A very profitable farm has arisen out of a desert.
Though the cattle matter most and are the essence of the farm, the newer addition of the narrow mobile poultry pens most strikes the eye. They are daily moved on their eccentric wheels in a straight line across the down. They advance over successive acres in a line many hundred yards in length, and leave behind them as certain a fertility as the Nile flood. A man and boy, with unlaborious work, and some 3,000 hens perform the miracle. Scientific investigators into the maladies of poultry have found the birds—always on fresh grass and always in the open air—to be singularly free from disease, as the open-air cows are singularly free from tubercle. An apostle of the intensive cultivation of poultry came to see and went away to change all his methods. There is no waste of food. It is indeed ludicrous to watch rooks and starlings and sparrows staring disconsolately at the feeding hens and the little grain and mash troughs behind the wire.
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