¶ Breeding Strategies for Improving Flock Quality
If you listen to the last week's show , you may have more questions about starting your printing program . Well , you're in a lot because we're going to pick up right where we left off . So let's get started . My line of Rhode Island dreads were bred without bringing in outside blood for 80 plus years . I didn't have that long .
But you know the gentleman I got mine from got his from another lady who did the same thing and he just continued that process .
What was the temperament like on your males ?
Oh , they're very docile , very , very docile . It doesn't impact their breeding or fertility . They're very people friendly . As a matter of fact , young cockles I got out there . Now I'm literally afraid when I go into pen I'm thinking of tripping me up and I'm going to fall down and squish one up .
My birds were at me like that . They're a bunch of trip hazards .
Yeah , I'm wondering where the difference is between being socialized and being trip hazards .
Well , I'm wondering . Well , so some old timers in my family who've been around birds for quite a while and they would tell me to not keep the calm , docile males . Now , these guys , they believed in line , breeding through and through . But they said don't keep your lazy boys because you'll put yourself in a fertility pickle and you'll lose vigor .
And I don't think that's true , but I see it said again and again , and again , and I've heard it too , that they keep the sort of high , strong males because it's a clear representation of vigor , maybe .
Yes and no .
The problem your hatch results tell you if you were losing fertility or not .
Oh sure , and apart enough birds and compared the testicular size in the carcass and can I take back to the personality of the bird before call ?
This is true , and there's nothing like doing your own processing to really get into the nitty gritty of what's inside of a bird , because I think a lot of knowledge can not come forward to you about your flock if you're outsourcing your processing because you weren't there .
If something weird was found , they just chuck it aside and stick your bird in a bag and they don't have any notes to give you . But if you're doing the processing now . You're the one inside seeing variances and discrepancies and you'll be able to . You know that bird .
So once you get in there and go , oh well , that's why he was a hole , or oh , that's why that one was so passive and underdeveloped .
Or if you're constantly cutting your gloves because the body cavity spacing is so tight , getting in past than a pinball .
You will so understand and appreciate good bone spacing if you're the one with the hand that has to go up there .
I met Ms Donaldson and talked to her a couple of times before she passed away and we had some really good discussions and she always maintained that the very best breeders ate their coals . She said you can learn more from eating your coals , that's when I started to learn the most . Because what's going on Not only with the muscling but the skeletal structure ?
Yeah , the bone , spacing , the skeletal structure , even how they put on fat , where they put the fat . I have seen discrepancies with organ sizes , even if they had the body capacity . I've seen small hearts , small gizzards . I've seen oversized hearts , oversized gizzards .
I've seen all of these little different variances to where it really hinges on me doing my due diligence on the selection part and understanding what was getting bred forward and from where . So I'm getting ready to change the way I do things and we'll go into that later .
Let me ask you a question . You talked about organ size and I know how I feel about gizzards , but do you remember , if you're faster growing birds at larger gizzards ?
Yes , they did .
That's right , they sure do the pathetic boys usually had small hearts , small gizzards and small testicles , yeah , so if you're butchering your own birds , the capacity to grind feed with grit and extract . Yes , that's where the whole nutritional side starts with . Birds is the gizzard and how well it grinds feed so they can digest it .
So all means , pay attention to the gizzard side .
And I came living down south , gizzards and chicken hearts were available at every corner gas station and they're quite delicious .
Chicken liver is too .
One of my favorite things is to peel the gizzard , and I don't know why . It's just neat to get that little weird flap of skin off the inside of the gizzard . It's such a weird texture .
Well , yeah , but the important thing to remember is you don't take it off . You might as well go out there and chew on a spare tire .
Yeah , yeah , no , it's when you get a load of the inside of the gizzard and you open that thing up and you see what they've been eating on and what they have for grit and , like some of my birds must be done , because I found , you know , glass and random things in there , but that piece of glass is so smooth .
It's almost a marble and that skin on the inside is so tough .
It's like a turkey farm and he was processing , I think , found a big lighter inside of Turkey's gizzard . Oh , I can believe that and it was here lighter . It had his name on it . He bought it and his name on it and lost it .
