ide market for
it at 35 cents a bushel, it would cost $3.12; the alfalfa would be worth
$1.45, and the vegetables probably 65 cents, under like conditions,
making a total of $5.22 as a possible gross value of the food which the
hog has eaten. The gross value of these things, however, is far above
their net value when one considers time and expense of sale. The hog
saves all this trouble by tucking under his skin slow-selling remnants
of farm products and making of them finished assets which can be turned
into cash at a day's notice.

To feed the hogs on the scale now planned, I had to provide for
something like 7000 bushels of grain, chiefly corn and oats, 100 tons of
alfalfa, and an equal amount of vegetables, chiefly sugar beets and
mangel-wurzel. Certainly the widow's land would be needed.

The poultry had also outgrown my original plans, and I had built with
reference to my larger views. There were five houses on the poultry lot,
each 200 feet long, and each divided into ten equal pens. Four of these
houses were for the laying hens, which were divided into flocks of 40
each; while the other house was for the growing chickens and for
cockerels being fattened for market.

There were now on hand more than 1300 pullets and hens, and I instructed
Sam to run his incubator overtime that season, so as to fill our houses
by autumn. I should need 800 or 900 pullets to make our quota good, for
most of the older hens would have to be disposed of in the autumn,--all
but about 200, which would be kept until the following spring to breed
from.

I believe that a three-year-old hen that has shown the egg habit is the
best fowl to breed from, and it is the custom at Four Oaks to reserve
specially good pens for this purpose. The egg habit is unquestionably as
much a matter of heredity as the milk or the fat producing habit, and
should be as carefully cultivated. With this end in view, Sam added
young cockerels to four of his best-producing flocks on January 1, and
by the 15th he was able to start his incubators.

Breeding and feeding for eggs is on the same principle as feeding and
breeding for milk. It is no more natural for a hen to lay eggs for human
consumption than it is for the robin to do so, or for the cow to give
more milk than is sufficient for her calf. Man's necessity has made
demands upon both cow and hen, and man's intelligence has converted
individualists into socialists in both of these races. They no longer
live