The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, December 8, 1901, Page 21

SUNDAY CALL. THE finally do. Twent re were mot more ens to be ed or two c Petaluma a shipped from that the other towns of combined, and the vary in size from a back red acres or more. No person hav- p of land to sp is without a few figures following make the egg appear @ very much more dig- \pation than it is popularly sup- ents from Petaluma last year 2,000 “dozen eggs, 30,000 dozen of X dozen egEs i ovt in one/day from ket alone. More than erze and poultry used come from this tors. For Ss rancisco yea of brogders has been the otherwise worth- ided and o drive through it now the the the egg business more promising wit s near colony of 10 to 15 nickens. are scattered over many acre. t the green of a foothill 4 flutt the man »m the fead house with horse round - of. the .t : feed and gathering he goes. The leng: of eourse, with of a living s-.out a circuit of a liy fed only once a ion of » lunch of green =8 feed at night. The sled is loaded with four barrels of water, five sacks of wheat* and & mash composed of three sacks of coarse middlings and forty pounds of either cut green bone or ground fresh meat, which is mixed with skim milk that has been allowed to sour. On a big ranch it takes from 6 a. m. until 11 o’clock to complete the feeding and watering, and % sufficlent quantity is put out to last twenty-four hours. Seventy-five hens are roosted in each house, and the houses are built on runners. The colonies are from 400 to 500 feet apart and the hens being well supplied with feed, are content and do not wander rom one colony to another. An interesting feature of this open col- ony system is that each fowl knows and goes to unerringly its own particular col- ony house for roosting at night. No man is considered a professional poultry er about Petaluma unless he at least a thousand hens. Anotheff of keeping the fowls is in a continc houses with wire-inclosed hed; hut the scattered col- stem seems to be the favorite, and 150 the more heaithful and gives bel. in fertility and vigor. v of the women of Petaluma are y feeding the chickens. In 1900 $20,000 spent with the merchants of the town for chicken feed. This was out- side and above the feedstuff which some of the larger poultry raisers import from n Francisco. Small oyster shells are bought in this town of hens by the schooner load to furnish the biddies with A SMALL Loap oF EGGSHELLS -~ oNLY 45,000 ! < BarreED PL>MourH Rocw the lime wherewith to produce a proper eggshell. The cost of feeding one hen weil, and strike the happy medium of success in feeding, is about 65 cents per year— OF EGG COLLECTORS.. from that to $1. A man will go into a buy his wife a silk zown. store in Petaluma and buy $500 worth of chicken feed and pay cash for it as read- jly and perhaps more so than he would 4 —r, B> HBAL.y PET PHoros THE bylb FASHIONED. HEMN-HOUSE *+- to small producers on an average of $3000 per day for eggs and poultry. Producers get cash almost daily for their products and can sell one bird or one dozen eggs to a lively lot of competi- tors' for cash at the same rate that a thousand birds or a thousand dozen eggs would be bought for. The Petaluma. poultryman sells his eggs, he don’t consign them. In the spring sca- son San Francisco and other dealérs send to the town, and their agents may be often found out on the country roads try- nig to induce the incoming poultrymen to sign contracts to sell their products to them for the entire year. Many small producers ship eggs and poultry direct to San Francisco hotels and restaurants. Twenty' to thirty coops_of poultry are shipped each day from Petaluma to the San Francisco market. Poultry and eggs to the. value of $1500 are the daily ship- ments from the town at present, which figure is raised to $2500 from April to July. Wells-Fargo ghipped through their of- fice last year. ffom Petaluma 11,000 cases of eggs and 6000 boxes of butter, and the Petaluma Express Company is handling more than 100 cases per day. The best argument &s to profits is the Spot cash is the basis on which trading fact that everybody in the town is in (he is done in Petaluma, and the hens have poultry business in some form, and they made it so. The local merchants pay out all stay in it and enlarge each year. The 4 average profit per hen is §1 to $1 50 net per annum. One man about three miles from Petaluma has succeeded by special care, neatness and good selection of fowls, in making his hens pay a trifle over 2 each per annum. If the eggshells were only as valuable as the eggs what a duplicate store of riches would accrue to many. The in- cubators leave behind them a vast num- ber of shells, which are carted away by the wagon load for use in the tanneries, or are crushed and fed to their near rela- tives, the chicks. Perhaps the biggest wagon load on record was made by the shells left by 45,000 chicks hatched by in- cubator. Encased in wire netting they re- sembled a case of huge popcorn. The average poultry ranch is of about ten acres, on which can be kept 1500 hens, with plenty of room for a horse and to raise kale and cabbage for dry season food for the chickens, and plenty of bar- ley. One _of the biggest income producers near Petaluma is the Freeman ranch at Fallon, with 7000 hens, bringing in $%0 per day. The Strantz brothers, known as the most progressive poultrymen, having the prettiest ranch in the surrounding coun- try, with over 1500 thoroughbred white Leghorns, make 3$20 net per day. The Purvine brothers have among them the largest poultry interests of the county, perhaps, there being seven or eight of the brothers, each having a ranch with from 3000 to 6000 hens. The fas of W. Purvine contains 313 acres. A few people go in for fancy breeds, but there is practically no one engaged in raising table fowl to any extent. H. R. Campbell makes a spe- cialty of barred Plymouth Rocks and has some of the finest in Sonoma County. Many poultrymen make a specialty of hatching by the thousand to sell to others to keep up their flocks. In 1880 much wheat was shipped from Petaluma; now twice the quantity is shipped into the town to be sold for chicken feed. Tem years ago anything could be sold for feed; now the demand is for choice mill- ing wheat. The dealers buy in immense quantities’ and can sell low. It may be said that the Petaluma hen practically lays her egg on Front street, San Francisco. By the steamer Gold cases of eggs are delivered In San Francisco every day to dealers and the empty cases returned to Petaluma for 20 cents per case. This is less than the cartage would be from the ferry to the buyer in San Franecisco. The dealers’ aim is to make one-half to one cent per dozen on eggs shipped. The pro- ducer gets the balance. Eggs marked “Petaluma’” readily bring five cents per dozen more than those from other sections. Petaluma eggs keep bet- ter than others in cold storage, and the big lant run there by Dodge, Sweeney Co, 1s no small help to the poultryman. The company is now shipping séventy-five or eighty cases per day, and last year in competition shut out 17,000 cases of Eastern storage eggs from the San Francisco market. The storage room of this company in Petaluma will accommodate 10,000 cases of eggs. Though many broilers are marketed in San Francisco every year from Petaluma, yet 247 carloads of poultry came into the San Fran market from the East last year, with from 5000 to 6000 fowls in a car, which would suggest that some one might make a profitable specialty of ta- ble fowl raising in this town of Sonoma County. When San Francisco needs a big order of eggs and poultry at once for shipment to Honolulu or for any other purpose Petaluma is drawn upon at ad- vanced prices. The difference in the cost of transporta- tion and the certainty of best values in Petaluma as compared to other more remote, or not so naturally favored local- itles, amounts to the saving of an emor- mous tax. Figure it on a medium sized ranch, one ‘that sells six cases of eggs per week and saves say ten cents per case on his freight and gets one cent per dozen more for eggs than is paid for the product of other sections for a run of say ten years. One half a million of hens within a ra- case on freight and gets one cent per ter fed and give the egg collector a chance oftemer than in any other spot. Truly, Peialuma and vicinity musg be the ideal hennery of the world.