The chicken business is especially prone to failure from a disregard of the common essential relation of cost and selling price necessary to the success of any business.  That this should be more true of the poultry business than of any other undertakings is to be explained by the facts that as a business, it is new, that many of those who engage in it are inexperienced, but most particularly because practically all the literature published on the subject has been written by or written in the interest of those who had something to sell to the poultryman.  As a result the figures of production are generally given higher than the facts warrant.  The investor, be he ever so shrewd a man, builds upon these promises and when he finds his production lower, is caught with an excessive investment and a complicated system on his hands, which make all profits impossible and which cannot readily be adapted to the new conditions.

Estimates of poultry profits are quite common, but there are few published figures showing the results that are actually obtained under practical working conditions.  In this volume I will try to give the facts of what is being and can be actually accomplished.

Various Poultry Products.

In considering the poultry industry we must first get some idea of the various articles produced for sale.

It is common knowledge that the large meat packer can undersell the small packer because the by-products, such as bristles, which are wasted by the local killer, are a source of income to the large packer.  Now, this does not infer that the small packer is shiftless and neglects to save his bristles, but that on the scale on which he operates it would cost him more to save the bristles than he could realize on them.

So it is with poultry farming.  For illustration:  A visionary writer in a leading poultry paper, not long ago, advised poultrymen to store eggs.  In reality this would be the height of folly, unless the poultryman had his own retail store.  In the first place profit on cold storage eggs, when all expenses are paid, will not average a half a cent a dozen; in the second place, the small lot would be relatively troublesome and expensive to handle, and in the third place, small lots of cold storage eggs are looked upon with suspicion and do not find ready sale.  So we see that cold storage eggs are not a suitable product for the small poultryman to handle.

A second illustration of an ill-chosen combination might be taken in the case of a duck farmer who attempts to produce broilers.  The principal difficulty of the duck business is that of getting sufficient intelligent labor in the rush season.  The chief expense of investment is for incubators and brooder houses.  If the duck farmer now tries to add broilers, he will find that the labor comes at the same time of the year, that the chief equipment required is that which is already crowded by the duck business, and that of the men who have succeeded moderately well in caring for ducks will fail altogether with the young chicks, which do not thrive under the same machine-like methods.