RANKIN'S DUCK BOOK 



one week behind. The weight was in favor of the Pekins 

 about one pound per pair. 



The same difficulty existed as in former years — the te- 

 nacity of the feathers. The pickers grumbled, while the birds 

 were more or less disfigured. I notified the dealers of the 

 breeds of those ducks, and of the claim made by the English 

 breeders, and wished them to ascertain if possible if there was 

 any difference in favor of the Aylesburys. They said their 

 customers found no preference, for themselves they preferred 

 the Pekins on account of the larger size and finer appearance 

 of the dressed birds. But I found it made a vast deal more 

 difference than that to me. One pound per pair on 2,000 pairs 

 of ducklings, at an average price of twenty-five cents per 

 pound, made a difference of more than $500 to me; especially 

 the extra ten days required to mature the Aylesburys cost 

 more than the feed for extra pound of flesh grown upon the 

 Pekins. 



Precocity 



There is one point which I wish to iinpress, which is too- 

 often overlooked, and yet is of the most vital importance to 

 the poultry grower, and that is the early maturity of his 

 market birds. I often hear growers say that as there is very 

 little change in the poultry market during nine months of the 

 year, and as they do not contend for the early spring prices 

 anyway, if their birds are three or four weeks longer in matur- 

 ing it does not matter. Does it not? I have always contended 1 

 that it requires just so much to sustain life in either bird or 

 animal, and the profit consists in what we can get them to- 

 consume and digest over and above that; and if the time re- 

 quired to do this is protracted longer than is necessary, it is 

 done at the expense of the grower. 



If it takes ten weeks to grow five pounds of flesh or» 

 one bird and fourteen weeks on another the one must nec- 

 essarily cost more than the other per pound, simply because 

 you have to sustain life four weeks longer in one case than 

 in the other, and that cannot be done for nothing. That is 

 why, though I can easily grow a pound of duck for six cents,. 

 I must have eight cents to grow a pound of chicken, because- 

 the ducks will take oh six pounds of flesh in ten weeks, while 

 the chicken requires twenty weeks to obtain the same size.. 

 These appear trivial matters when a person grows only a. 

 few dozen fowls yearly, but when he makes a life business 

 of it and grows fowls by the thousands, it is of the utmost 

 importance. 



f 36 ] 



