Flatlands Tutors Come To You

Today’s Flatlands is mostly a residential community, but it wasn’t always that way. The Dutch established it as a farming community as early as 1636, when two Dutchmen bought 15,000 acres of land to grow crops, potentially including corn, squash, potato bean, marsh hay, beans, and tobacco. The community kept its agricultural flavor for several centuries, even into the twentieth century, when a man named Murray Weiss started a unique business: eggs directly from the chicken to the consumer.

Weiss, who named his farm Weiss-Way Egg Farm, learned that poultry producers earned slim profits because of all the middlemen, wholesalers, retailers, and brokers involved. A graduate of New Jersey State Agricultural School and a former farmer, Weiss decided to shake up the existing system and establish an indoor poultry farm. He bought a building on Fairfield Avenue, which today is Flatlands Avenue, and built individual cubbies. He bought 600 hens, posted a huge sign that said, “Eggs Laid While You Wait,” and waited to see what would happen.

As expected, the sign drew unbelievers, who couldn’t believe they’d be able to buy eggs so fresh. But Weiss’s vision worked, and customers raved about the quality of the eggs. Weiss had to expand his plant several times to keep up with demand. At its peak, the building housed 3,500 leghorn chickens who laid 130 dozen eggs each day, all sold directly to consumers.

Weiss raised baby chicks in his own hatchery, immunizing them at three months old against fowl pox and bronchitis. At the age of 5-1/2 months, each one was transferred to a cubicle and given a chart to record production. If a hen failed to lay 175 eggs in her first year, she was sold at the city markets for meat. Hens with healthy egg productions typically dropped their production in the second year and again in the third. At that point, the hen would be sold for meat.

The secret to the high egg quality was the way the chickens were treated. Weiss could keep a close eye on his chickens because of the way the facility was laid out: three layers of one hundred cages each, with only one chicken per cage.

Weiss also learned that eggs were fresher if they immediately rolled down a chute into a cooling basket. This was a big advantage to raising chickens indoors, because outdoor chickens tended to sit on their eggs and keep them warm for a long time, he learned.

Weiss used his knowledge of husbandry and science to test his ideas about maximizing egg production and passed his knowledge down to his assistant. In the same way, Flatlands tutors can pass their knowledge down to local students, helping them with time management and processes for studying. Hiring a Flatlands tutor is a great way for students to get ahead in school.