THE BUILDING OF THE FARM 23 



daily contact our fear of the machine decreased, and 

 we exchanged it for one with a capacity of one hun- 

 dren and twenty-five eggs, and this, in turn, was ex- 

 changed for one holding two hundred and fifty eggs. 



We obtained fairly large flocks of youngsters that 

 season, but, as we had the usual hallucination that 

 poultry culture was really a miracle, and required 

 neither work, capital, nor brains, that all you had to 

 do was to accept the profit and the chickens did it all 

 themselves, we did not get so very far. The growth 

 of the birds was so slow they did not reach a profitable 

 weight until the broiler market had dropped the price 

 to its lowest level. The pullets which we carried 

 through the winter never produced an egg, for the 

 simple reason that we had never studied the question 

 out as to how the hen produces an egg. In other 

 words, our lack of knowledge of the right methods 

 was the reason for charging up a considerable loss 

 instead of profit so far as the first season's work with 

 hens went. 



We very early discovered there must have been 

 a considerable amount of fiction in the writings on 

 the squab industry. One reads that a pair of pigeons 

 eats nothing like the amount of food which is re- 

 quired for one hen, and that they never eat more than 

 their exact wants require, and that when they have 

 young in the nest, this amount is very slightly in- 

 creased. We found, however, that they ate in sea- 

 son and out of season. In fact one recalls, in this 



