Farm periodicals

I came upon these lovely periodicals in a Connecticut antique shop earlier yesterday. One can only imagine the pleasure that was derived when finding these in your mail box - hopefully in a brown wrapper to hide the scandalous and risqué content from prying eyes.

Imagine Uncle Sam asking you the make 1942 "your best year with chicks". If you were lucky enough to be home to read this periodical you would have a pretty good year with the chicks - just saying. Especially true if you were reading this after December 8th when the draft began for WW II.

The cover art certainly looks patriotic and somewhat geared up for what was about to hit the fan in Europe and the Pacific. Even chickens were being prepared for the war effort and we were all apparently waiting enter into the war as this early publication might suggest.

so, who could resist reading about Dairy Dollars from purina? A plethora of valuable dairy information and just plain, old fashioned fun with cows. These topics firmly suggest that farm life before television was obviously an empty desert as far as entertainment goes. 

My personal favorite is Ful-O-Pep Egg Mash. What was in that? Chickens and giant eggs on the cover seemed to suggest that the eggs would be super-sized  Probably resulted in some pretty hyper-active chickens but not gigantic eggs. 

A feed product called Ful-O-Pep is still being marketed except now by Allied Feeds out of Texas. 
Allied Feeds http://www.fulopep.com/poultry.shtml

It is not clear that it is the same Ful-O-Pep that Quaker Oats once wrote about though - no more giant eggs, just tables of nutritional data.

More from the Quaker Oats company featuring talking chickens. Using Ful-O-Pep stuff obviously turns normally stoic chickens into english speaking jabber beaks. Rather articulate chickens too - I might add. 

The two chickens discuss the "matter" in the mash while Quaker Oats  claims to drive egg profits higher, and suggests that chickens talk about their food. These are two things that would be attractive to any chicken farmer in the 1920s. What the heck, tic-tac-toe playing chickens are popular even today so having a chicken to talk with would be priceless.

Something for everyone here; Profitable Pork Production - another riveting title with state of the art graphics. The folks at Quaker Oats seemed fully engaged in the feeding of almost every imaginable farm animal back in the day. 

The cover art reminds me of the Saturday Evening Post styled covers. Except instead of a Norman Rockwell image a gnarly pig head pops out of the circle. Really when you just get right down to it there is probably nothing as attractive as a fattened pig with a bright blood red background.

All very cool examples of advertising propaganda meets farming technology from the first half of the 20th century. Interesting things and evidence of the military industrial complex in it's infancy - right in your local antique center.