No. 4.] POULTRY KEEPING. 117 



branches of poultry culture have rarely been made profit- 

 able as all-year-round exclusive occupations. It is Avorth 

 while to note and remember this, because some very plausi- 

 ble arguments in favor of extreme specialization in poultry 

 culture are sometimes advanced, and their partial presenta- 

 tion of the facts is often so alluring that many people are 

 persuaded into doing what is soon found to be unprofitable. 

 When a man who knows little or nothing about poultry 

 and as little about growing farm crops writes to ask me if it 

 is possible for him to stock a farm with poultry, conduct it 

 as a poultry farm, and at the same time produce on the farm 

 the food for the poultry, I answer most emphatically that it 

 is not, — not for him. When a good poultrvman who is no 

 farmer asks a similar question, I do not feel warranted to 

 encourage him to try to do more, at first, than grow a part 

 of the food for the fowls, preferably such things as cabbage, 

 mangels, turnips, grain to be fed in the sheaf, not attempt- 

 ing the growing of grain crops on a large scale until he is 

 more sure of his ground. But the case of the farmer en- 

 gaging in or extending operations in poultry keeping is 

 quite different. He is generally somewhat of an expert in 

 crop growing, and, even though he may not have given 

 special attention to poultry culture before, is apt to be 

 pretty well grounded in general methods of caring for live 

 stock. He, therefore, is in a position to begin at once to 

 combine poultry keeping with his other farming. 



Methods of Poultry Keeping compared. 

 It was a surprise and something of a disappointment to 

 me, coming from a western State, to find so many of the 

 farmers of New England, who were giving special attention 

 to poultry, adopting the back-yard methods of the city poul- 

 tr} r keeper, thus throwing away some of the positive advan- 

 tages the farm offers the poultry keeper, and taking instead 

 the doubtful advantages of modern intensive methods of 

 poultry culture. I would not be understood as decrying these 

 intensive methods. They are good methods, — under some 

 conditions they may be the best methods ; but they are not — 

 except when greatly modified (that is, when less intensive") — • 



