THE POULTRY PRODUCING COMMUNITY 
In these sixteen functions there is ample opportunity for 
capital, backed by ability in organization, to reap an ample 
reward. Is it a dream? In a sense yes, but a dream made 
possible by the observation of the actual results achieved in 
similar lines, and of the present tendency in the poultry pro- 
ducing world. 
Why has not this thing been done before? Because no one 
knew enough to do it. Why did not the wonderful trucking 
regions develop earlier in the South, and why does it still take 
northern settlers, backed by railroad advertising, to develop 
the wonderful modern industries which enables every city 
dweller in the North to have strawberries in February and 
fresh vegetables any day in the year? 
Why did the California fruit trade develop? Did anyone 
supose forty years ago that the unsettled valley around Pasa- 
dena would ever produce one thousand dollars per acre in one 
year? These orange groves, too valuable for agricultural pur- 
poses to be used as town sites, were precarious experiments 
until the trans-continental refrigerator car and the California 
Fruit Growers’ Exchange paved the way and put each day 
in every eastern and northern city just the quantity of oranges 
that the people could consume at a profitable price. 
Mr. Harwood, in the World’s Work for May, 1908, after 
describing the “City of a Million Hens,” raises the question, 
“If in Petaluma, why not anywhere?” I would like to answer 
that question by saying that while anywhere is a little broad, 
the reason the industry has not developed elsewhere has been 
because of the diversion of interested capital towards imprac- 
tical large individual poultry plants, manned by hired labor. 
Another reason has been the lack of the technical knowledge 
necessary to construct and operate éfficient hatcheries. 
The poultryman has been a disciple of the poultry papers 
and poultry fanciers of the day. The poultry papers and poul- 
try literature has generally been supported by poultry fanciers 
and manufacturers of incubators, patent nests and portable 
houses. The good folks have vied with one another in compli- 
cating the business. They have built steam-piped houses, with 
padded walls and miniature railways with which daily to haul 
away the droppings. A few famous fanciers selling eggs at 
$10.00 per setting have made such business pay, but alas for 
the luckless investor in what the visiting poultry editor would 
style a “handsomely equipped modern poultry plant.” 
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