Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock.
Some people who preemptively dub the comb, so they don't even have to worry about it.
We're getting a lot of really good questions and comments tonight. And I, folks, I really appreciate you doing that. That's what makes a show very helpful to other people is when you ask good questions like we're getting tonight. And speaking of questions, Bonnie Wagner wants to know if you plant anything specific in the pastures for the chickens to free range.
So we do a grass mix with a lot of rye and some wheat that I'll throw out there. Red Clover, I like that a lot, cause it's pretty. And then we have some native weeds, like Chickweed is prolific here, and they love it. And it comes up all by itself, I don't have to do anything. Purple Dead Nettle is another one that they like a lot, that grows, On its own. I have, I don't have to go seed that. So I keep the beneficial weeds. I try to remove stuff that they won't eat.
Like sometimes our pasture will get an invasion of dock and that stuff is terrible and they don't eat it either. So I'll kill those plants and then reseed over that with a little blend. And I think. Jeff has a couple recipes for flock pasture building.
I do. It just depends, it depends on your zone and your region, you hit on probably the best. So poultry, my observation over the years, poultry prefer a succulent legume. Like a young clover, young alfalfa, that's their go to first. If people are in a hurry, they can use this, what we call a cereal grain, like a wheat, barley, oats, something like that, which germinates really quickly, right? And as long as they get them out there while it's young, but it's pretty much, a one time grazing.
It's not going to come back. When chickens dig into something green that they like. Nothing's going to come back because they eat it all the way to the ground and it disappears, right? So you almost want to think about, your chicken pastures as an annual crop and be willing to reseed it every year because they're just going to annihilate it. And, what they don't eat, they're going to scratch up. They're going to scratch loose.
And I prefer people considering an annual planting or two annual plantings a year for their poultry. And I think they get a lot further ahead that way.
Hey Jeff, I got a question for you. Okay. What about rotational grazing? Works for
cows. It does.
Works for chickens too.
It works really good for chickens. As long as people don't leave them on the yard too long. Okay. Now in a trap door set up, Mandy mentioned trap doors. So right outside the doors, that first two to three feet is going to get so denuded with manure and traffic, with their feet that nothing's going to grow there, right? You're going to have to do something in that region. There's no reason why you can't rotationally graze chickens.
Or any poultry, for that matter the key is you have to know when it's time to quit and move on. And if you look at it and say, oh, it's still green out there, and you keep going, It won't come back. They're it.
Yeah, if it goes shorter than an inch or so and then the next bird behind them takes it down the rest of the way to the dirt.
Yep.
Excuse me, they're after that fresh greenery too, so when it starts to regrow, they're on it faster than what's already established and it'll thin out pretty quickly. You know what, it's something like, it takes a minimum of 50 square foot per chicken to even have a hope of keeping grass around. And that's a lot of room. 50 square foot per bird is a lot of space. And in France for the Bresse, they have government regulated minimums of 10 square meters per bird per pasture.
And when people ask me like Carrie's question about rotationally grazing, I tell them they need. Four square feet per bird per day. So each day, they need to have a fresh four square feet per bird. So a flock of 50 would need 200 new, 200 square feet of new space every day.
And, there you would have an opportunity to come in, maybe put down some lime, reseed it, and you definitely can do it but they like the legumes the best even peas, like immature field peas yeah, they're going to tear that up, they're just, they're going to love it they're not as crazy about grasses, they'll eat them, But if you ever turn a batch of chickens loose on something that's well mixed forage, you're gonna watch and their go to is the alfalfas first, or the legumes first.
They'll eat the grass, it's not really what they want. It's not
the best. Yeah, they'll
save
it
for later. Yeah, they're like kids. They want the candy. I
grow this trailing sedum, which is pretty much a succulent, and it's like chicken candy, and it grows over top of mulch and rock, and everywhere I have a bare spot in my landscape, I plant it. I just stick some of that on the surface and it takes over. And then when I go, Oh, I have too much of that. I can grab it out by the handful and it's like little chicken treats. So it's starting to act like a mulch and I don't have to replace that mulch.
