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.
Consistency is so important in a clan. You can't stress that too much. You prompted something, a little question went off in my brain here. But how do you determine which female is laying which eggs or do you even worry about that?
I do worry about that. And I use my, I have a three hole sort cage. That's big enough to where if I needed to put a bird in there for a week, I could. So if I walk into a pen and I say, okay, ladies, I need to know who's laying what, and we're going to start with who's not laying. So I won't let them out that day. And each of my doors of the barn, I can disconnect them from my pulley system of opening and closing. And I'll just shut their door for that day.
And I'll hover around the pen and watch and see who's doing nest box activity. Okay. And that nest box activity usually means she's going to lay an egg that day. So I go ahead and grab her first, put her in the sort cage. And then within less than 12 hours, I know which egg is hers. But then the other ones, if they're not showing me that nest box activity, they end up in the sort cage longer.
And if I don't see an egg from them for five days, then I go ahead and put her in a different pen and see if that story changes or if she was the dud I was after. And sometimes the condition of the bird will tell me. And then I can put her in the sort cage and confirm that she's not in lay. But sometimes I've had that also be wrong.
Sometimes just by separating the birds and disrupting their routine, they can go off lay for a day or three as well. So giving them a chance to recover before, putting them off to summer camp might not be a bad idea.
One thing I learned early on And I did a lot of pair and trio matings, or maybe a male and three females. But, if I was observant, I could identify by the shape of the egg who laid that egg.
Doesn't really work if you get up much above three females, because that will Drive you nuts, but if you pay attention and you know when a chicken lays and you grab that egg and really look at it, there's going to be slight variations in shape, maybe in texture in size, but you can identify with great certainty, by doing that what hen laid what egg.
If the eggs are too different, they'll end up being breakfast eggs and my breakfast basket has there's one female. I don't know why I still have her, but she's giant and massive and very meaty, but her comb is too big and her egg is just always very round.
Two round, so I don't hatch them because it's so consistent and when they are consistently not the right shape, that's when you can rule her out from the breeding pen because she's going to be more liable to make daughters that produce that same way.
And that goes for like the
super long, long torpedo shaped eggs too.
Have you ever had a problem getting those round eggs to hatch?
Some of them didn't develop at all, even if they were fertilized. I wonder if there's something else going on there. And I noticed sometimes they might be more porous in the shell, especially when they're Coming towards the end of the laying cycle,
And I don't know really what the cause is and why it works out this way, but when I had Marans and they prefer them to lay that rounder shape egg, because they think the pigment on it is darker. But I had a time to getting those rounder eggs to hatch. It was, you may set six and get one or two to hatch.
Yeah, I remember some of that with Marans too. And so I was looking like you want it rounded on either end, but you still want to see more of that bottom point. With much of the roundness at the top of the egg and like the overall length of the egg You want to see it oblong and not basketball shaped.
Correct.
And being able to tell which is the pointy end Sometimes eggs, I look at them and go, I don't know which direction to set this thing So it doesn't get set. That's a,
and that ends up in the freezer. You can't tell which ends up.
Yeah.
Honestly, one thing I tried and it didn't really work any better, but with those round eggs, I tried laying them on their side.
Let them decide?
And it just didn't work. No matter what I tried. I gave up. I think
it's natural selection. I don't think a round egg is meant to survive. And we're just, we're managing our flock. We're man aging. So we're, accelerating the natural selection process. I think if we're doing our jobs correctly.
It, it stands to reason to me that for example, birds that have problems physically are shunned by the rest of the flock or they don't last long for whatever reason. So why would it not hold true for the same thing with eggs? And maybe I'm oversimplifying that. I don't know.
The natural world is a pretty unforgiving place, and I think by coddling our birds, assisting in hatching, and then breeding from those eggs that we helped unwrap we're doing a big disservice to the breed if we're doing that.
And I used to do that, and I did notice a decline in flock quality, and I was like
You bet.
It all started clicking into place. It's like propping up those birds and limping them along, and then Getting the egg from her and going, Oh, it's so cute. I'm going to put it in the incubator. And then a much higher failure rate happened from her offspring. And it started, everything started making sense after that. I was like, Oh, the old timers were right. I really should have listened.
The it, so many times when we prop up birds, Over Medicaid and keep birds, we really shouldn't for whatever reason, it'll come back to bite us every single time, or at least it has me.
