an of any other undertakings is to be explained
by the facts that as a business, it is new, that many of those who
engage in it are inexperienced, but most particularly because
practically all the literature published on the subject has been
written by or written in the interest of those who had something to
sell to the poultryman. As a result the figures of production are
generally given higher than the facts warrant. The investor, be he
ever so shrewd a man, builds upon these promises and when he finds
his production lower, is caught with an excessive investment and a
complicated system on his hands, which make all profits impossible
and which cannot readily be adapted to the new conditions.

Estimates of poultry profits are quite common, but there are few
published figures showing the results that are actually obtained
under practical working conditions. In this volume I will try to
give the facts of what is being and can be actually accomplished.

Various Poultry Products.

In considering the poultry industry we must first get some idea of
the various articles produced for sale.

It is common knowledge that the large meat packer can undersell the
small packer because the by-products, such as bristles, which are
wasted by the local killer, are a source of income to the large
packer. Now, this does not infer that the small packer is shiftless
and neglects to save his bristles, but that on the scale on which he
operates it would cost him more to save the bristles than he could
realize on them.

So it is with poultry farming. For illustration: A visionary writer
in a leading poultry paper, not long ago, advised poultrymen to
store eggs. In reality this would be the height of folly, unless the
poultryman had his own retail store. In the first place profit on
cold storage eggs, when all expenses are paid, will not average a
half a cent a dozen; in the second place, the small lot would be
relatively troublesome and expensive to handle, and in the third
place, small lots of cold storage eggs are looked upon with
suspicion and do not find ready sale. So we see that cold storage
eggs are not a suitable product for the small poultryman to handle.

A second illustration of an ill-chosen combination might be taken in
the case of a duck farmer who attempts to produce broilers. The
principal difficulty of the duck business is that of getting
sufficient intelligent labor in the rush season. The chief expense
of investment