As a general thing, the individual poultry farmer will, for shipping his product, use express east of Buffalo and north of Norfolk. The poultry community could use freight in these same regions and get as good or better service than by express.
The location in relation to the railroad station is equally important to the freight rate. Besides heavy hauling frequent trips will be necessary in marketing eggs. These on the larger farms will be daily or at least semi-weekly. On the heavy hauling alone, at 25 cents per ton mile, distance from the railroad will figure up 1-1/4 cents per hen which, on the basis of the previous illustration, would make a difference of twenty-five dollars per acre for every mile of distance from the station. One of the most successful poultry farms I know is right along the railroad and has an elevator which handles the grain from the cars and later dumps it into the feed wagons without its ever being touched by hand. The labor saving in this counts up rapidly.
The poultry community can have its own elevator and the grain can be sold to the farmer to be delivered directly into the hoppers in his field with but a single loading into a wagon.
Availability of Water.
One more point to be considered in location is water.
The labor of watering poultry by carrying water in buckets is tremendous and not to be considered on any up-to-date poultry plant. Watering must be accomplished by some artificial piping system or from spring-fed brooks. The more length of flowing streams on a piece of land, provided the adjacent ground is dry, the more value the property has for poultry. Two spring-fed brooks crossing a forty-acre tract so as to give a half mile of running water, or a full mile of houses, would water five thousand hens without labor. This would mean an annual saving of at least one man's time as against hand watering, or a matter of a thousand dollars or more in the cost of installation of a watering system.
If running water cannot be had the next best thing is to get land with water near the surface which may be tapped with sand points. If one must go deep for water a large flow is essential so that one power pump may easily supply sufficient water for the plant.
The land should lay in a gentle slope so that water may be run over the entire surface by gravity. Hilly lands are a nuisance in poultry keeping and raise the expense at every turn.
A Few Statistics.
The following table does not bear directly upon the poultry-man's choice of a location, but is inserted here because of its general interest in showing the poultry development of the country.