.S. this year, and Professor Rice was its chairman.

To the cackle of 10,000 assorted fowl, delegates from 45 foreign nations and poultry fanciers from 48 States began a ten-day chicken festival. No less than 150,000 congress tickets were sold to poultry raisers four months before the opening. By the fourth day attendance was 110,000; 500,000 poultry folk were expected in Cleveland before this week's end.

Some chicken facts:

>The U.S. has about 375,000,000 hens which produce an average of 36,000,000,000 eggs a year (less than an egg a day for each inhabitant).

>In 1938 U.S. farmers took in $990,000,000 gross income from chicken and eggs. Most of it went into the farmer's wife's china teapot.

>Small farmers with flocks of less than 100 birds produce 75% of U.S. eggs. Farmers eat 34% of their flocks, 25% of their eggs.

>Large-flock commercial breeders account for only a fraction of the total output. Largest egg factory is California's Runnymede Farm. Its top capacity: 325,000 laying hens.

Poultrymen wish the New Deal would stop worrying about cotton, grain & tobacco growers and pay some attention to them. Said one delegate to last week's Congress: "Poultry produces enough dollars every year to make the income of U.S. Steel Corp. look like chicken feed." He might have added that it is not much more profitable as a business. As long as three out of four eggs are a byproduct of general farming--produced with little direct cost--competition keeps prices down to a level where there is little profit in the business for most specialists.

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