And then whenever that greenery gets out of control, I just grab it by the handful and throw it to the birds. I didn't know. It's juicy. It's thick. It's it's
nice. I didn't know they liked that. Mary needs to watch out for hers. I guess I might have to get into it.
It grows back quick enough. She'll never miss it. Oh, it's
super fast. They cleared out like a three by three area when I wasn't looking. Just gone, decimated, but the roots came back a couple weeks later after a rain. It's already coming right back.
Oh, here's a good question. Sarah Enoch wants to know, do you also cull the parents of the birds with yellow feet?
Yes. You have to confirm which specific ones had it. And so I just bought a pile of hatching baskets so I can pair hatch by the hen and keep the eggs separate for hatching, just to make sure that if I ever have that question, I know the answer. Because if you see it and you clan mated, You don't know who it was.
So if I was going to do anything different now that I've been at it this long, I would have paramedic from the beginning because it would have prevented a whole lot of questions that came up later after you get, three, four generations in, you're like, wait, that's a little weird. Where'd that come from? Which bird threw that? If I was paramedic, I would have known.
See, we're getting some, man, some good questions here. Austin says that they're in Birmingham. It's just a matter of keeping them well shaded in the summer to feed them out.
Carrie, that's for you. You're down there.
For me all of mine are in the shade. Even the pens that I have that are not shaded, in the summertime, I put a shade cloth over to keep them shaded, and I also have fans that I hang in the tops of my pens, so they constantly have wind blowing, but I can have dinner fresh year round. They, they do, my birds do really well, the Bresse that I've got from you. They stay cooler than some of my game birds because they have the bigger cones and wattles in the summertime.
And I did not get any that had frostbite this past winter. Which, I do give them, if they stay low they will stay out of the wind. Now, I've got some knuckleheads that they're getting on their roost, no matter how cold it is. It's always that one
word.
No matter if the rain is, if the rain is horizontal, they're still gonna get up on the roost at night. But, yeah, they, mine, the ones that I got from you, Mandy, are pretty daggum hardy.
It's sink or swim here,
and they're also tasty.
So you did eat one. You didn't tell me.
You've been really busy lately, and I haven't had a chance to talk to you, but. Still gonna send
me a carcass picture.
Okay, this is true. I'm sorry I'll do that next time, but I have I have chunked it, cooked it in the oven, chunked it and deep fried it put the whole thing in the crock pot, and I I can't even go to a restaurant and order chicken anymore.
Me neither. I'm ruined.
I feel like a snob, but, and I've got some, I've got some turkeys. You'll like those. And then, I've got, You're going to become
a turkey snob too.
I've got Thanksgiving and Christmas already, they're already on their diet. And. It's, even the family noticed a difference. And I'm just like, I know what that thing ate all of its life. And I know what I just put in my body. And I can't say that when I go to a restaurant. You're right.
Mandy, Austin wants to know if you use mobile houses or do you keep them in one stationary house with access to pasture?
So the picture behind me is young males that are in rooster coop and rooster coop is a nine by 13 stationary coop, and it's got about an eighth of an acre. And then I can open up into another about eighth of an acre, and then I can open up into another area on the other side in case they eat it all down, which they're, they don't, I usually put what, like 20, 25 birds in that building at a time, so they never run it down to the dirt.
This year is weird because we're in a drought, so everything is crispy. So I've been doing a couple of fodder trays for them to supplement a little bit.
Don't do that. Don't do that.
Just for greens. I know, Jeff.
Don't do that.
They still get their regular feed. And they camp out inside when it's hot anyways.
If you were tracking the numbers right now? This is no lie. Poultry grow faster on range on a drought year than they do on a lush year.
Really?
Yes, because they can find more bugs, more spiders. More slugs. Oh, our
spiders are hot and heavy too. We've got some intense spiders.
Yes they will do by far better on a drought crispy year on range than they do on a wet year. Oh, we've
got giant grasshoppers. What do they call them when they start flying? Aren't those locusts?
