While farmers usually care more for horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs, many become interested in poultry, and if they are natural fanciers and good business men, it often happens that the growing of fancy poultry becomes one of the most important industries on the farm. Many women on farms become interested in fancy poultry, and some become very skillful breeders and exhibitors. A farmer-fancier's poultry plant is usually a combination of extensive and intensive methods. Some buildings with small compartments must be provided, but all except the choicest birds can be managed just like the ordinary fowls on a farm where arrangements are made with a view to giving them the full advantage of the good conditions which the place affords. [Illustration: Fig. 121. Summer quarters for poultry. (Photograph from New York State Agricultural College at Cornell University)] To a novice in fancy-poultry culture the number of chickens grown by expert fanciers seems very small for the equipment and the land used, but the old fancier has learned in the costly school of competition, by the bitter experience of defeat, that in growing exhibition poultry it pays to give the birds a great deal more room, both indoors and outdoors, than is needed simply to get quick growth and good size. Elegance of form, depth and brilliance of color, and the indefinable qualities of style and finish that distinguish the high-class exhibition fowl are obtained in a much larger proportion of birds when they are given a great deal more room than they apparently need. CHAPTER VI DUCKS Ducks rank next to fowls in economic importance. If there were no fowls, domestic ducks would probably be as numerous as fowls are now, for it is much easier to produce eggs and meat from ducks than from any known species of gallinaceous bird except the fowl. To most people who are not accustomed to eating them, neither the flesh nor the eggs of ducks seem quite as palatable as the flesh and eggs of fowls. On the other hand, people accustomed to eating fat ducks and the eggs of ducks, which contain a much higher percentage of fat than hens' eggs, often consider the flesh and eggs of fowls rather insipid. The feathers of ducks are more valuable commercially than those of fowls but are not correspondingly profitable to the producer, because ducks are much harder to pluck. =Description.= Common ducks are about the same size as common fowls. The improved breeds vary greatly in size but do not present such extremes of size and diversity of form as are found in the races of fowls. As the duck in a state of nature lives much upon the water, its form is at nearly every point different from the typical form of the fowl. The duck is usually described as boat-shaped, but, while this is a good description, it would be more correct to say that a boat is duck-shaped. The duck was the natural model for the first builders of boats.