CHAPTER XII

    How eggs are marketed
      The Country Merchant
      The Huckster
      The Produce Buyer
      The City Distribution of Eggs
      Cold Storage of Eggs
      Preserving Eggs Out of Cold Storage
      Improved Methods of Marketing Farm-Grown Eggs
      The High Grade Egg Business
      Buying Eggs by Weight
      The Retailing of Eggs by the Producer
      The Price of Eggs
      N.Y.  Mercantile Exchange, Official Quotations

CHAPTER XIII

    Breeds of chickens
      Breed Tests
      The Hen’s Ancestors
      What Breed?

CHAPTER XIV

    Practical and scientific breeding
      Breeding as an Art
      Scientific Theories of Breeding
      Breeding for Egg Production

CHAPTER XV

    Experiment station work
      The Stations Leading in Poultry Work
      The Story of the “Big Coon”
      Important Experimental Results at the Illinois Station
      Experimental Bias
      The Egg Breeding Work at the Maine Station

CHAPTER XVI

    Poultry on the general farm
      Best Breeds for the Farm
      Keep Only Workers
      Hatching Chicks with Hens
      Incubators on the Farm
      Rearing Chicks
      Feeding Laying Hens
      Cleanliness
      Farm Chicken Houses

THE DOLLAR HEN

CHAPTER I

Is there money in the poultry business?

The chicken business is big.  No one knows how big it is and no one can find out.  The reason it is hard to find out is because so many people are engaged in it and because the chicken crop is sold, not once a year, but a hundred times a year.

Statistics are guesses.  True statistics are the sum of little guesses, but often figures published as statistics are big guesses by a guesser who is big enough to have his guess accepted.

A Big Business; Growing Bigger

The only real statistics for the poultry crop of the United States are those of the Federal Census.  At this writing these statistics are nine years old and somewhat out of date.  The value of poultry and eggs in 1899, according to the census figures, was $291,000,000.  Is this too big or too little?  I don’t know.  If the reader wishes to know let him imagine the census enumerator asking a farmer the value of the poultry and eggs which he has produced the previous year.  Would the farmer’s guess be too big or too small?

From these census figures as a base, estimates have been made for later years.  The Secretary of Agriculture, or, speaking more accurately, a clerk in the Statistical Bureau of the Department of Agriculture, says the poultry and egg crop for 1907 was over $600,000,000.