Get them. Get the birds there.
I'll walk through and see if any jump up or if they're all gone.
Okay.
I didn't know that. I learned something tonight, Jeff.
There you go. And Rebecca Cahill, like Austin said, fodder is too much work. It ain't worth the work. That's for sure. It is not worth the work.
Rebecca said she never thought about the water source as a contributing issue of frostbite.
Oh yeah, it's putting humidity in. Anytime you have surface area of water, it's releasing humidity. And if you heat it, it's going to release a little more humidity if the air is cold. That's true. All that steam coming off of it when you first set it down or if you refill it. So I, I rotate my water drinkers in the wintertime and I'll put them in the hatch room to thaw and then bring out the other ones that are filled. And so it's room temperature water, not hot water, not heated water.
And then once it freezes solid again, I just swap it out. So that way I know at minimum, like if it's zero degrees, it's probably frozen again in three or four hours, I'm going to swap it. But. So long as I know they get fresh water two or three times a day in the cold, then I feel okay about not heating it. It adds to my work, but it's better for the birds that way. So
far. I see. Here we go. Julie wants to say that she planted a forage crop for her birds. They keep trying to get at it while she's growing it out so they can have at it.
Keep it watered.
Oh man, we've been getting the rain down here this year, jeez. Austin wants to know, can you raise good quality breasts with not much access to pasture?
You can, but the flavor's not going to be as intense without that forage. But you're still going to get some pretty decent fat development, hopefully. Hopefully that gene is in there. I like to see the crock rolls have a half inch fat pad. on the bat when they're like 16 weeks old. If it's earlier, they're not going to be as developed as that. But when that fat's in there and you put them in the smoker at 225 degrees, it's so juicy. It's the juiciest chicken.
Just when all that fat, it's like a self buttering bird. And you can do that just with regular feed with no grass at all. You're just not going to have that complexity to the flavor profile that the pasture brings to the meat. Next question.
Next question. Our friend Ingrid wants to know if you know of a reliable breeder in Canada.
No, not offhand. Like I've heard that they're tricky to find up there. And some of them are prone to being on the small side is what I've heard. And getting anything across the borders next to impossible through the proper channels. And you should only ever consider the proper channels. Don't try to sneak anything. That's a no.
That'll get you in big trouble.
Oh yeah, that's not worth the trouble that would bring. Don't even think about it. Just, eventually, maybe, someone will Maybe someone's up there working in secret and they're going to debut their flock next spring and Canada can finally get some big, good growing birds up there in that breed. They have other chickens that grow good up there.
I understand live birds, but what's the deal with sending hatching eggs across? There's not really a disease transmission issue through the hatching eggs that's going to matter.
So there still, so for you to ship hatching eggs out of country like that Legally. You have to have your flock vet checked and they have to do several different things and sign off on it. When they do that, you're good to go for 30 days and that's it. And you have to have a vet come back out and check your flock and then you can renew it for another 30 days. But it's a 30 day export ticket.
And it can be tricky just to get the vet to come by. Like we have to almost have a crisis, life or death, and maybe the vet will be by tomorrow.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of vets that won't even do it because They're liable for what they signed when they sign and say it's clean and they don't want to be responsible for it.
Here's a couple of good questions here. Samantha Greig wants to know, can you raise breasts? As a Cornish game hen processing sooner and younger for the two to two and a half pound weights.
Absolutely.
I think I don't look great though. Wait, are they? Okay. What does that look like? Okay. Like a Cornish hen where you're talking about a Cornish cross harvested at four weeks or three and a half weeks, it still looks somewhat plump. The bone length
is different. Huh?
Yeah. The bone
length is different.
Yeah. Yes, you can do it, but what is the, what is the appearance of that going to be? Is it still going to look okay to do that? Or, okay, so some fowl, the bones grow out. And then the meat catches up, the fleshing catches up. So turkeys do that, right? Because turkeys go through that ugly stage between week 8 and week 11 and then all of a sudden once the structure or the frame is built, the bones are in place, then they start fleshing out rapidly.
