SELLING THE BY-PRODUCT 167 



Street commission houses to palm off as fresh, 

 home-grown food. 



Although we make sales en gros, as when we 

 sell a cow or a couple of pigs, a lot of the business 

 has always been direct to the consumer. It is a 

 business dealing in a large number of small things, 

 which is a diametric opposite of standard farm 

 practice. Unless you are familiar with that type 

 of business you will be skeptical like the average 

 farmer of the way the volume rolls up. Take eggs 

 for example. During the year just ending my hens 

 produced a little over eight hundred dozen. Yet 

 the fact that the eggs do not appear by the great 

 gross but a dozen or two at most three or four 

 per day, makes egg production look insignificant. 

 Nevertheless we sold nearly six hundred dozen- 

 all a dozen or two, which is to say a few cents, at 

 a time. 



All together, in five years we have not had over 

 thirty-six different customers, and of these not six 

 could be described as regular. Yet they have been 

 enough to make a difference in the net cost of liv- 

 ing. Neither deliveries nor collections present any 

 problem: most of the business is cash; either the 

 customers come and take their goods away or de- 

 livery is incidental to some other errand. The 

 occasions when a special trip must be made to fill 

 an order are rare. The total of bad debts in five 

 years has not been five dollars. 



