56 LES5ON5 IN POULTRY KEEPING SECOND SERIES. 



Then It becomes a question of whether the poultry keeper can take up some form of recre- 

 ation that can be adapted to such leisure as he cau secure, and furnish relaxation which will 

 break the monotony of his work without interfering with it. If he cannot do this and if he 

 is of such a disposition that he cannot stand the monotony of the life, he is very apt to begin 

 to cut his duty here and there to get time for favorite pleasures, and when he does this the 

 finish of his venture is only a question of time. 



The poultry keeper like all who have the care of live stock has to give the real needs of his 

 stock precedence over all ordinary claims upon his time and attention. The care of the stock 

 will frequently require long days of labor extended far into the night, loss of sleep, and denial 

 of many pleasures. 



"Business tir>t" must be his invariable rule, for there is no other line of work in which the 

 penalties of slight infringements of that rule are more sure or more quickly felt. Whoever 

 linds it too hard to follow that rule will fail in poultry keeping. 



A common cause of failure which is in part the cause of by far the greater number of 

 failures in poultry keeping is a lack of sufficient capital. Any business undertaken with 

 insufficient capital is heavily handicapped at the start. In poultry keeping it is almost the rule 

 for men to begin with an amount of available capital which is in&ignin'caut in proportion to the 

 amount actually required by their plans. 



Those supposed authorities on poultry keeping who have so industriously preached that the 

 poultry business requires smaller capital and will yield larger returns on the investment than 

 any other, have a great many failures to answer for, and so have those who have advised pro- 

 spective poultrymen to go ahead on a capital which they could not help knowing was insufficient. 



While I blame such persons for misleading people, I have not as much sympathy as some 

 have for those who allow themselves to be misled, and have not much patience with them 

 when they try to put all the responsibility for their failures on those who advised them badly, 

 because too many such cases come to my notice where people have also been given good advice 

 but have followed the bad because it was more in accordance with their desires. 



I sometimes think that most of the people who ask advice about going into the poultry 

 business are simply looking for encouragement to go ahead with plans which are often very 

 peculiar plans, and keep asking until they get thje kind of advice or encouragement they 

 want. In such cases as this, both adviser and advised are equally responsible for the failure, 

 but the division of responsibility does not diminish the share of either. 



Far too maiiy of those who build poultry plants have not capital enough to properly equip 

 and stock them to say nothing of running them until the profits begin to appear. And so 

 financial worry is added to all the other worries. The poultryman goes into debt practically 

 mortgages his receipts for mouths in advance carries on bis business in a hand to mouth way, 

 neither buying nor selling to best advantage; interest eats up a large part of his profits, and 

 finally he is forced to the wall. 



Lack of business ability is responsible for many failures. 



It is very difficult if not quite impossible for one who is not a fairly good business man 

 to make much of a success of poultry keeping, and in some branches of the business a man is 

 seriously handicapped if he is not a good correspondent and salesman. 



My observation has been that the poultrymen who lack business ability who are deficient in 

 the trading faculty, seldom realize that the fault is with themselves. Many of them are dis- 

 posed to quarrel with the conditions of the business and to imagine all kinds of crookedness 

 and meanness the most substantial aids to the advancement of their more successful 

 competitors. 



I suppose that in New England it is not necessary to dwell long on the lack of business 

 ability, for Yankees are supposed to be born traders, and if a genuine Yankee fails in poultry 

 keeping we have to lay it to one of the other causes. 



The three things named inexperience, lack of capital, and lack of business ability, I con- 

 sider the principal causes of failures in poultry keeping; but, besides these there are numerous 

 minor causes which frequently prevent success, or turn most promising prospects into failure. 



