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.

As adjuncts of this business may be mentioned the sale of a line of
poultry supplies and the handling of other p