Fifteenth, the conduction of breeding operations along any desired line, with the opportunity of combining the principle of great numbers for selection with the comparison of all progeny from ancestry, a method that will bring results a hundred times more quickly than the efforts of the small breeder.

Sixteenth, the advantage of the sale of breeding stock to be acquired from the free publicity which is showered on all unique industrial enterprises.

In these sixteen functions there is ample opportunity for capital, backed by ability in organization, to reap an ample reward.  Is it a dream?  In a sense yes, but a dream made possible by the observation of the actual results achieved in similar lines, and of the present tendency in the poultry producing world.

Why has not this thing been done before?  Because no one knew enough to do it.  Why did not the wonderful trucking regions develop earlier in the South, and why does it still take northern settlers, backed by railroad advertising, to develop the wonderful modern industries which enables every city dweller in the North to have strawberries in February and fresh vegetables any day in the year?

Why did the California fruit trade develop?  Did anyone suppose forty years ago that the unsettled valley around Pasadena would ever produce one thousand dollars per acre in one year?  These orange groves, too valuable for agricultural purposes to be used as town sites, were precarious experiments until the trans-continental refrigerator car and the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange paved the way and put each day in every eastern and northern city just the quantity of oranges that the people could consume at a profitable price.

Mr. Harwood, in the World’s Work for May, 1908, after describing the “City of a Million Hens,” raises the question, “If in Petaluma, why not anywhere?” I would like to answer that question by saying that while anywhere is a little broad, the reason the industry has not developed elsewhere has been because of the diversion of interested capital towards impractical large individual poultry plants, manned by hired labor.  Another reason has been the lack of the technical knowledge necessary to construct and operate efficient hatcheries.

The poultryman has been a disciple of the poultry papers and poultry fanciers of the day.  The poultry papers and poultry literature has generally been supported by poultry fanciers and manufacturers of incubators, patent nests and portable houses.  The good folks have vied with one another in complicating the business.  They have built steam-piped houses, with padded walls and miniature railways with which daily to haul away the droppings.  A few famous fanciers selling eggs at $10.00 per setting have made such business pay, but alas for the luckless investor in what the visiting poultry editor would style a “handsomely equipped modern poultry plant.”