Sometimes I chuckle when I think about the old Frank Perdue commercial. It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. And I really, that now that I'm raising poultry the truth behind that just makes a lot more sense.
He's right. Let's talk about weights, and particularly as it pertains to females. What, do you have a target weight for a bird before you put it in your breeding pen? Do you want them to attain?
Oh, for sure.
And it is?
When I first got going with the American Bresse, there were some girls who struggled to even get to three and a half pounds. That's And that's not very dual purpose. And they were very pinched up in the back end. They had very weak fleshing. And I also, in that first year, I had a real high rate of prolapse as well. And that's when I started digging into the breeding selection of that and what it all meant.
So now if they're going to start laying an egg at 18 weeks old, they got to be five pounds, because as soon as they start laying that female growth stops. Ops. And I'm looking for that five pound mark knowing that they've got another six months at least to hit breed standard weight and to get to that six and a half pound point that's going to take some more time.
But if they're not at least five pounds when that first egg starts coming, they're probably going to struggle to meet the standard weight. And I get some girls who end up being seven and a half pounds, which is way too big. So I just find a smaller male for them, fix it in the offspring.
Good old compensation mating.
Yeah.
What method do you use to identify your birds?
Initially I used zip ties and now I'm into numbered color coded wing bands. And that has been a relief to have that sort of organization because I was relying on sorting into pens and not really IDing the individual birds, but using the space. But then every once in a while you go out and count, you have an extra one here, and you're one short over there, and now you don't know which bird it was. Putting a permanent wing band on there. Out of, gosh, over 600 used now, I've only lost one.
That's a lot better than what was happening before.
But that's one of the reasons I dropped
down to one breed, because I'm not going to jumble the genetics if I only have the one breed.
Exactly Exactly. Zip ties are those things are a pain as whereas if you compare 'em to numbered wing bands, those are the catch meow in my opinion. Oh, and it stays on for as long as the bird. You can even leave it on there while you cook the birds. So you can go back and identify the cook carcass to notes and compare that. Oh, I do. Yeah. You can get
down, once you have all the meat off and you're seeing the actual skeleton itself, you can add even more notes to that bird's file. If they're numbered and you know exactly who is who and each bird has a little file, now you can really dig into details.
I sat down at the dinner table with my notebook and made notes on the bird that I was feeding.
I'm sorry, I just had this flash into my mind, but I can envision Mandy's husband saying, Honey, what's for dinner? And she would come and say, 5 46 and dumplings. Yeah, 3719. I, I just couldn't help myself. Sorry.
Don't worry. I know I actually do that, Rip. That's a real thing.
We've talked about how many chicks you hatch. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
I was able to point out, so Esther had come up. Earlier this week to pick up a rooster. I've also used wing bands, but as soon as I decide on my keepers for sure, which is like five to six weeks is just the right age to slip the ABA leg bands on. So I really like those and especially your tip that I picked up a couple of years ago about putting that wing band upside down when you put it on.
When we were going through the selection process and Esther was holding the bird, she just looked down and. It was pointing upside down, but right side up for reading. And I'm like, remember that episode of poultry keepers 360 about three years ago. So
the quick reference of a leg band is pretty nice because the wing bands, once they have feathers on, you got to go digging for it.
They're gone. I find with the wing bands, especially I'm up into the J and K size wing bands or sorry, leg bands now, which are, thanks to breeding and nutrition I'm there. But. With a good pair of spotting glasses, even from my chair inside, I can see out through my screen and, mate 30 yards away and I can read the leg band numbers on the birds with a good pair of field glasses.
A man after my own heart.
But most of the time, I can identify them. I'll grab my glasses and I'll go, I bet you that's so and I'll zoom in and I'm like, yep, turn, yep, okay, yeah, that's you, huh.
You can and even on whitebirds, like y'all have, you can still identify little bitty traits about a bird.
Body shape, conformation, sometimes the way they walk or their chickenality, the way they interact with the birds around them. I know which bird is which out in my yard, but my flock is still small enough where I manage them to that level.
Mandy, when you talked about how many birds you hatch each week, but how many birds do you think you grew out? Over the course of a year, a 12 month period of time.
I try to hit 400 minimum, and that gives us at least 200 freezer birds, and we're good for eating at least 125, 150. Some years, if we start smoking them six at a time, We might eat most of them ourselves. Cause I, I got into doing smoked chicken and then shredding the meat, multiple birds at a time. And then putting that pre cooked meat into Ziploc bags and putting it right back in the freezer. Oh, that'd be great. Super easy.
