Milo Hastings - Chicken Husbandry

Chicken Husbandry

Hastings’ interest in chickens began as a teenager on his family’s farm. In college at Kansas State Agricultural College he began their poultry husbandry program. He built a new kind of chicken house based on plans from the Maine Experiment Station. It was a “curtain-front” house, the idea being a big frame covered with heavy white cloth on the south side instead of glass windows. The cloth let the water vapor pass through to keep the house drier, but was as warm as glass. In 1904 while still at Kansa State he began the first official egg laying contest in America.

It was during his college days he got the idea for the forced-draft chicken incubator. The goal was to incubate eggs in large numbers. Up to that time eggs were incubated by the dozens. Milo’s goal, later appearing on his stationery, was the million egg incubator. The technical problem was the control of heat and humidity. Eggs in the early stages of incubation take in heat. In the later stages they give off heat. Milo’s idea was an incubator with eggs in various stages of incubation with a fan to move the excess heat of the later stages to the earlier stages all while maintaining the proper humidity. He proposed the idea to the Department of Agriculture where he was working after he completed college in 1906. The idea was rejected as impractical.

The Department did accept his 1909 patent (Serial No. 911,875) for a cold-storage evaporimeter. Hastings recognized the importance of maintaining proper humidity in the cold storage of eggs. He wrote Circular 149, "A Cold-Storage Evaporimeter", describing the device and Circular 140 on "The Egg Trade of the United States."

In 1909 while still working for the Department (he left in 1910) he wrote The Dollar Hen, which became the classic guide to free-range chicken farming. The book was published in 1911 by the National Poultry Publishing Company. It was republished in 2003 by Norton Creek Press and is also available on the Internet through Project Gutenberg. The book is full of practical advice and Hastings’ witticisms:

On the most successful New England poultry farms, warm houses for hens have been given up. Hens fare better out of doors in Virginia than they do in New England, but make more profit out of doors anywhere than they will shut up in houses. If your climate will not permit your hen to live out doors get out of the climate or get out of the hen business.

There is, however, a vast difference in the kind of out-of-doors. The running stream with its fringe of trees, brush and rank growing grass, forms daylight quarters for the hen par excellence. Rank growing crops, fodder piled against the fences, a board fence on the north side of the lot, or little sheds made by propping a platform against a stake, will all help. A place out of the wind for the hens to dust and sun and be sociable is what is wanted, and what must be provided, preferably by Nature, if not by Nature then by the poultryman.

Hastings’ serialized portions of The Dollar Hen as “Home Course in Poultry Keeping”. The series was distributed by the American Press Association and appeared in several papers in 1910 and 1911.

Hastings made three tries at building a large commercial forced-draft chicken incubator. In 1911 he built a 6000 egg incubator in Brooklyn, New York, for a Walter B. Davis. An advertising booklet “Davis Poultry Farm” described operations on the farm. Later in 1911 Hastings went to Muskogee, Oklahoma and built a 30,000 egg incubator in a business arrangement with a Lieber, a local lawyer and business man. In the spring of 1912 Milo went to Petaluma, California, then the chicken capitol of the West, trying to generate interest in a million egg incubator. With interest lacking he then went to Port O’Conner, Texas and built a 150,000 egg incubator with financial support from a local businessman. All these business ventures were undercapitalized and none were a commercial success.

While still working on the Brooklyn incubator, Milo filed for a patent, Serial No. 624,885 for “A Hatchery for the Eggs of Domestic Fowl”. (The application was witnessed by Edgar Chambless, Hastings' urban planning mentor.) Supporting documents were filed in July, 1911 and further amended by counsel on May 24, 1912. The patent was rejected, the rejection appealed, and on Dec 30, 1912 the appeal was rejected. The patent application was eventually abandoned.

In 1918 a Smith got patent Serial No. 1,262,860 for basically the same invention. The Smith patent was challenged in both the United States and Canada. The matter was in the courts for years. At first the challenges were unsuccessful. Then a new strategy was tried: that the Smith patent was invalid because of Hastings’ prior art. So Hastings had a career as an expert witness. This was the only money he ever made off his incubator invention. The matter wound up in the Supreme Court and was decided in Smith v. Hall, 301 U.S. 216 (1937). The decision, confirming Milo’s prior art, was writing by Justice Harlan Stone, soon to become chief justice. The decision tracks the evolution of Milo’s incubator ideas and his whereabouts.

Hastings was also interested in industrializing the raising of chickens. In a Scientific American of September 18, 1915 he detailed how to raise poultry on a manufacturing basis.

Hastings’ final major poultry activity was raising chickens at his place in Tarrytown, New York. By 1928 he had 10,000 birds selling the eggs in New York City. Then in 1929 a chicken cholera epidemic wiped the flock out in a matter of weeks. Milo discusses this disease in The Dollar Hen. His discussion of its deadliness is all too prophetic.