Achieving Poultry Excellence: One Goal at a Time

0:00 Hey folks, do you have goals for your Pulse refloch? Do you know why they're so important to your success? Coming up, we'll share the information you'll need for effective and attainable goals for your success. Before we get started with today's topic, we want to share our future plans for the next 13 episodes. No matter why you keep poultry, these episodes will help you build a stronger, healthier and more productive flock, and, because there's a growing interest in quality dual purpose birds, we'll be talking about them, what they are and how to produce them.

0:42 Our goal is to help make this series as relevant to your situation as possible. If you hear us talk about something you want to know more about, just send us an email at poultrykeeperspodcast at gmailcom and let us know, because we want to give you the information you need to succeed. Now that you know where we're going, let's get started. You might wonder why are we starting off talking about gold? I think that's one of the most important things that we do. If we don't have goals, we're just kind of flailing around. Goals help drive us to what we want to accomplish. What do you want to accomplish with your flock? What do I want to accomplish? What does John want to accomplish?

1:23 So, mandy, when you first started out, what was your initial goal? Was it to have eggs or birds to eat, or both, or to show? What was your primary goal for them? Primarily, it was first just the chicken. I was a can and I wanted the pets, so any bird would have filled that role. And then, as time went on and I grew into the hobby and I started to appreciate more about the birds and the eggs. I learned how to cook an omelet, I learned how to do scrambled eggs, and it shifted from just the bird to the egg and it stayed there for quite a while before it evolved further and so ultimately reaching the dual purpose side of things.

2:11 So now I'm in the category of I need the utility in both of these, in both forms, but also still just having the birds, because I still I just really like chickens and having them around, just looking outside the window and seeing them out on grass doing their chicken thing, and then going out and collecting eggs later and then going back once or twice a month and processing a couple of extra boys. We had this whole cycle now. That took, you know, over 20 years to reach that point, going from just any old chicken I could catch to more refined breeding program. It's been a journey figuring out the goals and how they've changed over time and recognizing changes that needed to be made to accommodate the goals.

3:03 So in essence your goals kind of changed over time At least five different times. Ok, so have your goals helped you maintain a focus on what you're trying to do with your birds? Absolutely, and there's goals coming up that I never even thought about In any way, shape or form, especially when it came into breeding, to standard or developing show stock like do I want to show poultry is something that's new. I didn't start out with four H. I didn't start out in a poultry club. That's something that came a lot later, and now there's stuff to get involved in that I haven't even been a part of yet.

3:44 John, same question for you. Layers meat, both for exhibition. Of why I am completely foreign to the exhibition aspects, so I'm really looking forward to learning on that. My background coming into poultry has been from the angle of sustainability and feeding people. My first real exposure to chickens other than cooking them as a chef and, just, you know, taking them out of the case and doing what I needed to to put them on a plate and get paid for it, raising them was I was in an ag program at a local college and it was part of the integrated curriculum where we were raising heritage meat birds out on pastures and paddocks in a rotational grazing system behind other animals and this meat went into the cafeteria system.

4:31 So we raised what we ate. That's pretty much where I came from. You know there was a flock of layers and all the males went out to pasture, except only the very best ones, and that was decided on a cold day. You know we'd be picking up birds going nope, we're saving this one for breeding. And he went into another pen and that's pretty much how the males were selected on cold day. Like wow, this guy is too good to put in a freezer, we need to keep him. So and the same two questions for you? Have your goals for your birds changed over time and have they helped you maintain a focus on improving your birds?

5:12 My focus got so much tighter in once I found the breed that I really feel is going to work best for me and by in my environment I was able to really tighten down on them, realize that some of the stock that I had been working on perhaps wasn't the best place to be investing my time. I was able to find an amazing breeder who we sink beautifully with and he was in a similar situation you know, regionally doing the same things and I believe that has shaved 10 years of time off my future breeding just being able to get a hold of outstanding stock from a quality breeder who can trace the pedigree back 50 years and can explain it to me and you know why he did certain things and you know what the results of those things were.

6:01 And then he's basically doing a handoff to me Is you know I will to other people eventually. So keeping this tradition alive of you know, knowing the progeny and pedigree of your birds, I think is incredibly important. So I can go back and say you know, last year, before I hatched these eggs out, the hen these came from lay 220 eggs a year. My customers are going to want to know that. I think Mandy has got a question, and if she doesn't get the answer or ask it pretty soon, she might explode. So, mandy, what's on your mind?

