Judging Poultry for Production

How to tell, by looking at a bird, whether she is earning her feed: the Cornell method for picking out the layers worth keeping and culling the rest.

Judging Poultry for Production's subject is selection: the physical signs that separate a hen returning a profit from one that is not. Rice works through the physiology of egg laying, the pigment that drains from a bird's beak and shanks as the season goes on, the timing and pattern of the moult, the shape and set of the head, and the way production spreads across the year.

The premise still holds. Birds on the same ration return wildly different numbers of eggs, and a practised eye can tell which is which. Written while American egg production was industrialising fast, it is also a clear window on how the modern laying flock came to be chosen.

This edition features:

• The physiology of egg laying and what a season of production does to a bird's pigment and plumage
• A method for reading the moult, the head and the body to judge what a hen will return
• Guidance on selecting the birds to breed from and removing those that do not repay their feed
• Useful background for anyone with a laying flock and for readers of agricultural history