At the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all Perry County farms kept chickens, usually tended by women, with chicks raised first in a warm brooder house and later moved to a chicken house, while eggs were collected daily, stored, and picked up weekly for cash. Many farms raised grain as a cash crop or milked five to ten cows by hand for income, cooling milk in spring or pump houses before a milkman collected it. Even farmers who had bought tractors often still used horses or mules for planting because they compacted the soil less. Farm work was labor-intensive and included plowing, mowing, raking hay, shocking wheat and oats, and cutting corn, with corn harvesting requiring several hands to husk stalks and throw ears into a wagon, or sometimes leaving ears on shocked stalks in the field until animals needed feed. As the century progressed, advances in genetics, nutrition, and equipment brought faster livestock maturation, greater productivity, and more specialization, with many hog and poultry growers contracting with large centralized companies while beef and dairy production often remained independent. Dairy stayed a major agricultural activity in western Perry County, and improved equipment for cutting, chopping, and storing corn and silage tripled forage production from the mid-1920s, while dairy herds grew from five to ten cows in the 1920s to well over eighty cows. In 1840 Perry County had 3,600 farmers, 53,000 livestock, 720,000 bushels of grain, and 4,000 horses for production power, while in 2012 it had 890 farmers, 337,000 livestock, 2,480,000 bushels of grain, 220,000 tons of forage, and 2,000 tractors. The 1927 census counted 1,951 Perry County farms averaging 100 acres and reported conveniences such as running water, furnace heat, milking machines, automobiles, trucks, tractors, phones, radios, silos, and electricity.