Goose-Fattening Farms
Fig. 152. Goslings grazing on a Rhode Island farm
Market duck growing is conducted on so large a scale that each grower can employ expert pickers and sell his product directly to wholesale dealers in poultry. So the duck grower fattens his own ducks before killing them. It is natural for him to do this, too, because his method of fattening is a modification of the feeding process which he has used from the start. As he nears the end of his process of feeding, he simply increases the proportion of fat-forming material in the food and feeds all that the ducks will eat. The fattening of geese that have been grown on grass to make them of the quality that will bring the highest price requires a change to a heavy grain diet. The farmers who grow these geese could fatten them better than any one else and make more profit on them, but few of these farmers are willing to give them the special attention that this requires. So large a part of the geese sold alive are thin that the men who bought them to dress for market long ago saw an opportunity to make a greater profit by fattening them before they were killed. Some of those who engaged in fattening geese were very successful and made large profits. As they extended operations in this line they required a great deal of land. Sometimes as many as 15,000 geese are fattened on one farm in a season. The fatteners buy in the early part of the summer from the farmers who sell the green geese as soon as they are grown. As these make the finest geese for the table, and as the best demand for geese comes at the holiday season in the winter, a large part of them are put in storage after being killed. After the green geese are disposed of, the fatteners buy live geese shipped in from distant points, and have them ready to kill about the time when the demand for goose is good.
Fig. 153. Scene on a goose-fattening farm in England
While they are very profitable when everything goes well, fattening geese is a business attended by heavy risks. In buying from many different sources a fattener may get some geese having a contagious disease, and the infection may spread through his whole flock before he discovers it, for some diseases have no pronounced symptoms in their early stages. Keeping such large numbers of geese on the same land year after year also brings trouble through the pollution of the soil.