The Small Farm Success Story
A local poultry farmer credits fifty hens with rescuing his family from poverty and setting them on the path to financial stability.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A breeder on one of the islands near Tacoma came here from the East about five years ago. He bought fifty acres of land and, after paying for it, he had about two hundred dollars left. With this, he built a cabin and bought fifty hens. He says that those hens, in five years, made him one hundred and fifty dollars after paying for their food, which was enough to keep his family. Since then, he has put in Brown Leghorns altogether—about one hundred and fifty—and sells eggs, lots of them for setting, at two dollars a setting. Now he has his farm partly in small fruits and is doing as well as any of our business men. He attributes all his success to his first fifty hens. If it had not been for them, he would have had to work for something else, but his chickens kept his family, and he was thus able to spend all of his time in improving his place.
“He attributes all his success to his first fifty hens.”
Small-scale agrarian self-sufficiency remains a dream for many in the Pacific Northwest, though the modern cost of land around Grays Harbor has shifted from the accessible prices described here to a major barrier for new growers.
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