FOOD, PURE FOOD, AND FRESH FOOD 2$ 



on any considerable investment in our poultry-yard. 

 Unless experienced personal guidance is available, no 

 amount of mere reading can prevent the beginner 

 from making mistakes. If the initial venture is a large 

 one, the mistake may prove financially disastrous. 

 Some years after we moved to the country, a small, 

 completely equipped farm near us was purchased by 

 another city migrant. Ill-health and inability to keep 

 up his work in the city (he was a newspaper man) 

 had forced this move upon him. It was his idea to 

 raise chickens for a living. He, too, started out know- 

 ing nothing about chickens and having to rely upon 

 book knowledge for information. But unlike the 

 Borsodi family, he started out on a large scale, buying 

 500 day-old chicks from commercial hatcheries to 

 begin. The poultry books told him that the chicks 

 were to be fed grit and water before they received 

 their first regular feed. To a countryman, the word 

 grit would have been self-explanatory. No doubt the 

 author of the bulletin upon which this man relied did 

 not feel it necessary to explain what grit was, or, if 

 there was such an explanation in the book, its signifi- 

 cance did not register on our neighbor. At any rate, 

 what he did do was to go to his barns and look for a 

 sack of grit. Having found what he thought was 

 grit, he proceeded to feed it to his chickens as in- 

 structed. Within a short time the chickens began to 

 die right and left. He began to lose chicks in batches 

 of fifty in a single day. And he had hardly any of his 

 original 500 chicks left when he discovered that what 



