PROFITS FROM POULTRY 269 
profits are enormous. When I showed the balance-sheet to ex- 
perienced poultrymen of the old school they were sceptical about 
the truth of it, and rightly so, because such results as I am about 
to disclose are quite impossible on farms run on any other lines. 
I put the balance-sheet before a great expert, who is also a pro- 
gressive egg-farmer using all modern methods, and he said at once 
that though the profits relatively exceeded his own they were no 
more than any intelligent farmer using the right methods had a 
right to expect. He also added that to do so well as my friend 
had done meant that he had not met with any real bad luck, 
because there is always a slight element of luck where live stock 
is kept. What he really meant was that the successful egg-farmer 
had not been visited by serious illness or epidemic. 
Before going further I give the profit and loss account (see p. 270), 
which intending poultry-keepers should cut out and frame and keep 
before them as an ideal to which they may also aspire : 
Excellent as is this balance-sheet, I can see a weak spot that 
if properly strengthened would have greatly increased the profits. 
It will be noticed that his 750 pullets only produced 698 eggs in 
November, or rather less than one apiece during the month. This, 
of course, was a miserable result, and it is quite easy to trace the 
cause. 
The reason why he did so badly in November was because he 
did not hatch his pullets early enough. It will be observed that 
they were hatched in April, May and June. April, of course, is 
the right month to hatch Leghorns. May is just one month too 
late, and June is just two months too late. He does not tell us 
what proportion of pullets were hatched in April, but there is 
strong internal evidence that very few were hatched in that month, 
else we would have seen nearer 6000 than 600 eggs in November. 
Note that one month later—in December—he did get 5893, so that 
he virtually lost 5000 eggs in November by the late hatching of 
his birds. His figures for January were 10,831, but had he hatched 
at the proper time he would have got tho e figures in December, 
when eggs were at their record price. Not only so, but he would 
in all probability have got more eggs. I reckon that by failing to 
