Instead of moaning about the price just keep less pigeons. The first thing this sport needs to do is fill the transporter each week to cover costs; sprint racing week after week will do this, channel racing is not an option for regional feds, plenty of different avenues for those channel fliers. Small feds need to join together, forget prevailing winds, golden mile etc, fill the crates and help keep the cost of sending birds down.
If your racing each week up to 200m why need 40 birds? 12 cocks/hens is plenty to race with, only one bird can win. Distance fliers can use the fed to get their birds ready for the channel races, commensense over daft politics needs to prevail if we want to race in the future.