The farm of our grandfather was a very diversified institution. It contained in miniature a woolen mill, a packing house, a cheese factory, perhaps a shoe factory and a blacksmith shop. One by one these industries have been withdrawn from general farm-life, and established as independent businesses. Likewise our dairy farms, our fruit farms, and our market gardens have been segregated from the general farm. This simply means that manufacturing cloth, or cheese, or producing milk, or tomatoes can be done at less cost in separate establishments than upon a general farm. The general farm will always grow poultry for home consumption, and will always have some surplus to sell. With the surplus, the poultryman must compete. His only hope of successful competition is production at lower cost. Can this be done? It is being done, and the numbers of people who are doing it are increasing, but they spend little money at poultry shows, or with the advertisers of poultry papers, and hence are little heard of in the poultry world. The people whose names and faces are in the poultry papers are frequently there only while their money lasts. They write long articles and show pictures of many houses and yards to prove that there is money in the poultry business, but if one should keep their names and put the question to them five years hence, a great many could say, "Yes, there is money in the poultry business; mine is in it." Such people and such plants do not get the cost of production down below the farmer's level. Between these two classes of poultry plants, the writer hopes in this work to show the distinction. CHAPTER II WHAT BRANCH OF THE POULTRY BUSINESS? 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.