MANAGEMENT OF FOWLS 



109 



keeping fowls in small, bare yards depended in any case upon 

 the business capacity of the poultry keeper. 



Concentration not profitable. Very few people who have not 

 had experience in growing large numbers of poultry under both 

 good and bad conditions can be made to understand how futile 

 industry and business methods are when many other things 

 which affect results are unfavorable. Even when the obstacles 

 to the application of intensive methods on a large scale are 

 pointed out to them, most novices imagine that the difficulties 

 are exaggerated for the purpose of discouraging them. They 

 think that the successful poultry keeper wishes to discourage 



FIG. 109. Commercial laying house at New Jersey Experiment Station. 

 (Photograph from the station) 



competition, and that the person who has failed does not want 

 to see any one else succeed, and so warns others to let such 

 projects alone. Those who have been very successful in their 

 first efforts in a small way seldom lack perfect confidence in 

 their ability to make good on any scale if once they are in a 

 position to devote themselves entirely to this work. 



For some seventy or eighty years, but more especially for 

 the last thirty or forty years, the most conspicuous phase of 

 the poultry industry in America has been the widespread and 

 continuous movement to develop large plants of this character. 

 There has been no time, for a quarter of a century, when poultry 

 plants of this kind, which to the uninitiated appeared to be highly 



