considered, and sold at the greatest possible 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 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.