The bulk of labor in poultry work must be self-reliant labor and the only test for such efficiency is number of chicks reared and the weight of the egg basket.  Even this will not be a complete test unless from the income be subtracted the feed bills.

A system of renting or working on shares that will gain the advantages of centralization without losing the individual interest of the laborer, will go a long way toward making the poultry business one wherein large capital and large brains can find a place to work.  I expect to see in the future some such system evolved.  In fact we have to-day a profit-sharing plan between owner and foreman on many of our best plants.  To extend such to each laborer requires more system and better superintendence, but it is feasible and must come.  But, better still is it for the worker to own the stock.  Best yet if he owns both stock and land, leaving to larger capital only such phases of the business as involve great saving when done on a wholesale basis.

Just as the manufacturer of farm machinery, the packing of meat and the manufacture of butter have successfully been taken out of the control of the individual farmer and placed under corporate or co-operative organization, so the writer expects to see certain portions of the process of poultry production removed from the hands of the farmer and controlled by more specialized and expert labor.  Far from meaning the lessening of the earning power of the farmer, every one of such steps means larger production and more profits.  The ideal of agricultural economics is to give the farmer the smallest possible proportion of the work of agricultural production in order that the most may be produced and the farmer’s share along with the others may be largest.

Established Poultry Communities.

In a previous chapter we spoke of the South Shore roaster district of Massachusetts.  Here is a community where, in lots of from a dozen to four or five thousand, are annually produced seventy-five or one hundred thousand market fowls of one particular type.  While this business was not built up by the efforts of a corporation or individual who planned definitely the entire project, yet we find a central influence at work in the person of the firm of Curtis Bros., who for years have bought the majority of South Shore roasters, and who have done a great deal to advertise the product and encourage their neighbors to a larger and more uniform production.

At Little Compton, R. I., is a very similar parallel of the South Shore district in the shape of egg farms.  Here we find within a radius of two miles about one hundred thousand Rhode Island Red hens owned in flocks of two thousand or less.  The methods used throughout the community are all alike and are simple in the extreme.  There are no incubators, no brooders, no poultry houses, no long houses, no dropping boards to be scraped every morning, nothing in fact, but board-walled, board-roofed,