POULJ RT- CRAFT. 259 



the eggs and poultry sold amount each year to enough to be an item of some importance. 

 The figures of the last census allow an average value of less than one dollar per week for 

 each farm in the United States this for both eggs and poultry. Large figures do not 

 always seem so large when analyzed. It doesn't take a very large flock or a very pro- 

 ductive one to produce that much. 



The census figures take no account of poultry not on farms except where fowls 

 enough are kept to require one man's time, or its equivalent. Yet there are millions of 

 small flocks, and many thousands of large ones, in cities, towns, and villages which 

 cannot properly be excluded from any enumeration of our poultry resources. Indeed, it 

 is well known to those engaged in the various occupations which have developed out of 

 the necessities of poultry culture that it is upon the town and village poultry keepers 

 rather than upon the more numerous poultry keepers on farms that these allied occupa- 

 tions and industries depend for sustenance. 



As a rule it is not the farmers who read papers, who buy supplies of various kinds, 

 incubators, brooders, bone cutters, feed troughs, drinking fountains, meat scraps, oyster 

 shell, charcoal, grit, cut clover, etc., who support the hundreds of poultry shows and 

 the scores of poultry journals with their thousands of advertisers. A few farmers are 

 interested in these things the many are not. They get their support from the city and 

 town poultry keepers, and from only a fraction of these, the greater number being quite 

 indifferent. In short, the shows, the journals, and the allied industries depend for sup- 

 port principally upon that small proportion of town poultry keepers, and still smaller 

 proportion of farm poultry keepers which takes an active, intelligent, and progressive 

 interest in deriving pleasure or profit, or pleasure and profit from poultry. 



For these people is provided a literature which discusses the subjects of interest to them 

 in detail and more exhaustively than any other branch of agriculture or stock interest, or 

 any recreation having its own special literature. They support nearly four hundred 

 special poultry shows each year. Their requirements for the animal food which forms 

 but a small percentage of the diet of their fowls create a demand to which large packing 

 companies find it worth while to cater, because it furnishes a market for some most 

 important by-products which otherwise would be sold as fertilizer, and it is a cash 

 market, while fertilizers are sold on long credit. 



Within a few years there have sprung up several scores of incubator manufactories, 

 and though it would seem that the business must inevitably soon be overdone, so far 

 the demand has been such that it has absorbed practically everything offered it. 

 There may there probably will come a time when the supply will exceed the demand, 

 and when the concerns that lack financial stability will be shaken down, but the number 

 of poultry keepers not yet interested in efforts to make poultry pay as well as possible is 

 so great, and the rate of increase in interest so rapid that he would be a rash man who 

 would venture to mark bounds for the development of these great industries which have 

 grown up with the general improvement of the condition of small stocks of poultry. 



In writing of the subject of profits in poultry in the paragraph devoted to that matter 

 in the first chapter of this book the writer purposely refrained from saying anything of 

 the volume of business done by or of the probable annual net incomes of the most 

 successful poultry keepers, because these exceptional cases should not be used in making 

 estimates of probable returns from poultry, and it was thought best not to introduce 

 anything there that would divert the mind of the reader from the statements made about 

 usual probable results and returns. Beginners are always apt at making estimates on 

 the supposition that they will do at least nearly as well as the best, and the beginners' 

 estimates are almost always away beyond his actual results. However, it is natural that 

 everyone interested in making poultry profitable should want to know something of how 

 much the most successful poultrymen make, and right that the information should be 

 given them. 