I had a duck hen that was acting off and poorly , so I pulled her and I put her in a , you know , isolation because they were special ducks , they weren't that common . These were a Sax ducks , very pretty , but she was poorly and I only had three females .
So I was freaking out and freaking out and I tried everything I knew how to do and she would just would not get better and on the third or fourth day she ended up passing away . So I opened her up . You know , for science , what's going on . Why did this bird deteriorate like that ?
She had eaten an inch and a half staple and once she had swallowed that thing , the gizzard was not strong enough to withstand a staple .
So well where disease in the hardware disease , yeah .
Yeah .
The same thing in the poultry world hardware disease .
I've never heard it used , but I certainly know that they do it . I suffer from it .
Well , now I own one of those handheld ground magnets . So every time we complete a building project , we sweep the magnet over the ground , pick that stuff up .
I thought you were going to say you went around and did birds with it . Oh no , you know there was a problem .
You can get those handheld security wands they have at concerts . They're pretty cheap now and you can scan any animal very quickly and very accurately to check for hardware disease , at least if it's ferrous .
I've only ever had it happen once in all of my time with birds . It was just that one time .
Well , now they just feed cows , these giant magnets to collect anything .
How do they get it back out ?
They don't , but it gets trapped in a safer space . Yes , that's been around for us . I remember seeing those when I was a kid advertised in the Cedars Farming Ranch catalog . They called them steel bullises .
You betcha , we're giving confirmation we're giving them oh yeah , we went down a rabbit hole for sure .
Yeah , we did . Where were we ?
We'll fix that in post-production .
You know , lion breeding is really good because it's easier to make improvements , because you have a better idea of who the parentage is , and which brings up another topic that I will probably get into in a subsequent recording . But Mandy has seen the light now and she's ready to start doing some single mating , and that's mating one male to one female .
Now you can make one male to several females , but the females are housed individually , so you know not only who the male was , but who the female was that produced that chick . If you're keeping records on it , that's how you make your best , and quickest improvement is when you can identify the male and the female that produced your really good chicks .
Now , inverse of that issue , you also know the male and the female that produced really bad chicks .
I see you . That's my main reason for changing my ways , because I want to know my call list first or foremost , who needs to come out .
How many times do we see on Facebook groups I've got this defect or this disqualification , so I'm just removing all the birds that have it from the flock .
Well , after you've spent time , space and resources to grow it to the point that you saw it .
Well , true , you have to find the parents and remove them .
Yeah , that's the key to it . Not only remove the birds that have it that you produce , get rid of the parent .
Then you stop seeing it .
That's the root of the problem . Right there is the parents that are producing the chick .
It wasn't so bullheaded , I would have done it sooner .
We all have different learning curves .
Production quota .
to me as well , this is true but , now I have the numbers to get into the nitty gritty of it , though yeah yeah , there are other rules , but some rules so . So you want to hear an analysis of some
¶ Poultry Breeding and Inbreeding Importance
criteria .
Inbreeding John , how do you feel about inbreeding and inbreeding ? Is breeding very closely related ?
bird Again it's a very powerful tool . Yeah , I'm not ready to do that yet I understand the value and the power of it . Again , that's a Pandora's box I am not willing to open up .
Oh , I'm going to split it wide open with my breed cross Between your Chantecler , male , and two of my breast females . I'm absolutely taking sibling to sibling to get to the bottom of what both have in there Early . I'm not going to waste three , four or five years half heartedly doing it . I'm going to go neck deep into it .
Well , you have the infrastructure and the ethical outlet for your culls .
Valid , and it's also not something that I would recommend new breeders to do , because it can help you in a hurry or it can hurt you in a hurry . All right , I have inbred birds a couple of times , one time for seven or eight generations to firmly establish the trait that I was after , and that was a smaller size in panels .
But if you're going to inbreed , you better pay attention to the bigger of your chicks , or misery , to miss another word , if they don't have good vigor , you are just backing up in a hurry .
Well , what's the real difference between line breeding and inbreeding ?
Line breeding is breeding loosely related individuals .
