No. 6. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 433 



succeed witli the very variety that marks the failure of auother. Of 

 course if you expect to make the pay in part from the commercial 

 end of the business, you must select a variety noted either for eggs 

 or Hesh, or both. Don't select a variety just because some one else 

 has it. Have some originality of thought and action. Listen cour- 

 teously to the advice of others, but do business on your own judg- 

 ment. 



Having decided upon your variety, be careful about the strain. 

 Take every honorable advantage of the experience of others. Start 

 just as near the top as possible. Don't begin with duughills and 

 culls and expect to "breed them up to standard excellence." That 

 has been tlie pitfall that has entrapped to many. Far better start 

 with a trio that are fine and well-bred birds that can reasonably be 

 expected to reproduce themselves — even though they cost you .f2o, 

 than to get fifty nondescripts for that same sum. 



Take just one breed. The arguments are numerous. Less ex- 

 pensive as to fences and yards. Better opportunity of exercise in 

 breeding season. No crov'^s-breeding by accident. Remember that 

 the first couplation of a pullet, if by an opposite colored male, may 

 mark her progeny for a year. But the strongest argument is the 

 lecord of others. No man in the business now at the height of 

 fame but became so by means of a single variety. If you get there it 

 will be because your name becomes so intimately connected with the 

 name of your chosen variety that the one stands for the other. The 

 fact that the eminently successful men have mostly been breeders of 

 several varieties and have gradually reduced the number again and 

 again ought to convince you that the right way is to sfart with just 

 one breed. As some one has said, 'Tut all your eggs in one basket — 

 then watch that basket." 



Again let me urge that you stick to your breed. Many men about 

 the time success is within their reach with one variety see somebody 

 else going up faster with another; so, throwing away valuable expe- 

 rience, they start at the bottom again. I know a man, now nearly 

 three-score-and-ten, who in the past forty years has been an enthusi- 

 astic breeder of thirty-one different varieties of fowls, and yet never 

 more than three varieties at one time. The money he has spent in 

 buying stock has exceeded his total receipts ten fold. I know an- 

 other man nearly the same age who has bred Plymouth Rocks for 

 thirty years, and in the past fifteen years has failed but once to clear 

 $1,000 per year; yet in all that time he never had another variety on 

 his place but once. Just once he w^as induced to add White Ply- 

 mouth Rocks. That year he didn't make any money, and lost a part 

 of the trade he had always held because he was an exclusive breeder 

 of the barred variety. 

 28—6—1901 



