44 POULTRY PRODUCTION 



For specific farms, transportation facilities and nearness 

 to markets determine the commercial advisability of empha- 

 sizing poultry production, and unfavorable soil or climatic 

 conditions are, of course, local limiting factors. 



Food Manufacturing Efficiency of the Hen. — ^As the question 

 of the food-supply becomes more and more acute and the 

 cost of living higher, the efficiency of the various domestic 

 animals as human food factories will be taken more and more 

 into consideration. In the last analysis, other things being 

 equal, the animal that manufactures the least human food 

 from a given amount of digestible feed will be the one whose 

 product will be the most expensive. As food becomes in- 

 creasingly expensive there will be a cessation in the con- 

 sumption of the more expensive kinds as articles of common 

 diet, and they will be placed among the luxuries. 



As the size of farm or even town flocks grows beyond that 

 necessary for waste consumption, the efficiency of poultry 

 with reference to food production is going to play a larger 

 and larger part. 



Unfortunately, data are not available which show the com- 

 parative efficiency of poultry with other animals except for 

 the chicken. A comparison between the hen and her com- 

 petitors among the larger animals, with regard to the amount 

 of marketable product and the actual edible solids produced 

 from one hundred pounds of digestible organic material in 

 the ration, is shown in Table XI. 



Table XI. — The Amount of Human Food Produced from One 

 Hundred Pounds of Digestible Organic Matter 

 IN THE Ration.' 



Sheep and lambs Dressed carcass . . . 7 . 00 2 . 60 



' Adapted from figures given in Jordon's Feeding of Farm Animals. 