Jack, you're making me want to go find a volunteer out of my seven week old cockerels just for science.
You should do that. You should do that.
It's been a cockerel heavy season. I've got extra for boys.
I'm really curious what they look like. Yeah, now I am too. We'll expect a carcass post, on Facebook in the next few days. You better give me a week.
And this is for Mandy and Jeff Austin wants to know the best feeding recommendations for Bresse. Go ahead
Mandy.
You're going to have to correct me, but the program you set me up with the 23 percent starter and then by four weeks, switching them over to What was the grow or 19%?
23, 19 and 17. And then do
that up until about week 12. At least that's what I did.
And then put them
on the 17 percent finishing formula. And I was having them processed four weeks after being on the finishing formula. And I feel like maybe there could have been some more corn in it, a little more corn heavy for, or. Whatever puts more fat on. They were a little leaner on the finishing by keeping nutrition in it. Cause with the finishing I was doing it was essentially milk, corn and wheat. And that was it for 2 3 weeks.
But what you provided with that formula was full nutrition, but they just didn't put the fat on exactly the same.
No. But the starter was
fantastic. Those were chunky monkeys at 4 days old.
Yeah. And we can change the finisher feed based on what you want, out of the gate, formulating a finisher feed for people. That was, a little bit more uniform for everybody, but, yeah, it's 2319 at 17 was the protein profiles, but, we jacked up the amino acids to get those growth rates in the early first eight weeks. That you were seeing cause earlier you were talking about harvesting at like 15 or 16 weeks. And I thought, yeah, it used to
be 16 to 18 weeks. Now I'm at 14
to
16 for a similar result.
It's all in the feed.
Yeah, that was definitely, cause I didn't change my genetics in a year, like the same flock, but just by changing the feed, bumped me up like an average of three weeks, which was pretty cool.
Now I just started saying that's very cool. Hey, we've got some photos that Mandy sent us and we've been getting so many questions, this is great, man. Let's pull these up.
So that's a historical image of the white and the black, and I wish the U. S. flock had that if you look at those birds right there, they are the exact same shape, just different colors.
But the black bresse and blue bresse, the colored ones that are in the US, tend to be smaller than the white bresse, and that's just a difference of lineage, and that difference can be anywhere from a pound difference all the way towards two and a half, three pound different weights, they're not identical between the colors, so that's a big thing that'll have to be worked on over time is getting the different colors To be more similar to each other in their structure and shape, to meet standard
universally, no matter what color it is. That'll be tricky. That's gonna take a while. That's the grey, that's the, from my understanding, that's the oldest, and, I'm talking like 500 years these birds were going on in France. That's the first mention of them is 500 years ago. And they've been through a lot since then.
And I love this color pattern. It reminds me very much of silver penciled hamburgs. It's a mouthful, but,
now that color did sneak through in some genetics in the U. S. flock. Cause as the longer you line breed and tighten in your genetics, new stuff will come up. And one of the new things that came up was this color pattern from one of the first import lines. And it started with one bird and then a couple more birds. And so the two people were first trying to figure out what it was and what it meant.
And then they were speaking to some breeders in France and they were like, Oh, they carry the gray pattern in there. You should keep reading that, see what happens. So that's what they're doing. It's going to be a while before they have the pattern but the fact that it was in there already and it didn't have to get imported, that's pretty cool. And now I want to play with those. But any pattern
bird is a challenge to breed. Oh yeah.
Tricky. The picture on the left side, that was in England in 1913, at a show there, and then that's just one of my growouts, I think she's from last year, and I wanted to put them side by side to see what was different and what was similar in that amount of time. of birds that are the same breed. I thought that was a neat comparison of the tail angles are different. The slope is like that. There's a lot different there, but there's still some similarities too.
Yes. I think if your bird didn't have quite the feather length that she does, she would look much more like that bird on the left.
