WHAT BRANCH OF THE BUSINESS? 
equally well in both communities. I expect to see the time 
when chicken flesh shall be produced with these more ad- 
vanced methods in many “South Shore” communities. 
Too Much Competition in Fancy Poultry. 
The various types of chicken farming are classified by what 
is made the leading sales product. This will depend wholly 
upon what is done with the female chicks that are hatched. 
If they are sold as broilers it is a broiler plant; if as roasters, 
it is a roaster plant; if as stock, it is a fancy or breeding stock 
business, but if kept for laying the proposition is an egg farm, 
and all other products are by-products. These by-products 
are to be carefully considered, and sold at the greatest possi- 
ble price, but their production is incidental to the production 
of the main crop. 
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 choco- 
late money, so the man starting out as a poultry fancier is 
certainly working at great odds in competition with the pro- 
fessional 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 pro- 
ductive 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 un- 
profitable, he certainly has failed to get the key-note of the 
situation. There are numbers of fancy poultry breeders mak- 
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