No. 4.] EGG PRODUCTION. 69 



handled. There is a man in your audience here to-day, one 

 of your own number, whom I have known for several years, 

 who is making good, clear profit on the sale of eggs and 

 roasters. I can refer you to farms in New York State — 

 and if I were sufficiently familiar with your State and its 

 farms I know I could say the same of them — where hens 

 have been kept in an orchard where large crops of apples or 

 other fruit are grown that could not be grown a few. years 

 ago. I have seen orchards nearly broken down with their 

 loads of fruit where hens have run for a few years, whereas 

 orchards wdthout live stock, right on the same farm in ad- 

 jacent fields, are still unthrifty and unproductive. I have 

 seen " volunteer " fields of clover follow naturally without 

 seeding where hens have pastured. On the Cornell farm 

 this year there are spots where clover is running in like a 

 mat where brooder houses stood the year before. The secur- 

 ing of good crops is frequently a question of an adequate 

 supply of plant food ; it is a question of saving this material 

 to enable the soil to do its best work. Hens justify them- 

 selves on the land improvement basis alone. As insect 

 hunters, poultry of various kinds are valuable. In our 

 State, on Long Island and some other sections where aspara- 

 gus, for example, is grown extensively, the asparagus farmers 

 have fences around the asparagus fields, and let hundreds 

 of chickens run in the fields to catch the pernicious beetles 

 that spraying will not kill. 



We have two principal problems to face in our endeavor to 

 make poultry husbandry pay. The first one is to produce 

 an efficient machine, because the hen is a living machine and 

 is just as truly a manufacturing plant as any manufacturing 

 industry in the State of Massachusetts, and sooner or later 

 the business people of the cities and towns must come to 

 recognize that a person who owns a hen factory out in the 

 suburbs or within the city limits is just as much entitled to 

 consideration as any other manufacturer would be who devel- 

 ops an infant industry. This would be on the ground that 

 it brings in money and labor and is a business investment 

 that you can well afford to encourage. Cities and towns will 

 aid manufacturers by giving them various important consid- 



