Hi, I'm Mandelyn Royal and I would like to welcome you to another episode of the Poultry Keepers podcast. Joining me in the studio are John Gunterman and Rip Stalvey, the rest of our podcast team and we're looking forward to visiting with you and talking poultry from feathers to function.
I explained to her, I was like, don't worry about how many actual females we find, because remember, each of these females is going to produce X number of eggs, so we really need to focus on Looking at the season as a whole over multiple months and stagger hatching from just the better females instead of trying to rush through and use bulk and use females that are not actually going to do any breeding favors to the program.
So only the best moves forward. So how many females does she have now that are good enough?
Like six.
Okay, which just falls in line with that rule of tens, yeah, the only thing we don't have, if there was, following the rules of tens, I would expect at about six really good females, and two or three really good males, from that starting number, the only thing you didn't get was any outstanding males.
Yeah, and that was really unfortunate, and based on the picture, she did have some promising ones that just fizzled out before it was their time to shine. Which is okay. You can call that self culling because you do have to keep an eye on overall vigor and health and all of those things. If a bird takes himself out of the program, more power to him.
I think if a bird doesn't appeal to the breeder, It's certainly not going to appeal to the consumer.
Because it's the breeder that is their own best filter.
And just the way you're describing your birds to your potential customers or your customers, they're going to feel the energy and excitement in your voice, or if it's not there, if they're customer service is an art form, you've worked retail, I think we all have yeah, even in doing technical support, I used to tell my people on the phone, smile, the customer can hear it on the other side of the phone, they really can. So if you're down on your birds, they're not going to sell well.
I just had a thought occurred to me. Looking at this from a marketing perspective. That if you can somehow figure out a way to weave all the selection process that you have to go through. To get those really good marketable birds. That should be part of your sales story. Yeah. It's a story that sells things. It's not so much the product. Most of the time.
At farmer's market, I would be sitting there with pictures of, the three birds. So I had this. Person, Mandy, drive all the way up here and help me sort through. And these are the birds that we pared down to last year. And this is what I'm producing this year. And that's just going to help drive sales and customer enthusiasm. And it's just, it's a cycle that feeds into itself. Where you get excited about your birds, you take better care of them. It all just feeds back into the loop.
That's really true. And you have to have confidence in what you're producing.
Oh, sure.
And it can be heartbreaking to make this kind of investment and be, at the end of your first year and go, wow, I spent all this time and money on all these birds and all I have left is this, but I look at it as, we're phenohunting. We're looking for the phenotypical expression that's going to do great in our environment. And to walk away the first year with even that many birds, I think is pretty darn good.
So the struggle to avoid doing a bloodline cross, because I know I was able to supply her with a spare and that's going to, fertilize some eggs and fill the incubator for the freezer. And it'll also help to ask the question, how quickly could we change the underbody of the bird with this one line cross if he's with a couple of those chosen females, but also to keep that original line pure, we need to go back to where she got them from and ask, do you have some males?
Cause she has another three pens that don't even have a male in them. And ideally they should come from that source to keep that line pure. Yes, absolutely. Or as closely related as possible. So we're not just muddying up the genetics. Because that's a whole other breeding plan if we're going to start line crossing and that's a whole other time commitment on getting it right.
Starting just from, is it going to be a male or female based line cross?
And technically the female is better, but she doesn't even have the male.
And so how do you back out of that? There is no back out
plan. And then based off of what we were seeing, as far as them still wanting to do that feather picking and stuff. When I got back, I did jump on the phone with Jeff Maddox, because he's, our local feed expert. And we were on the phone for over an hour, talking about what I saw and which recipes she was using. And I was like you formulated it. And he was like who was doing the mixing? We have some more irons in the fire on what to figure out to get this flock up and going better, but.
And it sounds like they have a pretty big operation and they're not ready to take on mixing their own feed.
Not just yet, but it might become a thing that has to happen for the sake of the birds.
Any other surprises in these other pens? You went through three pens, we talked about the first one a lot. Were the other two pretty much the same, or any surprises?
The second pen, I think I only found one bird. And each pen had eight or nine birds in it. All female, when I got there, because the last male standing was off in his own area to protect him from getting henpecked. And he was also with one female who herself had been dramatically henpecked, like she was bloody on the backside where they had ripped her open even, and so we saved those two birds for last, but the second pen was similar to the first and disappointingly consistent.
How old were these birds now? They ranged all of them were old enough to be laying. All of them were at point of lay or past it. So probably five and a half, six months old, all the way up to seven, eight, nine months.
