Before going farther let us look at the labor bill.  Suppose it is a one-man plant.  Suppose the owner sets a value on his services of $1,200 per annum.  That is pretty good, but few men who set a lower value on their services will have accumulated enough capital to go into the business.  At 20 cents each it will take 6,000 broilers to make $1,200.  That will take 30,000 eggs and at three settings will require 40 240-egg incubators, which, of a good make, will cost $1,260.  To spread the hatching out over a longer period is to run into cheap prices on the one hand, or a still impossible egg season on the other.  It will take upwards of a hundred brooders to house the chicks.

There is no use of going farther till we have solved these difficulties.  First we have more work than one man can do; second, we require a number of hatchable eggs that cannot be bought in winter without a campaign of advertising and canvassing for them, that would make them cost double our previous figure.  To produce them oneself would require a flock of 2,500 hens.  When a man gets to that point in the business he is out of the broiler business and an egg farmer, and will do the same thing, hatch the chicks when eggs are cheap and fertile, selling his surplus cockerels for 25 cents each and permit the storage man to freeze them until the following spring to compete with the broiler man’s expensively produced goods.

The effort at early broiler production was a natural result of the combination of the idea of artificial incubation with our grandmother’s pride in having the first setting hen.  But in the present age the man who attempts it is rowing against the current of economical production, for the cheaply produced broiler can be stored until the season of scarcity, with but slight loss in quality.  To produce broilers in the season of scarcity, necessitates the consumption of a product (eggs) which cannot be so successfully stored, with a lesser quantity of that same product in its season of plenty.  We will give the production of broilers no further attention save as a by-product of egg production.

South Shore Roaster.

The production of South Shore soft roasters in a local section of Massachusetts, offers a successful contrast with the broiler business and is, so far as the writer knows, the only case in the United States where pullets are profitably diverted from egg production.  The process of roaster production is essentially as follows: 

The incubators are set in the fall or early winter, and the chicks reared in brooder houses.  As soon as the tender age is past, the chickens are put in simple colony houses where, with hopper fed corn, beef scrap and rye on the range, they grow throughout the winter and spring.  They are sold from May 1st to July 1st and bring such prices that the cockerels are caponized yet not sold as capons, showing them to be the highest priced chicken flesh in the market save small broilers.  Now, the income of roasters is two to five times as much per head as that of broilers.  The added expense is only a matter of feed, which bears about the same ratio to weight as with broilers.  The great advantage of the roaster business over that of the broiler business comes in the following points: