WHAT BRANCH OF THE BUSINESS? 
services of $1,200 per annum. That is pretty good, but few 
men who set a lower value on their services will have accumu- 
lated enough capital to go into the business. At 20 cents each 
it will take 6,000 broilers to make $1,200. That will take 
80,000 eggs and at three settings will require 40 240-egg incu- 
bators, which, of a good make, will cost $1,260. To spread 
the hatching out over a longer period is to run into cheap 
prices on the one hand, or a still impossible egg season on the 
other. It will take upwards of a hundred brooders to house 
the chicks. 
There is no use of going farther till we have solved these 
difficulties. First we have more work than one man can do; 
second, we require a number of hatchable eggs that cannot 
be bought in winter without a campaign of advertising and 
canvassing for them, that would make them cost double our 
previous figure. To produce them oneself would require a 
flock of 2,500 hens. When a man gets to that point in the 
business he is out of the broiler business and an egg farmer, 
and will do the same thing, hatch the chicks when eggs are 
cheap and fertile, selling his surplus cockerels for 25 cents 
each and permit the storage man to freeze them until the fol- 
lowing spring to compete with the broiler man’s expensively 
produced goods. 
The effort at early broiler production was a natural result 
of the combination of the idea of artificial incubation with our 
grandmother’s pride in having the first setting hen. But in 
the present age the man who attempts it is rowing against 
the current of economical production, for the cheaply pro- 
duced broiler can be stored until the season of scarcity, with 
but slight loss in quality. To produce broilers in the season 
of scarcity, necessitates the consumption of a product (eggs) 
which cannot be so successfully stored, with a lesser quantity 
of that same product in its season of plenty. We will give the 
production of broilers no further attention save as a by-pro- 
duct of egg production. 
South Shore Roaster. 
The production of South Shore soft roasters in a local sec- 
tion of Massachusetts, offers a successful contrast with the 
broiler business and is, so far as the writer knows, the only 
case in the United States where pullets are profitably diverted 
from egg production. The process of roaster production is 
essentially as follows: 
The incubators are set in the fall or early winter, and the 
chicks reared in brooder houses. As soon as the tender age 
is past, the chickens are put in simple colony houses where, 
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