Introduction. 5 



Poultry keeping for profit is the laudable ambition of the 

 great majority of poultry keepers, and poultry are really kept 

 to the profit of their owners, in the great majority of cases. 

 Little account is made of them, and no account is kept of 

 their expenses or of the income derived from them, and yet it 

 is the settled conviction of the frugal housewife, who looks 

 more or less after the poultry, and of the farmer, who sees 

 how large a part of the store bill is settled by eggs, and who 

 brings home from market or from the shipper who buys his 

 dressed poultry at Christmas-time a satisfactory roll of bank- 

 notes, that poultry is really a paying farm crop. 4 



Then, too, when a regular debit and credit account is kept 

 with the poultry, and a fair allowance is made for labor and 

 interest, the profit always shows up to be something enor- 

 mous—often one hundred per cent., or even more. 



If there really is so much profit in poultry keeping, is it 

 not strange that when undertaken on a large scale it is always 

 a losing business ? 'Few people consider that farm-yard fowls 

 of all kinds, ducks and geese included, get a great part of 

 their living, and in some parts of the year the whole of it, 

 from what would otherwise be lost or wasted, and from 

 insects, snails and worms, which are a positive harm to grow- 

 ing crops. Hence the conclusion is a just one that poultry, if 

 well managed, are really most profitable as an adjunct to 

 other farm and garden operations, especially as but little time 

 is generally devoted to their care which would be more use- 

 fully employed. 



This amount of, so to speak, wasted food is limited, and 

 when fowls or other poultry are multiplied upon a single farm 

 or circumscribed area, their care soon becomes sufficient to 