So father to daughter , mother to , son .
Yeah yeah , inbreeding is breeding more closely related individuals like brother and sister . You will bring out problems you didn't know you had , and you may also bring out really good quality you didn't know was in there either .
It can go either way and it will probably do that in the same batch , like if you hatch off 30 , 15 might be okay to gray and then the other 15 will be dinner .
But ultimately , that's what you want to know .
Or you could have scissor beaks and curly toes . Yeah , absolutely , you want to know if it's that's why you have to pair hatch to get started to figure out who threw it .
Which kind of brings us to another thing , and that's the breeding value of individual birds . Mandy , what's your thought ?
So , with this little plan I have in my mind , my thought was to hatch every egg the two girls , or put now and grow them in batches and then do my regular selection that I do , where I look for health , I look for vigor , I look for growth rate , I look for good , positive basic chicken features , like .
My first question is always how well do they chicken ? And then sorting them down from there to get down to the best representations of the best chicken , and not really focusing too much on physical traits and variances there , because I could sort that out later . That's my thought , and then let that tell me what's buried in both and then what I need .
It'll give me , like my shopping list of future selection , because that's the way it's always panned out before is even the worst birds . Tell you what you need to work on .
Bring up an interesting concept . You touched on loosely keeping parts birds . Like this bird great , you're looking for blue legs always .
Oh yeah . And then you have to weigh out the other traits they have . And then that's where it gets subjective and tricky too , because you can easily develop tunnel vision , like as soon as you recognize a problem and you go , oh , I need to work on this , and then you work on that so hard that you lose other things .
So then that next season you have to either recapture something or pick a different trait , and then you could inadvertently lose the one thing you worked on the season prior . Like it gets really fun .
It does and , honestly , I get the most satisfaction and the most enjoyment from the whole breeding process .
Oh , I love that part .
You know I say , okay , this bird will give me this and I've gotten . This sounds like I'm bragging . I don't mean it that way , but I've gotten to the point with my birds over the years that I know what that line is going to produce . I know what to expect and that gives you a level of comfort .
And , Mandy , I think you're just now starting to see that you've got the level of comfort in your birds and what they will do . You're ready to try something new that will take you to the next level .
Well , it's going to just teach me more stuff .
Well , and it's important that we know that new stuff , because what got us to point from point A to point B ? Probably not the same thing . It's going to get us from point B to point C .
I always like to have one good science project going on in the background and usually the last several years it's just been a bloodline cross within the same breed .
But I do find that I miss some of the more extreme science that I've dabbled in before , when I was looking into how barring and sex linkage worked and I went off the deep end there for a little while . And then the different comb types and how they express forward and how , because you'll see some weird stuff pop out .
I've seen combs that weren't any one particular type of comb . It was a mishmash of craziness and so I go oh me and then I call through and Like there was one time where I did this weird hybrid project and I had gotten two seasons into it and they looked weird . You could tell these were weird project birds .
But when I was processing the cockerels there was a significant difference in the texture of the tissues . And then some of these boys were 19 , 20 , 22 weeks old , but the connective tissue was that of like a 14-week-old bird . So the processing was still really easy and I was like where is that even coming from ?
And I didn't pursue it because I started to understand how much space and resources would be required to do your due diligence in , yes , an abstract kind of project like that . So I stopped it there .
And then , now that I've processed so many birds and I've seen that tissue harden right at that 19 , 20 , 21-week point , like , well , wouldn't it be kind of nice if I did have a line of birds that didn't do that , and maybe I already had them and let them go ? You know , for science yeah , for science .
What about pre-potency ? And you know the value of that to your breeding .
If . And what John's talking about , I think , is if you have a bird that the old timers called it pre-pot , if he had a male and no matter which female you made it into , they all pretty much look like him .
If you have a bird that's pre-potent for equality whether it's color type , egg production , whatever you really want to hang on to those birds because they are tremendously valuable to your breeding program . If it's a good quality . If it's a bad quality , you know they can kind of go on down the road . Pre-potent bird are Very powerful breeding troops .
Is it most usually on the males ?