Already prepped chicken that stores more efficiently than a whole carcass does in the freezer.
Sure. And for a smaller family, that's more appropriate than, sometimes taking a whole bird out of the freezer. Me and Lolly have that challenge where it's just the two of us and we can't finish a whole bird.
Oh, we can't, we can eat one a day if we put our minds to it.
We shouldn't finish a whole bird, I should say.
Mandy, one thing I don't think I have ever asked you, so here it comes. Hold on to your hat. What are your long term flock goals?
To keep a good thing going and to not, it was such a struggle every time I needed to start a new flock. And I did that pretty often either because we moved or because I just didn't care for what we had. And so I would start thinking about all these different breeds and which one I wanted to bring in next. And then figuring out how to source them and where they should come from and then I get them. And it was so inconsistent that one of my least favorite things to do is go chicken shopping.
So I picked up breeding so that I was in control of producing the birds that I wanted to have. And now that they're doing that performance, And now that I have a pretty good feel of how to keep them going, I just, I want to avoid breeding into a corner. I want to avoid, there's a lot of problems that I want to not have again. And I just want to keep them going steadily and not trying to rush anything, working at their pace while we eat really good.
And I don't have to worry about shopping for chicken.
And you bring up some really good points there. Starting over is a pain in the rear and maintaining things can be a bit of a pain too. I think some people are, Oh, I'll just go down and get a pair of chickens and I'll get them to lay some eggs and I'll hatch some chicks and I'll be set. If you're going to responsibly and ethically breed chickens, there is an awful lot of moving points. It's a lot more complicated.
I thought you could just hatch eggs. You can, but you don't make any progress.
You're not going to get very far in two or three years. You're just not going to have a flock.
If you have any kind of expectations out of your birds, those expectations are managed through breeding.
Yes.
Because otherwise, if you don't do it and you skip it, things will fall apart. Things will. devolve almost back into their natural, like if you're not paying attention to growth rate, you're going to lose it. If you're not paying attention to rate of lay, you're going to lose it. And if you grow out 30 pullets and 15 of them can't keep up because they were from eggs that were just hatched and the performance of the mothers was unknown.
If you don't have that consistency built into that flock, especially if you start from diversified genetics.
Yes.
If you start from Very diverse genetics, then that needs sorted and refined down into consistency because otherwise they're just going to be all over the board.
And some of those qualities that when we lose them, we can lose them a lot faster than we can correct them and get them back.
Yes. That's very true.
Took me a while to learn that, and I finally realized, hey, this is not working for me. I need to focus on a lot more things at one time. It's a challenge, and it's hard, but man, when it all comes together, it makes it so worthwhile.
That's how I ended up with that big barn full, because not only do I have my different age groups, there's little different reasons of why those birds are together in each of those pens. And when I'm looking for those generational improvements, that next generation of birds, if they gained what I was after and that pen behind them, then I'm looking at something different to keep out of the females coming after those. So I end up with the whole assortment of available trades.
And then I spiral them through each other through the male side, but I have these developing female families. And then now that consistency is starting to come into play. And now my cull cockerels, once they're in a shrink bag, they look identical to each other more often than not.
I've seen some of the pictures of those bagged birds that you post. They, there is remarkable consistency that I often think, I hope people realize what effort It took Mandy and how much effort and time and really money went into her being able to produce birds like that, because that's quite an accomplishment.
And every time I try birds from somewhere else and I get through the carcass photos, I'm like, not a single one of these is just like another. But there just wasn't any consistency. Nine times out of 10, I would just default back to what I was already working on. And I might bring in, 20, chicks from somewhere else and grow them out and find one bird.
That's just applying selection pressure generation after generation and, choosing what you want.
And as I started to see how important that was, and I started getting more rigid about it, more ruthless about it, more. focused in it, and then the results started compounding on each other. And I was like, Oh, it's working. Oh, it's neat. It's so
rewarding. It really is. Yeah. In genetics, we call that allele stacking and polygenetic traits, but let's not confuse the topic.
As Cary Blackman would say in redneck and ease, I just called that yee haw, it worked.
If you got a whole big pile of goodness and you keep the bad stuff out and you keep a good pile of goodness, you can't help but succeed. It's just
And then you set up some local friends with your insurance birds.
