Of the fancy poultry business as a main issue it must be said that it is certainly a poor policy to start out to make a living doing what hundreds of other people are only too glad to spend money in doing.  Just as a homeless girl in a great city is beaten out in the struggle for existence by competition with girls who have good homes, and are working for chocolate money, so the man starting out as a poultry fancier is certainly working at great odds in competition with the professional men, farmers and poultry raisers whose income from fancy stock is meant to buy Christmas presents and not to pay grocery bills.

To enter the fancy poultry business, one should take up poultry breeding in a small way, while working at another occupation, or he may take up commercial poultry production, learn to produce stock in large quantities and at a low productive cost, after which any breeding stock business he may secure will be added profit.  The fancier will find the cost of production as given for commercial purposes very instructive, but if he operates in a small way he should expect to find his productive costs increased unless he chooses to count his own labor as of little or no value.  That every chicken fancier also has in a small way commercial products to sell, goes without saying.  These, indeed, together with his sales of high-priced stock, may pull him through with a total profit, even though his production cost is great, but every fancier should take a pride in making the sales at commercial rates pay for their cost of production.

If the reader has received the impression from the present discussion that fancy poultry breeding always proves unprofitable, he certainly has failed to get the key-note of the situation.  There are numbers of fancy poultry breeders making incomes of several thousand dollars per year, but these are old breeders and well-known men.

There is another type of poultry fancier who is more commercial in his methods, but whose work lacks the personal enthusiasm and artistic touch of the regular fancier.  I refer to the band wagon style of breeder who gets out a general catalog in which are pictured acres of poultry yards with fences as straight as the draughtsman’s rule can make them.  Such men do a big business.  They may carry a part or all of the breeding stock on a central poultry plant and farm out the eggs, contracting to buy back the stock in the fall, or the poultry farm may be a myth and the manager may simply sell the product of the neighboring farmers who raise it under contract.

The system is naturally disliked by the higher class fanciers, but the writer must confess that any system which gets improved stock distributed among the farmers is worthy of praise.  These types of poultry farms have been more largely carried on in the West than in the East, owing to the fact that true fanciers are thicker in the East.  There is undoubtedly still plenty of room for band wagon poultry plants in the West and especially in the South.