Abuses 21 



No one can ever know to what depths of humiliation I 

 have been cast through making a failure. I lost home, money, 

 friends, everything through my failures, and if I take these 

 pages to warn you to be careful you will understand why 

 I do so. 



I hope my pen never leads any one to lose a single dollar 

 through giving a false impression of the poultry business. 

 I am writing this book for the purpose of telling the truth— 

 the truth as I know it, a knowledge gained from practical 

 experience. 



When things begin to go wrong on the beginner's poultry 

 farm, he does not know what to do. His hens stand around 

 mopily, he is absolutely in the dark. He is like some men 

 with a gasoline engine; they can run it when everything goes 

 all right. So the poultryman can feed his hens properly and 

 sometimes make them pay even without experience if he 

 happens to be located where the ground is soft and the hens 

 can get plenty of bugs and worms and green food and grain. 

 Under these conditions he may make money — not through 

 any knowledge of his own but through luck — inasmuch as 

 the location supplies the hens with everything they need. 

 They balance their own ration and lay copiously while there 

 are plenty of bugs and worms, but when the ground gets dry 

 and hard and too many hens are put on the ground, so that 

 there is not enough natural food to go around, the hens stop 

 laying, something goes wrong, just as when something goes 

 wrong with the gasoline engine. Now, if you do not under- 

 stand a gasoline engine, what a time you would have in 

 getting it started if there was anything very radical the mat- 

 ter with it. You might work on that engine indefinitely and 

 never get it going. You can do exactly the same thing with 

 hens. You must have experience and lots of it. You want 

 to become just as expert at making a hen lay after she has 



