Page 124 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

produce, but Whitely decided to raise chickens.

Not knowing a great deal about raising chickens, he sent to the U. S.
Department of Agriculture for bulletins and studied them carefully. Then he
visited a farmer in the neighborhood who had been raising poultry with
indifferent success. Here he learned what not to do if he wanted to make
money. Inquiry revealed that the farmer had little or no idea how to feed his
chickens and practically no ideas on marketing them. His poultry house was
filthy, and it was obvious that the chickens had little or no attention from one
day to another. The farmer thought government bulletins and poultry
magazines were a lot of nonsense. “As if,” he growled, “you can learn to
raise chickens from a book or a magazine.”

However, Howard Whitely had his own ideas on this subject which he
discreetly kept to himself. On his little farm there was a poultry house which
he thoroughly cleaned and fumigated. He built a poultry run and then
purchased a second-hand incubator and a brooder from a dealer in town.
From another dealer he bought ten dozen eggs and then he started his poultry
business. Some of the eggs, of course, did not hatch. Of those that did, he
kept about half for breeding, and the rest were raised for the market. In
raising the chickens, he followed the government bulletins religiously. He
found that cleanliness was the most important thing in keeping the chickens
free from disease. By preventing all possible contamination, he not only
saved himself a load of trouble but considerable expense. Naturally, he made
a few mistakes, but none of them serious. He found, too, that he liked raising
poultry.

In the meantime, Whitely had been thinking about his marketing problem.
Having been a salesman he realized it was one thing to raise a good product,
but unless you got busy and sold it, there would be little profit to bank. By
the time he had his poultry ready for market, he had secured orders from a
number of old customers in Indianapolis as well as from two hotels and three
restaurants. When his customers saw the plump, milk-fed broilers he had
raised, they were sold to the hilt and he had no difficulty in getting reorders.
He and his wife made a great effort to pack the birds attractively. Each capon
was wrapped separately in white, moisture-proof wrapping paper, and