Yeah. I'm always looking for a reason to disqualify birds. So at the end, I just have the best bird standing.
Here's a question for you, Mandy. You've been breeding breasts now for what, seven years or so?
Yeah.
How have your birds changed over time since you started?
Oh, they've changed a lot in the shape and the growth rate. The diversity they had initially is pretty much gone. Now they're pretty consistent and it's getting pretty tricky to tell birds apart from each other, with the exception of their combs. Every single one of them has a different comb. So that's my last little thing to work on for the outside aesthetics. But when I got them, they had tails that shot straight off the back.
Sometimes they had squirrely looking tails and there wasn't like a good curve to the sickle feather. Their back ends were too tight. So when you're sorting and selecting and you find that one bird that can change the entire program and. That bird can make a lot of progress for you. If you really get in there and nitpick and compare them to each other, there's certain birds who can really change everything.
And the more you hatch, more options you have of potentially finding that game changer bird. And once that started to become apparent, that's when I started hatching and eating more and more. And then I found a couple of those key birds that changed so much about the flock after that point.
The best breeders eat a lot of chicken.
Yeah, exactly. You don't find those really stellar key birds all that often, but man, when they do come along, they can move you ahead in your program unbelievably fast. I call them my one in a hundred. the
most for the body structure and the growth rate and the fleshing, he was so ugly. He was so ugly.
It's not too unusual to have that experience.
So you just put that other focus on the females and fix it in the offspring and then that best son from that bird, he's got everything the sire had, plus he's pretty.
Do you do backbreeding?
Not yet.
Okay.
See, the whole backbreeding thing, like they say when you do the line breeding to take the daughters, put them back in their mother's pen, take the male from the pen next door over those birds, and then you spiral your way through, but you have to be so extra picky on which males you use, because whatever Little flaws in that male is going to get compounded on if you put the daughters back with them.
So when looking at the birds and doing that selection, I never, until this year, so it took me seven years to breed the kind of male that I would breed back to. I didn't start off that way because I knew that was going to breed me right into a corner. And I would have poor traits more prevalent instead of fixing it. So I chased forward momentum for a while to breed the kind of male where I could do that. Now I'm thinking about it, but it took a long time to get that bird bred.
I would say usually five to six years and then you start seeing where, I can start. looping this daughter back around to her father, Rooster, and start concentrating some of these traits because they're starting to collect really nicely. And then see what that throws. Sometimes you're going to get a concentration of bad traits though. There's a strong case for test hatching.
One thing
about breeding poultry is that once you think you've got it figured out, you'll find out that you weren't even close because they'll throw you a curve.
A lot of times it's rolling the genetic dice.
Yes, absolutely.
I think it's like that every time.
True. If you learn how you can load your dice and start predicting your rolls, then it helps to use the analogy.
Hey, before we go, I got a question for you guys. Is there anything that you would do differently? If you started over, anything about nutrition, about breeding, about feeding, genetics, whatever. What would you try to do differently knowing what you know now?
I would have designed the inside of my barn differently and accommodated for more growth space. Especially after eight weeks old. My pinch point is eight weeks to 16 weeks. And that means, I could add a fleet of tractors and get that seasonally, which I might do it that way. But I don't need to have breeding pens as big as they are. And that could have been growth space too. You can do a lot of work with Small number of birds. I don't need to have 55 hens. I don't need to have 25 hens.
You, you probably did back then, but I think you're getting to the point where you can condense those numbers down a little bit.
So now I'm looking at my pen designs. Like I've got three pens that are real long that I could split in half and put the adults in the back half so that they have their outdoor run and put their best offspring. In front and just put a little divider wall and that would add three more growth. But yeah, that growth space is your most important space as it turns out. And I try to do
much.
I hover around like 70 percent of the space is grow out space and 30 percent is for the adults. And I still want more growth space. I
agree. John, same question for you, buddy.
I'm at a comfortable place. Given the size of my property and the size of my flock Yeah I'm where I need to be. The genetics are really strong. I've got an upstream breeder who's great at what they do. I'm just enjoying growing out my birds right now. It's refining the process, making these little incremental improvements. It's been a journey. It's, five years of sometimes pain along the way, physical, mental.
The only thing in capacity planning that I didn't account for was This making my own rations. So coming up with a good dry grain bin storage area and capacity. My mixer is a little scary cause it's a 120 year old cast iron thing. Yeah it's scary. It's an old concrete mixer that was made. A long time ago and my grinder's a little small, but other than that that's the only thing that having larger capacity would make life faster and easier for me.
