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while the average profit per hen figures large, the poultry keeper's 

 pay for his time figures small. It is a general fact, easily veri- 

 fied, that the poultry keepers who get the most satisfactory net 

 results in money in most cases get only very ordinary egg yields. 

 Their results are satisfactory, their work is workmanlike, and 

 their venture stands on a business basis, because their modest re- 

 sults give good pay for time and effort required to produce them. 



The man who has only a little land and can use it all for poultry 

 and could use none of it for anything else will find intensive 

 methods of poultry keeping the best for him ; but I am convinced, 

 from what I have seen of such plants, that as a rule the proprie- 

 tors work harder for what they get, and are more tied to their 

 work by the inevitable daily routine, than if they had more room 

 and could use an easier system ; and I rarely find one of these 

 poultry keepers who would not gladly change to a location where 

 he could have more room and an easier system. But, having 

 once adopted the intensive system, a man whose land does not 

 furnish room for a change cannot often make a change of systems 

 except by changing location and making sacrifices he cannot afford 

 to make. So he goes on with the intensive system, keeping many 

 fowls on a small plot of ground, and doing for the fowls or work- 

 ing to compel them to do many of the things they do for themselves 

 under more natural conditions. It is only so that in his circum- 

 stances and by his methods he can make a day's wages by a day's 

 work. 



By the colony system the owner of a large farm will distribute 

 his fowls over the farm, and, by giving them room and range, 

 relieves himself of the necessity of doing for them many of the 

 things which the poultry keeper who uses intensive methods must 

 do daily. 



To illustrate : When fowls are confined in small yards, the grass 

 is so quickly killed out, or at best so soiled by the fowls, that they 

 eat only a little of it, — and that little under protest, — and do 

 not get green food in quality and quantity proportionate to their 

 needs, unless it is especially given to them. To get green stuff 

 for a considerable number of fowls so confined sometimes taxes 

 the ingenuity of the keeper, besides consuming time and occasion- 

 ing more or less cash outlay. 



Similarly with meat food. Fowls confined to small yards — 

 either yards that are actually small or those that are small for the 

 number of fowls occupying them — soon exhaust the supply of 

 worms and grubs near the surface, and the occasional fiying in- 

 sects which come within their reach are as nothing compared to 

 what they would get if foraging over a good range. To compen- 



