424 BOAED OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



returned as manure to feed the land. Assuming that a cer- 

 tain farm is to be conducted on this principle, the next 

 question to be decided is : what kind or kinds of live stock 

 shall be used in converting the bulky produce of the land 

 into more condensed forms, of greater value and more easily 

 handled ? 



There have been many farmers in this section who, when 

 they became interested in poultry, and found it, perhaps, 

 more profitable than anything else they had tried on their 

 farms, gave all their attention to the poultry, to the neglect, 

 if not to the entire abandonment, of every other branch of 

 farm work. So far as my observation goes, such men have 

 generally found it necessary to retrace their steps, and 

 gradually get back to a combination in which some other 

 branches of farm work were quite equally important with 

 poultry. The reasons which bring them back to more di- 

 versified farming have already been stated. They are the 

 same as those which suggest to a poultryman who is not a 

 farmer, after he has had experience in watching some of the 

 leaks in an exclusive poultry business, the advisability of 

 extending operations into side lines which will take care of 

 those leakages, even if to do so requires some curtailment 

 of the principal, or poultry, business. The farmer, because 

 of his previous training, is likely to see and act more quickly 

 in such cases than another man would. 



When one branch of the work on a farm is proving more 

 profitable than others, there is a temptation to develop it at 

 the expense of the others. This, to be sure, is in the line of 

 natural development, but even naturally things over-develop 

 sometimes ; and in such cases we have to be careful to avoid 

 developing a favored line of work so fast and so far that the 

 change of conditions thus created reacts on the profits from 

 this line of work. For such over-development not only 

 means failure of income from the lines of work abandoned, 

 but it means that there will soon be a reduction of profit, as 

 compared with cost and labor, in the overdone branch itself. 

 By overdoing one branch, that balance of interests, the proper 

 adjustment of which means the maximum of profit from the 

 minimum of investment and labor, is disturbed. 