6:41 Back when John said the thing about shaving 10 years of breeding time off of his calendar. That rings true when I think back to all of my experiences and how I source poultry and the problems I've encountered during the acquisition process. Because it's easy to say, oh, I want this variety, and then you start finding how to go about that. Do you just click order on a hatchery, or do you track down a breeder, or do you get lucky and find a mom craigslist? There's a lot of different ways to be a bio. But if I would have given more thought to someone's breeding program when I was looking to source birds and I was goal oriented at that time it would have saved me a lot.

7:27 But on the flip side, I've also learned a lot about by stumbling through the way that I did. So I don't want to trade that education, but if I knew different going into it. You bring up an excellent point is that by doing it in essence the hard way and I don't mean that in a negative fashion, but you learn so much and I had that same experience. You know I made a whole lot of mistakes coming up early on with my birds, but I like to think that I'm better because of that mistake, because they forced me to focus on what was really important, a little bit about how I kind of got started and how my goals evolved over time.

8:18 I had a very similar starting poultry to Mandy. I got my first chickens when I was three. I just make me remember. I don't remember the birds, but I remember one particular incident. I had been waiting on this little panum pull it to start laying. She was just a backyard mutt type chicken and when she finally laid man, I was proud as a peacock. I grabbed up that egg, went in and put it in the refrigerator, or tried to put it in the refrigerator. Like then we had an old international harvester refrigerator. Now I know most of y'all think of international harvester and tractor terms, but they used to make refrigerators Many eons ago, but it had up.

9:02 Most of our refrigerators today have a removal egg holder. Well, this one didn't have that, but it did have holes drilled in the bottom of one shelf so I knew that's where you put eggs. So I just opened the refrigerator, put my egg in that refrigerator and bam, straight through all the way and broke onto the floor. That that is my earliest childhood memory, believe it or not, as I about the time I started in first grade. We got what was then a really large flock of white legged. We had 800 birds, 800 hens laying eggs, and so from the time I was in first grade to the time I was a senior in high school, we ran a door to door egg route.

9:49 Every Friday, man, we were delivering egg, and so my initial approach to poultry was from more of a production standpoint primary egg layers, because we dealt with white legged. How many? eggers, did you have 800. 800. So that means along the way you probably hatched out 800. Did you do with that? No, no, back then you bought ready to lay bullets. At that time there were several farms around that specialized in 20 week old bullets, and so you told them how many you wanted and when you wanted them, and magically this flatbed truck was large wooden crates of birds showed up and they started loading them into your house.

10:39 Do you happen to remember how much they were? A dollar a piece. Wow, but that was in the 1950s, adjusted for inflation these days. to me that's a $30 bird. If I was going to sell an 18 week old bird, I want $30 for her. But if a bird is? that old on my farm she's staying. And we were getting a princely sum of I think 50 cents a dozen for extra large eggs and then we went down 5 cents a dozen, 45 cents for large, and right on down the road but it helped me appreciate the production standpoint, although I didn't really realize I was appreciating at that point.

11:26 Then, when I about the time I was 10, I saw a picture of a buff Plymouth rock and I had never considered individual breeds. There's particularly individual variety. It was you know what bird could I get, or could we get, that laid the most eggs for the least amount of feed. And then, believe it or not, I saw a little and in the one edge section, the Fugitive Stream Magazine, and there was a guy not far from me I guess he was 40 miles away that had buff Plymouth rocks, and so my aunt took me over there because I'd been hammering her to, I wanted to find some and I was all struck, dumb struck or whatever, fell in love immediately with buff Plymouth rock.

12:18 So we came back with the trio of buff Plymouth rocks and he also had some buttercups and I got a trio of buttercups. Those things were about the wildest chickens I had ever encountered. Up to that point I thought the legends were bad shoes. They couldn't hold a candle to those buttercups. But anyway, that was my first introduction to standard bred poultry. Then, when I was in my late teens about the time I graduated from high school I got exposed to exhibition poultry and what that really meant. So that gave me another perspective. I decided I want to start showing birds. So I did. Didn't do any winning at all with them, but I made the mistake of getting the first birds I saw that were under $5 a piece.

13:10 Oh, I've been there and the first time I got into good, purebred breeder quality stuff it was white based black Spanish, because I just thought they were crazy looking with all of that white all over their face and dragging down in that earlobe against the green sheen of the black feathers. They were so weird, I had to have them. And it was just as bad as when I had met my first Frizzle at a flea market in the early 90s and I looked at my mom and I said I have to have that chicken, that one right there, I have to have it and I think I laid out $7.

