A Watt Poultry article gives a pretty good rundown of the early egg industry, marred mostly by a few patches of garbled numbers.
The authors correctly identify the pioneering breeders who changed the egg industry in the first third of the 20th century (including James Dryden, whose book I need to reprint some day) and have some interesting tables of productivity per hen.
The numbers giving the amount of labor required per hen are garbled, but the numbers that report how many hens represent a full-time job at different technology levels are correct. The numbers tend to explain why you shied away from doubling your flock size this year!
I Publish Books! Norton Creek Press
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I would like someone to put a spin on some of Jull’s older books like Poultry breeding and Successful Poultry Management. I like the Production of 300 eggers…. by the Reliable Poultry Journal also and American Breeds of Poultry by Frank Platt. Those older books have lots of relative info for “backyard” poultry plants. Maybe you could post a few old articles from older 1910’s- 20’s poultry mags. I have got to finish the Dollar Hen. Good idea here.
Jamie
Everything Jull writes is good, though disease management and nutrition have moved on. Never use an old-time remedy without looking up the ingredients to see if they’re poisonous or carcinogenic, because they usually are. And until the mid-Fifties, the diets tended to be nutritionally deficient in one way or another. The cool thing was that the poultry scientists knew this and said so. No denial there. I like that.
I’d love to republish Jull’s books. They’re gold mines. Jull’s books are still under copyright, so I can’t republish them unless I can find his heirs, a process that is likely to cost more than the book is worth. Copyright lasts so long these days that this sort of thing is typical — none one knows who the copyright holder is, least of all the copyright holders themselves.
Robert