Milo Hastings

“ The running stream with its fringe of trees, brush and rank growing grass, forms daylight quarters for the hen par excellence. Rank growing crops, fodder piled against the fences, a board fence on the north side of the lot, or little sheds made by propping a platform against a stake, will all help. ”

“ The idea circulated by wild writers, that cold storage poultry was kept several years is an economic impossibility. The interest on the investment alone would make the holding of storage goods into the second season of plenty, quite unprofitable, but when the costs of storage, insurance and shrinkage are to be paid, storing poultry for more than one season becomes absurd. The fowl that has been once frozen cannot be made to look "fresh killed" again. For that reason packers like to get a monopoly on a particular market so that the two classes of goods will not have to compete side by side. ”

“ But the dreamer is right in his first premise—great economies in production are the result of specialization and combination. Why not then in agriculture? I'll tell you why. There is a touch of nature in the living thing that calls for a closer interest on the part of the laborer than the industrial system of the mine and factory can give.
Why is combined and specialized production more economical? It may be because it gets more efficient work out of labor, it may be that larger operations make feasible the employment of more efficient methods and machinery. ”

“ Breeding as an art or vocation, is a source of endless pleasure to man, and as such, is as worthy of encouragement as is painting, music, or the collection of the bones of prehistoric animals. Breeding as an art has produced many forms of chickens that are entirely worthless as food producers, but this same group of poultry breeders, tempered to be sure by the demands of commercialism, have produced other breeds that are certainly superior for the various commercial purposes to the unselected fowls of the old-fashioned farm-yard.
The mongrel chicken is a production of chance. ”

“ Certainly no employee will work as hard for an association as he will for himself.
Why people should expect to buy out the grocery store and hire the grocer to run it and save money for themselves, is a thing I could never understand. But if there is some great waste that co-operation will prevent, as where seven milk wagons drive every morning over the same route, or where the market of perishable crops is glutted one day and starved the next, centralization, corporate or co-operate, will pay. ”

“ The systems of poultry feeding that are commonly advertised are based either on some patent nostrum or a recommendation of green food in novel form, such as sprouted oats. The joke about poultry feed at 10 cents a bushel, absurd though it may seem, has caught lots of dollars. To take a bushel of oats worth 50 cents, add water, let them sprout and have five bushels costing 10 cents, is certainly a wonderful achievement in wealth getting. The only reason a man couldn't run a soup kitchen on the same principle is that he can't do a soup business by mail. ”

“ Be it far from me to say anything that will cause either my readers or his chickens to sleep less in the fresh air, yet for the love of truth and for the simplification of the problem of incubation, the real facts about ventilation must be given.
In breathing, oxygen is absorbed and carbon dioxide and water vapor are given off. It is popularly held that abundance of fresh air is necessary to supply the oxygen for breathing and that carbon dioxide is a poison. Both are mistakes. The amount of oxygen normally in the air is about 20 per cent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Suppose, for illustration, two merchants in the same town are each doing a business with a twenty per cent. profit, and are buying eggs at ten cents and selling for eleven, the cent advance being sufficient to pay for their labor, incidental loss, and a small profit. Now one merchant concludes to play for more trade. If he marks his goods down he would gain some trade, but many people would fear his goods were cheap. But if he puts up a placard, "Eleven Cents Paid For Eggs," the farmers will throng his store and never question the quality of his goods. ”

“ Just as a homeless girl in a great city is beaten out in the struggle for existence by competition with girls who have good homes, and are working for chocolate money, so the man starting out as a poultry fancier is certainly working at great odds in competition with the professional men, farmers and poultry raisers whose income from fancy stock is meant to buy Christmas presents and not to pay grocery bills. ”

“ If he is one of those prospective pleasure and profit poultrymen who propose to disregard all facts of biology and economics of production, you may save yourself the trouble of showing him the rest of the plant. Unfortunately, this scheme is not open to the poultryman who has breeding stock for sale.
I have frequently had the question put to me in the smoker of a Pullman car, "Do not epidemic diseases make the poultry business precarious?" Such questions came from farm-raised men, but not from poultry farmers. ”

“ I wish to call the farmer's attention to the fact that poultry keeping as an adjunct to general farming, especially to general farming in the Mississippi Valley, is quite a different proposition from poultry production as a regular business. Poultry keeping as a part of farm life and farm enterprise is a thing well worth while in any section of the United States, whereas poultry keeping, a separate occupation, requires special location and special conditions to make it profitable. ”

“ Let the poultryman who figures the nutritious ratio of chicken feed try this simple experiment. Place before a half dozen newly hatched chicks a feed of one of the commercial chick feeds. When they have had their fill, sacrifice these innocents on the altar of science and open their crops. He will find that one chick has eaten almost exclusively of millet seed, another has preferred cracked corn, another has filled up heavily on bits of beef scrap and mica crystal grit, while a fourth fancied oats and granulated bone. ”

“ Egg production is undoubtedly the most promising and profitable branch of the poultry industries. The chief reason that this is true is to be found in the fact that the most difficult feature in chicken growing is the rearing of young stock through the brooding period. Now, as the eggs laid by a hen are worth several times the value of her carcass, it stands to reason that once we succeed in rearing pullets, egg farming must be the most profitable business to engage in. ”

“ The various types of chicken farming are classified by what is made the leading sales product. This will depend wholly upon what is done with the female chicks that are hatched. If they are sold as broilers it is a broiler plant; if as roasters, it is a roaster plant; if as stock, it is a fancy or breeding stock business, but if kept for laying the proposition is an egg farm, and all other products are by-products. These by-products are to be carefully considered, and sold at the greatest possible price, but their production is incidental to the production of the main crop. ”

“ The number of eggs, size and color of eggs, rapid growth, ready fattening powers, quality of meat and general characteristics, are all matters of inheritance, and if proper means are taken to select the desirable individuals all such characteristics can be changed at the will of the breeder.
It is a fact, however, often overlooked, that the more traits for which one selects, the slower will be progress. For illustration: If in breeding for egg production, one-half the good layers are discarded for lack of fancy points, the progress will be just half as rapid. ”

“ When the same scientist, finding that an egg contains protein, says that wheat is a better egg food than corn because it has the largest amount of protein, that is a guess and does not work in practice because protein is not a definite substance, but the name of a group of substances of which the scientist does not know the composition, and which may or may not be of equal use to the hen in the formation of eggs.
All substances of which the world is made are composed of elements which cannot be changed. ”

“ One reason that the meat packers wanted the United States Inspection, is because it puts out of business the little fellow to whom the Government cannot afford to grant inspection. A few of the very largest poultry packers would like to see poultry inspection for the same reason, but with the business so thoroughly scattered as to render Government inspection so expensive as to be quite impracticable, any such bill would certainly be killed in a congressional committee. ”

“ It is simply a matter of forced feeding being a process that makes trouble with the health of the chicken if all is not just right.
It is probable that in the future more fattening will be done on the farm, or by the farmer operating in a small way among his neighbors. The reason for this is that the saving of labor in the large plant is hardly as great as the added loss from the shrinkage of the birds due to the excitement of shipping and crowding, and the introduction of disease by the mingling of chickens from so many different sources. ”

“ Land and intelligent labor, prompted by the spirit of ownership, is necessary to succeed in the hen business. Land the captains of industry have not monopolized, and labor imbued with the spirit of ownership they cannot monopolize. The chicken business is, in dollars, one of the biggest industries in the country. ”