Not necessarily .
Yeah , there's girls who will throw themselves forward strongly too . Yeah , doesn't that go back to them having come from like a well-cosivated linebread situation to have them absolutely that way .
That's really it's . I can't ever recall a pre-boat and burn that I raised .
That came from a flock mating situation the pre-poten birds that are the pre-poten birds that I had was from my linebread birds , because you remove , you come through that process over the years , removing undesirable traits and concentrating the good traits or the more desirable traits , and that's when you begin to see pre-poten birds popping up in your flock .
I Don't mean that to say that you're going to get 10 or 15 of them every year , because the chances that happens just not there , but you may get one or two and if you start building your flock around those Few pre-poten individuals , you're you're going to have a flock of birds that will not just suck off of anything else , whether it's showing , whether it's
production , egg laying or meat , it's it . Those are the kind of birds that can build your reputation as a breeder .
Absolutely . They fall within the if you're breeding to a standard .
Yes , yes , but if you're not breeding to a standard , how can you prove your birds ?
You have no you can't , you just have chickens .
I think that brings up the importance of breeding to a Written standard or any standard or just your flock goals . I mean you need to choose which way you're going to go and stick with it .
¶ Quality and Consistency in Poultry Breeding
I think the mark of a hatchery and how good their quality is is when you do buy a hundred chicks and you watch them grow . How similar to each other are they ? What sort of faults do you see within it ? How prevalent is it ? But , more importantly , what's the consistency like ?
Because I've ordered different breeds from the same place and they all had different levels of consistency and quality , where the one variety might not be that great but the other one actually is not bad .
And that level of consistency from that sort of environment all came from the foundation that they got started with when they started to Build up their numbers and the practices they employed to select their future breeders .
Yeah , yes .
And and how potent their beginners were . I .
I remember Bob James , who's an old poultry judge . He was very straightforward and he was from Tennessee so he didn't mince words . He talked kind of slow , which is he always said you start with crappy birds . All year ago to have his crappy bird .
Ish mostly right , yeah , cuz I've started with some crappy birds . But then I would hatch and hatch and hatch and grow , and grow and grow and I'd find you know three To move forward with , and after that they got a lot better . But it just takes a long time . It's a time commitment to do it that way .
Yeah , and , and sadly Most people and I don't , I'm not putting anybody down most people don't have the stick to it even this to do that . You know they kind of lose . They see , hey , this is a lot of work , I'm gonna do something else here .
We don't have the space . They need to pull it off . Yeah , oh yeah .
That's how I ended up where I'm at , because I realized the space constraints . And now here I am , sitting on this big old barn full of chickens , and I started with that little bitty backyard coop that would hold 12 . And then the deeper and deeper I got into it and the more I learned . But now it's exploded into this other Avenue .
I never thought I'd be in it puts a Brand new meaning on to the more you know , the more you grow , and some folks cases is knowledge . In some cases it's just Masses of a bird get getting over done with it .
But no , I did learn to not do that . Yeah , I don't . There's a couple of traps I almost fell into , where I was keeping birds for the sake of keeping birds , and and then I would hatch from them and I would get chaos as a result , and my OCD was not happy about that .
We we've talked about a lot of things here and we talked about knowing where your birds came from parents and you know that kind of stuff . But to do that you got to do what you got to have really good records .
You got to have a good way to identify your bird and if you don't keep good records you can't make improvements because you don't know where they came from .
And the short-term and the long-term Good record keeping will help you Remove undesirable traits from your bird and that just comes from the ability of recognizing who the parents are down to the individual , so you can backtrack and remove them and stop it there , right , and then you're only moving forward with your better results and those parents that produce those .
We don't have pedigrees and poultry the way they do in dog or Beef cattle or dairy cattle or hogs or sheep , and it's just not there . So To do that you really got to develop your own system , a numbering system of some sort . I started out Just kind of taking the shotgun approach , but I quickly learned that that wasn't working .
So I switched over to using a combination of toe punches and then wing bands . The toe punch I could tell at a glance what family particular bird was from . With the wing band numbers I could go back to my records and know who the parents were . There's a lot of folks use different colored leg bands .