I am planning on, I have had a pretty debilitating injury, which put me in a wheelchair for a while. So that's been an interesting consideration in my life. Is making sure that as I design these things, I'm building in this accessibility for additional injuries or as I get on in the years, I'm not arrogant enough to think that my body's not going to break down. So let's make sure that I'm ready for this.
I, John, I can really identify with that having a bad back the way I do. One thing that I wish. I had learned much earlier and I really feel bad for not doing this, but I never put a focus on production abilities. Never. And I've come up through the exhibition school and so by what the bird looked like now and how they performed. But it dawned on me several years ago that, hey, if we don't tighten up our focus on a bird's ability to produce and to reproduce.
It's going to be lost forever, and we're going to have a mess on our hands in the future. And that
messiness is already out there. It's already happening. Oh, it is.
Big time. There's a couple of
times I was gifted some hatching eggs from a very well known bloodline, and I was so excited because these came from the original person that had them, and they had changed hands. But that person that I got them from was still getting mentored by the original. And I was so excited and I put those eggs in and the hatch rate was abysmal. I ended up getting five chicks out of two dozen eggs and I lost two of those chicks in that first week.
And this is well after I've already, honed in on my poultry abilities. Like I was experienced enough to. Know what was going on. So it ended up being just a trio that I had left. And then they hit 13 weeks and they had no body condition to them whatsoever. They were knock kneed and wonky and just almost looking like they were going to fall apart. I was like, this is the top national bloodline. Why are, why? Cause they had diet, they had space, they had everything provided to them.
They got the same grow methods of everything else I had, and then one of the pullets dropped off, and I had just the pair left, and I was over it, so I ended up sending them with another way more experienced breeder than I am, and he ended up losing both of them, and I'm like, so is that bloodline then just fizzled on out? Are they toast? And there's a couple of lines where they didn't have that health and vigor selection to them. They didn't have they were so focused on the look of the bird.
Now they're barely strong enough to even get old enough to get those looks.
And I can't tell you guys how often I sit and think, How was I so stupid not to see the big, serious mistake I was making by not focusing on production?
Because if you don't know, you don't know.
But it still bites and it still hurts.
Oh, yeah, but you can't think of it that way. You can't get hung up on regrets.
And I, I don't. You don't know, you
don't know.
But we still have people, peeling stuck hatches and coaxing along weak genetics.
And for this reason, I started the Poultry Keepers 360 group and we started doing the live feeds and this podcast just to encourage people and say, Hey, if you're not careful, we stand a chance of losing some of these breeds. And if we're not careful, the ones we don't lose will be ruined. It's I hope we, the three of us have been able to open a few eyes.
That's been my whole thing. I'm. My major was in sustainable food systems and regenerative agriculture. We need to keep these breeds alive to feed us and our planet. We cannot be reliant on the global food chain and the Cornish Cross entirely. When
When you stop and realize that, hey, all the production poultry out there, both meat birds and egg production birds, Are controlled by three breeding farms. That's it. And those genetics, billions of birds,
everybody owns a piece of that. So the Cornish cross cannot exist without input from all these different people at just the right time. And as we've seen, anytime we put too much dependence on one species or process, when that happens. Process fails. It causes turmoil.
And folks, when you lose one spoke in that wheel, whole wheel's going to fall apart. So backyard flocks,
backyard flocks, food for thought and food for our bellies. Enough
of my soap box. I'll be quiet now, but guys, I want to appreciate you for, no, say I appreciate you for helping out today. Do either one of y'all have anything to offer up before we say goodbye for the day?
Just that we appreciate our listeners, and if there's anything you want us to cover, don't hesitate to ask. We'll add it to the list.
Absolutely. And get outside and enjoy your birds. Oh, yes. Just sit on a chair or an upturned bucket and just be out there with them with no other purpose than to enjoy the time.
Maybe I'll try to count mine.
There you go. I found if you sit there long enough and they start to ignore you and go back about their business it's a really great observation. It's got to be long. If I sit down too
long, they come gathering around like we're having a meeting.
It's a wonderful hobby. It's a wonderful experience, and you can make some wonderful friends in poultry. So please, I encourage you to do that. So until next week, we will be working hard to see what we can do for our next show. So we hope you enjoyed this show. We're glad you joined us and thank you so much.
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.