Most farms kept small flocks, from a few birds up to about 200, and for most of them, the point of chickens was eggs birds were sold for meat only when hens were spent or when chicks hatched out male. The January 1921 issue of the American Poultry Journal carried six pages of small-type classified ads featuring dozens of varieties from hundreds of breeders nationwide: Single-Comb Anconas, Silver Wyandottes, Brown Leghorns, Black Langshans, Light Brahmas, Sicilian Buttercups, Golden Campines, White-Laced Red Cornish, Silver-Gray Dorkings, Silver-Spangled Hamburgs, Mottled Houdans, Mahogany Orloffs, White Minorcas, Speckled Sussex. Which type of chicken was a complicated question, because there were so many to choose from. They were mostly small properties, growing a mix of crops and animals, and they almost all raised chickens. In 1925 there were more than six million farms in the United States, compared with two million now. In this excerpt of Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, author Maryn McKenna chronicles the rise of the backyard chicken to dietary staple.
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