Yeah, I could see that. And you were the one teaching me about fluff and feather makeup and explaining more of those finer points that I never had a reason to think about before. It
sure changes your look. It really does.
Yeah. And that's an example of the French standard. You cleaned that up real good. I feel like I can read that now.
It was a little bit of a challenge to read it, wasn't it?
It's old.
So am I.
So it's describing essentially what a dual purpose is. Like a dual purpose bird for the body and the breast and those descriptive words in there. You'll see some of that same word play in other breeds with their standard of it, that dual purpose category. There's just a certain structure that really brings that out better. So long as you're going for that overall balance.
This range standard is very close to the one y'all have here in America.
Yeah. The only thing we really changed was add an extra pound because a lot of the U S birds are that size.
So it's
not something we're breeding towards. It's something we're working with and it was already here. They were coming up heavier than standard, so the general consensus was, Alright let's just add another pound onto the standard. They're American Bresse, it's bigger here, like
There you go. Yeah.
It seemed to be making the most sense. Now, this is an example of two different genetic pools, and mine is the one on the left. And the other one on the right is from elsewhere, but you can see there's differences in the skin texture, and the plumpness is similar, but the age, like I thought it was neat, because these were fed out on the identical feed. Identical housing, like they were raised together, just a two week stagger in age, but it was just neat to see the differences.
But I think I got the scald water a little too warm on mine. I think it started cooking a little too soon and it changed the color of the skin because you have to watch your scald water. 155 is too much and I try to aim for 150 degrees to 155 degrees for scalding, much warmer. And you run the risk of changing the texture of the skin by too much heat.
Why not 145 like all other?
I was always told 150.
Yeah, ducks and waterfowl are 150 to 155. Now, if you catch them at the right time on feather cycle, you should be able to do them between 1. 45 and 1. 50.
I do have to wrestle with pin feathers sometimes on those earlier ages, right in the middle of our own feathers.
Yep, so before you actually even think about processing them, you should pull back the feathers and look at that, that, the pin feather development, and you're going to find a specific week timeframe. When everything will pluck clean and you need to write that down and share it with the rest of the world. It's, this is the nature of heritage poultry. And whether it's ducks, geese, heritage fowl, they will hit a specific window where there's no pin feathers cycling.
So it'll reduce your hand plucking.
Oh, that'd be nice.
Yeah.
Thanks for that tip. I'll try that on this next batch I have going.
See, there's your another little experiment.
Yeah. Another little nugget.
Yeah. And when you find out, is it 14 weeks? Is it 16 weeks or, what, whatever that date is. You just need to record it and share it with everybody else especially anyone using similar genetics as yours. But yeah, that's true. Pretty much the breast should be uniform enough to say, okay, if you do them at 15 weeks, there's no pin feather plucking. It should be really close.
I wonder what the difference is between the fast feathering genetics. And then if that window would be the same on the ones that have, there is some slow feathering going around.
Wait, hold it stop, time out. No, that is piss poor feed program, okay?
They're in the same group getting the same feed.
Probably don't have enough
feeder
space. Without the appropriate level of assisting. That feathering is not going to come out and there is no other feed out there that is adding cysteine. So every time you add a offshoot protein source that's going to be deficient in that. You're actually changing that overall feather development. Okay? So anytime somebody's using a byproduct protein or they're using byproducts period they're gonna throw that off But you're saying same group same farm, same feed.
Yeah, birds three, four weeks behind in their feathering. Five weeks old and they have just their little shoots coming out. Just as big, if not bigger than the other birds. But this
isn't your place, right? This is somewhere else.
Yeah, this is elsewhere. I get emailed a lot of questions. And a lot of pictures.
I still think It'd be inadequate feed space. I still think, yeah, it's inadequate feed space, and it's really inadequate feed. They're not being fed Then I have my list of follow up questions. They're not being fed what they need to show their true genetic potential. Okay.
Jeff, I got one for you. This is not related to Bresse, but it is related to Rhode Island Reds.
Okay.
Female chicks will feather out much faster than male chicks.
I believe that.
