CHAPTER II 
WHAT BRANCH OF THE POULTRY BUSINESS? 
The chicken business is especially prone to failure from a 
disregard of the common essential relation of cost and selling 
price necessary to the success of any business. That this 
should be more true of the poultry business than of any other 
undertakings is to be explained by the facts that as a business, 
it is new, that many of those who engage in it are inexperi- 
enced, but most particularly because practically all the litera- 
ture published on the subject has been written by or written in 
the interest of those who had something to sell to the poultry- 
man. As a result the figures of production are generally given 
higher than the facts warrant. The investor, be he ever so 
shrewd a man, builds upon these promises and when he finds 
his production lower, is caught with an excessive investment 
and a complicated system on his hands, which make all profits 
impossible and which cannot readily be adapted to the new 
conditions. 
Estimates of poultry profits are quite common, but there are 
few published figures showing the results that are actually 
obtained under practical working conditions. In this volume 
I will try to give the facts of what is being and can be 
actually accomplished. 
Various Poultry Products. 
In considering the poultry industry we must first get some 
idea of the various articles produced for sale. 
It is common knowledge that the large meat packer can 
undersell the small packer because the by-products, such as 
bristles, which are wasted by the local killer, are a source of 
income to the large packer. Now, this does not infer that the 
small packer is shiftless and neglects to save his bristles, but 
that on the scale on which he operates it would cost him more 
to save the bristles than he could realize on them. 
So it is with poultry farming. For illustration: A vision- 
ary writer in a leading poultry paper, not long ago, advised 
poultrymen to store eggs. In reality this would be the height 
of folly, unless the poultryman had his own retail store. In 
the first place profit on cold storage eggs, when all expenses 
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