CHAPTER VII 



THE AFT OF POULTRY FATTENING 



BY II. E. MOSS, NEW TOEK 



THE commercial or utility side of the 230ultry 

 industry, wliile it has always been the moving 

 iwwer thri drives tlie wheels of fancy, has now 

 reached a stage in this country that will mark 

 an epoch in its evolution. A new era has dawned. 

 New forces are at work and they are powerful and 

 capable of creating a revolution in methods. And this 

 force once applied cannot do otherwise than succeed. 

 This power is the great packing houses of the west : the 

 Swifts, Armours and others whose facilities for buying, 

 slaughtering and selling meat food products to the 

 world are of such magnitude and their S3'stem so perfect 

 that not a city, town or village in this, and but few in 

 foreign countries, in which their products are not sold 

 or their influence felt. To these great establishments 

 and not to the producers themselves are we indebted for 

 the new conditions. 



More than seven years ago one of them stated to 

 the writer that nothing would please them more than 

 to be able to enter foreign markets, not with better, but 

 only as good poultry as those markets afforded. The 

 reason it could not he done wa.s because the American 

 people have always set up as their standard of per- 

 fection a fat carcass, yellow and plump, without regard 

 to what that plumpness consisted of, the only 

 material known to them to produce it being corn, and 

 the result from feeding it being grease or fat deposited 

 in layers under the skin and a pound or more in 

 the abdominal cavity ; the flesh being inferior, often 

 stringy and tough, and that poultry in this condition 