Okay.
I will. But doesn't that have to
be
bred in? That's the, the true genes of that line, like Rip's talking about with the Rhode Island Red. So that part of it's already there. Okay. Now with the commercial birds, what we're seeing now the bigger they, the faster they make them grow, the harder they're having, the harder time they are having getting feather covering, okay? So to Rip's point, the cockerels are growing at a much faster rate, body and frame, than the pullets are.
So the pullet is putting more of her nutrition into the feathers. While the cockerel is putting more of what it's eating into frame and fleshing, okay? And it'll catch up later, right? So if Rip wanted to separate or someone with Rhode Island Reds actually could separate their cockerels and pullets and we could feed them differently out of the gate, we could make them, I could design the feed to make them feather equally at the exact same time. But that is a possibility.
That is interesting.
But there just isn't enough appropriate amino acids for those cockerels based on their growth performance to feather out. As quickly as, and I see that even in the Cornish crossbreed, Rip, same thing you're saying, the pullets will always feather out more uniformly and faster than the cockerels will.
And I can see the wheels in Mandy's mind spinning wildly
over there. She doesn't believe me. She's only going to do the field trial to see if she, if I'm wrong. She's going to try to prove you wrong. Yeah. She's going to try and prove me wrong.
A group. And then I'm going through countless conversations I've had with other people and a little list of other theories.
She's I got those three coops on the back side over there and the others where my hogs are. And I don't have those turkeys in them anymore.
No, I could,
I could,
I
could, I could use the other ones and I could put one set of chicks in here and one set of chicks there and I could prove Jeff wrong. I'm not
trying to
prove him
wrong, I just want to confirm that he's right.
My comments were not socially acceptable and I apologize, but sometimes people touch it on a sensitive nerve and they want to blame genetics for things that aren't genetics. It's piss poor feet. Okay. At the end of the day, it's deficient feed or deficient nutrition. There are there's lots of stuff that's genetic out there. And then I hear people say, Oh, like with Cornish cross, that's a genetic problem. No, that's a feed problem. And then they want to blame something else on feed.
And I'm like, no, that's a genetic problem. So people really don't have a clue. What is genetic and what is nutritional. And I run into it just about every day, right? People cleaning. Often
than not, it's an entire process of elimination to get to the bottom of some stuff. Like I've been through that process repeatedly of, is it this? Okay. Let's run down through that checklist again.
You did the first feed trial because you didn't believe that feed was going to make that big of a difference in the performance of your birds. As it turns
out, it was three weeks.
Yeah. And that's what everybody needs to hear. But unfortunately, not everyone can get, the same feed you're getting, right? They're not going to spend the money for that same quality of feed. And, but it's three weeks.
The cross was actually working out, though, because their consumption dropped.
But for somebody who needs to ship it three states away, you're, you live two hours away, but for people who have to ship it three or four states, Sue wants to accept the challenge, how am I going to get your feed to Sue in Oklahoma, right? And there's nobody in Oklahoma making the feed. that you are using. So short of paying the huge money to ship it in, what are you going to do?
Share a truck with friends and order a bunch? Yeah,
yeah. There you go. I'm having a hard time
convincing people to make the switch locally to where we can build up a truckload to actually get delivery so I don't have to do that drive because getting that drive scheduled is tricky.
I mean I know people that will split a pallet in certain areas. It does happen.
It happens a lot. There's several really good feed mills, like the one you're working with, Mandy, and some others, of equal quality. They're shipping half truckloads to different places, and it goes to one drop point. Everybody comes and picks it up on a Saturday morning or whatever, and, the feed millers are really, the good feed mills are willing to make these deals.
They just need somebody to step up and be the drop point and make the arrangements, get the orders, make the arrangements, and usually that person ends up getting a discount if they're willing to do the work they usually get about a 10 percent discount on their feed, it ends up paying, if you do it right,
gosh I hate to do this, but we have run way over time, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the show tonight and it was a
great show,
a great show. Thank you for joining us this week. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. We'll see you next week.