d are undoubtedly here
to stay.

The suggestion has been made by those who have failed or have seen
others fail in the poultry business, that success was impossible
because of the destructive competition of the farmer, whose expense
of production is small. Herein lies a great truth and a great error.
The farmer's cost of production is small, much smaller than that on
most of the book-made poultry farms--but the inference that the
poultryman's cost of production cannot be lowered below that of the
farmer is a different statement.

The farm of our grandfather was a very diversified institution. It
contained in miniature a woolen mill, a packing house, a cheese
factory, perhaps a shoe factory and a blacksmith shop. One by one
these industries have been withdrawn from general farm-life, and
established as independent businesses. Likewise our dairy farms, our
fruit farms, and our market gardens have been segregated from the
general farm. This simply means that manufacturing cloth, or cheese,
or producing milk, or tomatoes can be done at less cost in separate
establishments than upon a general farm.

The general farm will always grow poultry for home consumption, and
will always have some surplus to sell. With the surplus, the
poultryman must compete. His only hope of successful competition is
production at lower cost. Can this be done? It is being done, and
the numbers of people who are doing it are increasing, but they
spend little money at poultry shows, or with the advertisers of
poultry papers, and hence are little heard of in the poultry world.

The people whose names and faces are in the poultry papers are
frequently there only while their money lasts. They write long
articles and show pictures of many houses and yards to prove that
there is money in the poultry business, but if one should keep their
names and put the question to them five years hence, a great many
could say, "Yes, there is money in the poultry business; mine is in
it."

Such people and such plants do not get the cost of production down
below the farmer's level. Between these two classes of poultry
plants, the writer hopes in this work to show the distinction.

CHAPTER II

WHAT BRANCH OF THE POULTRY BUSINESS?

The chicken business is especially prone to failure from a disregard
of the common essential relation of cost and selling price necessary
to the success of any business. That this should be more true of the
poultry business th