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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 overdevelop 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. 



Two Illustrations. 



Returning to the question of the poultry farmer's growing his 

 grain, or the grain-growing farmer feeding his grain to poultry, 

 I want to tell a little about two farms which I have visited within 

 a few months, visiting them within a few days of each other, which 

 furnish excellent illustrations of the matter under consideration, 

 one from the farmer's, the other from the poultryman's, point of 

 view. 



The first is a farm of 200 acres, in New York State. For a 

 number of years this farm was run by its present owner and a 

 brother as a grain and grass farm, and was run at a loss. In the 

 effort to make the farm pay, they took up Holstein cattle, and 

 after a few years began to find the balances on the ledger going to 

 the right side. At some time during the early experience in mak- 

 ing a stock farm the other brother withdrew, leaving the one who 

 still owns it in full control. Becoming interested in poultry and 

 finding it profitable, this man built up a large poultry plant, and 

 increased the poultry stock until last winter he had at the begin- 

 ning of the season about 3,000 laying hens. The poultry plant 

 has been some six years or more in developing, and in that time 

 the stock of cattle has been very much reduced; it has, indeed, 

 been reduced too much ; and the owner of the farm told me that, 

 while he considered it more profitable to feed his grain to the 