I was wondering if this female might have been a peck out in the nesting box or something, if she was injured.
I thought of a follow up question that I need to ask her still on, when they go to bed, are the bald butt females the ones on the top rung of the roost? Because the way the roosts were designed put faces to butts.
I'm not a fan of the ladder roosts anymore. I like the way they look in a pen, but having seen a pen side by side of the ladder style roost and everybody on the same horizontal, there's a lot less competition and It's just calmer in the flat roost style, versus having everybody on a ladder, because they're not constantly jockeying for position, yes. Everybody's on the same plane, literally, and that makes for so much more of a harmonious pen.
Yeah, so I am still, a week and a half after the fact, thinking of follow up questions.
That's good. For me, I love just, going, I don't know, this is new. Because it means it's a learning opportunity for me as well.
Mandy, I'm curious you went over all her birds with her, and y'all found what you found. What's your advice for her next step? How does she go forward? How does she move forward from here?
Keeping track of those females that sorted out as the best and taking their traits into consideration, When she does reach out to the original breeder so that she has almost like a shopping list of traits that the boys should hopefully have. And she was like what if I have to start out with a whole other batch of chicks? And I'm like the same selection parameters are going to apply.
And if you bring in another group of 30, then we still need to be just as picky and just as hard, but with some tolerance on the males, just to avoid this scenario from happening again, where they might have been a little bit over culled. For the first year, she might have been a little too hard on them.
I would much rather see her do that, though, than I would be just grab them at random and say you'll do.
Correct, because that doesn't do anybody any favors. That'll make more chicken, but what kind of chicken?
Maybe not even. You start regressing. Unless you're I found this trap in the chicken world. Unless you're constantly pushing forward, you're going to slide back. There is no coast.
Right, and then if you start doing that extreme mating of taking the absolute biggest, that'll set you back too in the future.
As closely complimentary as possible with a lean towards the direction that you want to go, is the way that I like to do my pairing. And, that's the best way that I've thought to describe it. Maybe somebody else could describe it a little better
for other people, incremental improvements without going to the extreme.
Mandy, I'm curious. Do you and this reader have any follow up activities planned?
We're going to wait and see what the access is like for additional males, and then we'll figure out how best to salvage the hatch season because the hatch season is what's going to fill the freezer. That's the entire absolute goal is decent looking freezer birds. So worst case scenario, we see what my one male does. And how that's going to change that freezer result. And if she even gets to have second year sellable table birds, because she didn't sell any birds in a shrink bag at all.
Between the keel issues and everything else she was seeing, this was a $0 net season for her.
Did she track feed conversion ratio? Either along the way, because that to me, that's like the end of the year check. Okay does she have a bead on how much feed did she buy this year? And we'll compare that to next year. And how much meat did she make with that feed this year? Compare that to next year.
That's a good thing to bring up though.
To me it's all about, how efficiently are we converting my hard earned money that I buy feed with into meat to put in the freezer. And inefficient birds have no place on the farm.
So I had, this is a little bit unrelated, but at the end of the year, I went to our feed mill and I said, Hey, do you have a printout you could do that shows what I bought this season because I didn't keep all of my receipts and I'm curious, and I hadn't, oh, that hurts. I hadn't shopped anywhere else.
I got my food store has one of those old line printers, and I asked for that report and it went for a long time.
The good news was. When I compared that printout from the feed mill to my spreadsheet of what I sold, which wasn't much because I'm not big on the whole selling side of things. I'm about to fill in my freezer too. And I had a solid break even. They didn't cost me anything to keep. There was also zero profit, but break even is perfect.
Yeah, you can't beat that.
And you didn't go to the grocery store to buy meat.
I didn't go to the grocery store for eggs. I didn't go for meat, and the poultry, because we also get our pork feed from them too, the chickens paid for the pigs.
Oh, heck yeah.
Yeah, so the pork was free.
In essence, you did make a profit, in a sense.
If you look at what you saved off of your grocery bill, and what you've put in fertility back into the land that you live on, and there's a whole bunch of intangibles there.
Oh, our tomato row getting supplemented with peat moss with some chicken poo. Our tomatoes next season are going to be incredible. Especially when I take the ground up shells and add that calcium back into the soil.
I want to turn you on to the idea of a hugelkultur now. It's super easy to build and it's a great way to mound up a big pile of manure. And use it up.
We do a little bit of that because of how sloppy our ground is and how high our water table is. All of our gardening is above ground level, even after we install drainage.
But having that bunk of logs basically down below everything just acts as a beautiful sponge. Chicken poop is a beautiful thing. Don't waste it.