Some of them use the zip ties and I don't like those because it's a constant maintenance thing and if you've got a bunch of chickens you're constantly making sure those zip ties haven't gotten too tight , because when they get too tight they'll literally cut into a bird's leg as they grow .
Not pretty , when that happens .
No , it's not .
I started that way and didn't pursue it yeah .
For my adult birds . I love the ABA leg bands , american Band , the association bands . They have to be put on at a very specific time to slip over the foot but still stay up and you have to do it , it's just right , because it's a one-way trip , unless you cut them off . Well for identification .
There is a way around that I discovered years ago . If you use a pair of wire cutters , cut the band you can spread it just enough you can put them on . Put them on , prime them up and take them off .
Several times . They're surprisingly good plastic for that . Yes , and they change cores every year , which is nice .
So when a chick is hatched , I know which egg it came out of , if I'm there watching it and it gets a leg band and that gets recorded and as soon as it's three , maybe four days old , it gets a wing band and the leg band gets cut off and the wing band is its permanent record and I can always equate that back to my records and see what hand and what
rooster you know laid that egg on what day and what its weight was on collection day and what its weight was on lockdown day .
If you're doing single matings . Single matings , toe punches can tell you at a glance who the parents are easily , because you can get 16 different number combination just by punching a little small hole in the web between the toes on the check foot . You can do that the day they hatch right out of the incubator .
And they don't seem to mind it . It seems like that part of the skin doesn't have nerves in it . They don't seem to care at all .
Kind of like clipping our fingernails , you know .
Yeah .
They might squeak a little bit , but there's no big fuss .
I was just wing banding a whole bunch of quail and they were not even chirping , they were oblivious to me , just popping the band in . They're like yeah .
It's like it hurts a whole lot less than when my daughter got her ears pierced first . But let me ask you a question Leg bands you put them on right side up or upside down ?
I feel like this is a trick question .
If you pick your birds up and handle them a lot , I'd put them on upside down , exactly .
Much easier to read a band that's been put on upside down than it is to be putting them on right side up . I never even thought of that . I learned that the hard way .
Well . So here's a question I have , because I did buy a box of a thousand wing bands and I got them in five different colors in a number sequence of up to like 200 or so for each color . How visible are these wing bands when they're on the adult bird ? How hard is it to get in there and see ? You won't .
When they're walking around , you won't even tell what color they're on .
You won't notice it when they're walking around .
Pick them up and peel back the feathers to see them .
The reason I wanted to go with . That is because it'll hang with the bird through processing .
Yeah , so the rest of their life . If it's put on properly , that's a lifetime application . You don't have to change it , you don't have to do anything .
And if you put your farm name on it and a little bit of advertising because you can put up the three lines of typing , it's not that expensive from National .
I kept the first one , really simple Right .
but for customers , if you set the expectation like , hey , you know what ? Only my birds have this band tag with my name on it . It's your way of ensuring quality to the plate or to your customer . You have a marketing thing and your own .
That would matter once you achieve scale .
Yeah , Another thing is if you get those colored bands and I highly recommend them because a different color can designate a different year , but make sure you get the ones that are a solid color band with a different , highly contrasting color of numbers .
Oh , yeah , yeah .
It's worth two cents per .
Yeah , absolutely Little version .
Now we have to call them . You can't order the field through the website , but they're a wonderful deal with .
Yeah , they're the people that make all the bands everybody else's sale .
Did we say who they are ?
National band and tag .
Yes , they're local to us .
And they make bands for everything under the sun , not just chickens , not just duck , not just turkeys . You can get bands for ostriches . You can get bands for geese that slip over the neck . You can get bands and tags for fish from them if you're so inclined . But they've been around a number of years Plus . It's a product made right here in the US of A .
That's why I like it .
Northern Kentucky .
We hate to stop here because we have more information and we can't fit it all into one show . We will continue our discussion on starting your breeding programs next week . In the meantime , be sure to email us and share your thoughts at potporkieverspodcastcom . Until then , may all your birds be happy , healthy and productive . Thank you for listening .