The farmer was performing his daily chore of feeding the hens. Each morning while the sun was still low in the Eastern sky, the farmer would go to his barn and pour the feed grain from a large bag into a pail, and he would then carry the pail to the low fenced in feeding pen where the hens waited to be fed. The farmer would slowly walk around the pen and every few steps take a scoop of grain from the pail and scatter the feed widely over that part of the pen area nearest that part of the fence where the farmer was then walking. After completing a circuit around the pen’s periphery the farmer would have more-or-less uniformly scattered the feed over the entire area. The hens meanwhile would distribute themselves more-or-less uniformly throughout the feeding area, and each hen would scratch and peck around the ground near it and find feed grain morsels there to eat.

One day, while the farmer’s son was home on a visit from the college where he was studying the latest agricultural science and technology, the son was watching his father perform the morning chore. The son said, "Hey, Dad, I just had a neat idea. Suppose we build some chutes and feeding trays around the feeding pen so that you can just pour the bucket of grain in one place, and the chutes would distribute the grain to feeding trays throughout the pen. Then the hens could eat the grain right off of the trays a lot more efficiently then scratching and pecking over the ground most of the morning."

The farmer replied, "Gee, son, that is a neat idea. The hens would surely be able to finish eating a lot faster that way. But I wonder, son, taking economics into account, just
how much is a hen’s time worth?"