Don't waste it and give it time to age because it can be a little bit hot and toasty.
One thing I think we need to mention to our listeners is that I don't want folks to take away from what we've been talking about that we're trying to focus on the adverse things that this person experienced because if you're going to breed chickens, you're going to have to be able to deal With adversity and setbacks.
Oh yeah.
And these are completely normal numbers to be looking at.
And I would much rather personally deal with the setbacks and the abnormalities sooner rather than later, because the sooner you get them cleared up, the faster you can begin to have really good birds after that.
Definitely. I'd prefer to start with 120 eggs and finish my first season with a rooster and two or three outstanding hens.
And sometimes I've started off with 25 chicks only to have zero at the end. It can be heartbreaking. Yeah. No, I've been through some heartbreak.
And I think folks need to go into it, realizing that with the right expectations you're not going to buy a dozen fancy hatching eggs from even a top quality breeder and the very next season sell your hatching eggs for the exact same amount of money.
The expectation is to source the best stock that you can. Develop that flock, sort, select, figure out what those genetics are breeding forward because you want to make sure that what you retained is going to reproduce a predictable result. And so you need to get one, two, three generations into them to confirm what it is you think you have before you can even think about putting a big old price tag on them.
If you think you can get expensive birds and be in business that next season, you're already making mistakes on your long term reputation. Because those prices are from reputation.
And if people ask me for my eggs right now, I refer them to the breeder I got my chickens from.
Which is really smart and that helps cover down too, because that's going to protect your future reputation.
Yes, and it's going to, if we get into a situation where he has a catastrophe and I have a catastrophe, I know somebody who might have some closely related genetics that I could reach out to.
The more seed flocks available, the better, especially if you have some regional coverage going on too, because then you can really all rely on each other and it's not competitive. It doesn't have to be a cutthroat thing. It should be a cohesive team effort that focuses on the bird.
There's a breeder over, there's an island called Hero Island on Lake Champlain who does some really nice Chanticleers, but they're localized to that area. They wouldn't do good 1500 feet higher in elevation with the, negative 38s that I get here. And and she's only, 60 miles away. Even though they have the same conformation, I, they would not do as well. If somebody says, Hey, I'm from Burlington area and I want some Chanticleer. I'm going to send you to the person who's, five minutes away.
And by keeping a smaller scale sort of flock to where, on the best days you can't keep up with demand and you can instead share that demand with where it needs to go, especially when you account for those environmental variances, then you can say I don't have any right now. And honestly, the better birds for your situation are probably going to come from XYZ farm.
Conversely, I'll get referrals from other people who said, Hey, I was talking to so and so about getting some of their birds. And they said that yours are more acclimated to, my elevation and my wind chills.
Sharing the flock results and helping people get that genuine good start. Because that's what. My buddy up North, I guess I'll call her. She was looking for that genuine start. And at the time I couldn't help her and I was so buried in what I was doing. So I referred someone. So she brings in those birds from the referral and they're not the same, they're different, which was very educational for me.
They came from a different breeder than your birds came from and you've put. Five plus years into your selection.
I'm starting into season eight now.
Wow, that's good.
But, we'll get it figured out and we'll get her up and going where she needs to be. And we're going to make it work without forcing it. We're going to let the birds tell us what we need to do. You're not going to tell those birds what they're doing. Those birds are going to tell you.
And they're going to respond or not to, their husbandry practices, their environment, their feed their everything. And once, once you get the right combination of genetics and everybody finds their groove, it's just going to go.
Smooth sailing until the next catastrophe.
Until the next raccoon or ermine or whatever. Being down to one male is scary. I feel for her. I, as I, I do recommend people when they get in this situation, start keeping a two week rolling backup of eggs to set just in case.
Yeah, and in her situation, she didn't have that egg supply just yet either. With the age of the birds.
Yeah, they don't try to, base anything at all on pullet eggs and pullet hatches, but if that's the only chance you have to dig yourself out of a predation event, set it.
Thankfully she has horses and goats and sheep and pigs and everything is fenced again, and fenced on top of that.
Yeah. Have I mentioned Weasels, ermine, things like that.
She's got a really great dog though, that dog and I bonded. I might be better friends with a dog at this point.
So what's their next step? What are they gonna do?
She's gonna reach back out to the source and see if she can figure out a boy and then we're gonna go from there.
And this is a breeder of, good enough.
Yeah, good enough. They've got scale and options going
for them. The other thing is when they reach back and explain what's going on, they're going to be able to speak intelligently and go, yeah, I've got a male line that could help here. Let me collect some eggs from this pen.
It would really only take one, one good solid male to keep that line pure. But if that original breeder isn't willing to work with that, then that kind of gives us some answers too.
And if we're hoping to get one good male, I would say that's 36 eggs to start with. If they're being shipped, you're going to lose half.
It's the worst time of year to need a male.
Yeah, everybody wants one and everybody's in breeding season right now, or coming into it within the next two to three weeks.
And we did our culling back in August, September, October. Those extra ones are already long into the freezer, if not already in our bellies. So we'll see.
See. So when you were selecting, how critical were you on differentiating between what you would consider market quality and the standard.
I was looking at those market traits because first and foremost, that's what the market's going to hinge on and then looking at the standard traits. So I would say though, and when I look at the body shape. They may actually lean towards being a little longer of body. And I was trying to look for that balance between standard and market and to find that little extra piece of width in there that looks better in the shrink bag.
Yeah. I was trying to balance it and it was still just a little bit of a struggle to find the best of both worlds, I guess you'd say. Cause I know my most market pretty birds. It's where once those feathers are off and they're in the bag, that's ever so slightly outside of breed standard, technically, unless you break down that standard and you get into what specific words mean. So like when it says broad of chest how broad is too broad? How broad is just right?
And it's that's where it's open for the interpretation.
That's a mutual decision based on the customer and the farmer. The farmer's going to produce what's going to sell. The customer's going to ultimately dictate what they're going to, if they're looking at a table with four birds, and they're like, they keep buying the bird that's the widest, hopefully the farmer's going to pick on it.
And how much of that is the consumer psyche of what they've been trained on with the Cornish Cross? It's subjective, it depends, it's nuanced, it's all in the eye of the beholder, but ultimately the market's gonna decide, I guess you'd say.
As long as the structure is proper, and it's consistent, and it breeds true.
As long as they can get out there and chicken good, and then still have a good result, but ideally Are they out there ranging? Do they have the wherewithal and the health and the vigor? Can they get in there and lay as often as they should in a healthy manner without being overly productive and without being stingy? The whole thing is a balancing act.
It is, and I'm guilty of this myself, is putting, too many birds on not enough property. I like to do what I call day ranging, where, they have access to a half an acre behind electric during the day, but at night, everybody's locked up tight. That's not always an option for people who have to keep birds in tractors or in even smaller pens.
I'm excited for the episode we were talking about with Rip, talking about how is all of this possible with a much smaller flock? Yes. That's going to be fun to get into because I've had small flocks before, and technically on scale, the flock I have is pretty tiny. What I have is so tiny compared to like meaningful scale, but small flocks can mean five birds.
It can, and if they're well selected and you breed them properly, it's completely doable. I never want to go into carry more than 16 is my absolute limit over winter.
Yeah. See that's going to be a good episode when we get to that one.
But I don't need to produce, hundreds of birds anymore. We're not hatching out 400 at a time, filling a GQF cabinet. those days are over. It's time to step back a little and enjoy the gentleman farmer thing.
Yeah, that's what I call it. A gentleman farmer. I guess technically rips a gentleman farmer as well down there in Florida.
I don't even have enough to qualify for a gentleman farmer.
Yeah.
How many birds does it take to make a flock? Is that two or is that three, four, five?
It's relative.
You need a male and a female to start with.
And they'll make their own flock.
And if you manage it you could build up from there. That's a side project I'm doing with my quail. I took myself down to one female and two males. Total. That's scary. Yes, it's great, but I'm doing some genetics and quail are so fast and it's a great way to learn genetics, but. Yeah, I'm going to breed this male, he goes away, breed this male, he goes away, and then I got some plans. But I just do it because they're fast, and they taste great, and my dog loves them. The eggs sell.
Yeah, and that all helps to cover the feed bill. And, at least personally, if I can have the feed bill covered, I'm good.
And with me, sending all of my potential customers to fellow breeders and the breeder that I get my eggs from, I still, I need some way to, pay that feed bill and make it sustainable. We talk about sustainability. There's many levels of it. There's, physically, there's financially there's all sorts of responsibilities that come along with having these birds that we are responsible for giving the best possible food and care every day of their life until the last day.
True story. This brings us to the close of another Poultry Keepers podcast, and we're very happy you chose to join us. Until next time, we'd appreciate it if you would drop us a note, letting us know your thoughts about our podcast. Please share our podcast with all of your friends that keep poultry, and we hope you'll join us again when we'll be talking poultry from feathers to function.