13:58 A bit. Well, yeah, back then. And then the white face black Spanish I came by them from a fair actually. They're stunning birds. Back in the day there used to be some really good quality birds just at the local fair and it's dwindled significantly because I'm from I was born in an urban area this whole farming thing and the homesteader thing, that's something that came later in my life and I'm one generation removed from the farming that was in my family. So my parents and most of their siblings were, all you know, certified Well where was urban, but there was still some really good birds there.

14:49 But if you go there now, it's not the same. It's not like that anymore. Well, up in your area there used to be several string men, and that's how they made a large chunk of their money each year is they would take two or 300 birds of different breeds and varieties and they'd hit all of the county fairs and all the state fairs. Also they the ones fill in the cages. Yeah, and, but you could make a lot of money off your show premiums or your show winning. You know, I, I one guy up in Ohio, had his on railroad box car that was fitted out just to haul his chickens to fair and he would pay the railroad X number of dollars to move him from one fair to the next and he lived in it the whole time he was gone for the show See, which was almost five months.

15:43 So by the time a kid like me walked in off the street and I saw a particular bird that I was absolutely enthralled with, then folks like that were more than ready to set me up with a couple of birds. Yeah. That's what they did, all right, all right, they're the enablers. Thank you for the clarity. That's one of the benefits recursion, I would almost equate them to speculators. They saw me coming. No, not really. Not really. They do some good selection. That's quality and most of the time they did breed the birds they showed. They would go to other people they knew and buy birds.

16:24 But there was a couple in Ohio that were fantastic breeders Wilber Stoffer man. He had some of the most gorgeous legging round legging that you had ever seen and and hardly anybody could ever beat him. But I digress there. But over the time, you know, I changed from a more agricultural production standpoint to an exhibition standpoint. That's where I found the breed that I fell in love with hard, and that was Rhode Island Red.

17:05 They were at one time extremely productive birds. I remember reading articles that were written in the 19. I was the late teens and the early 20s of the last century and there were Rhode Island Red's hens then that were laying 300 eggs a year. And these were all standard bred birds, and some folks seem today to equate standard bred birds with show birds. To some extent that's true, but standard bred birds were the backbone of the American small farmers blocks.

17:47 Yeah, the hatcheries weren't there to fill it, it was all original producers, yeah. And, oh my gosh, I mean you could get in the teens, not in the 19. I saw some ads from 1918 where they were getting probably $20 for a dozen eggs and back then that was an exorbitant amount of money and if you wanted birds depending on the quality of birds it was anywhere from $5 to $25. Eso. As I started working with my reds, I quickly realized that the production of those birds Was not what it used to be.

18:30 My reds when I first started with them, I Was probably getting 80 to 100 eggs per hen per year. That's not many, not at all. But the mentality back then was it was enough to produce all the chicks that they would need To raise to get to show birds and continue to lie. So that was their focus, not breakfast, not breakfast, not dinner, but strictly show birds. And so, subsequently, the production of those birds Just went down the tune. So when I think of the production versus the look in the exhibition grade, I've been thinking about it from the angle of I need them to be productive first and Pretty later, because one of the realities that seems to be becoming apparent is, even in the pursuit of an exhibition flock, you're still gonna have 90% or less be coals, so shouldn't those coals also then be productive?

19:39 So I'm looking for particular birds out of a grouping, but still expecting the bulk of them to be utility. Mandy, you have the mindset of somebody who was raising poultry in the 1920s. That's weird costume habit where I make these historical costumes of long gowns I won't wear In the wrong century. Everybody forgets the economical qualities that are being referred to in the standard of perfection. Yeah, you shouldn't. I don't think you should. Well, the old timers, if those birds didn't pay their way, they were out. They went to something else that would pay their way, and so there was a Financial incentive, or the breeders, to really focus on the production abilities of birds, how many eggs they laid, or, if they were a meat bird, how big they got, how fast they got big.

20:36 But as and back then, most birds were dual purpose. Yes, they leaned more towards one direction or the other, but they were if you get too focused in your breeding because you can lose dual purpose in a season, oh yeah, but like being too hard to the egg laying or too hard to the meat, and the one bird that would have brought you balance you didn't use because of whatever reason it was. And now you're Heavy on the one side and you. It's up to you if you're gonna correct it that next season. Like as soon as you see that you've lost something in somewhere, then it's your responsibilities of breeder to go back and fix it quick and and sadly, when you Using the example you mentioned, if you lose something in a year, you can't get it back in a year.

21:26 Unless you kept enough spares in your overflow block of your ingredient birds to have it on standby. Most people and I'm not being critical, but when they start out with birds, don't have that folk, they don't have that breeders mindset and I know I can't support that scale. I'm getting us way off track of what we're supposed to be talking about and I apologize for that. No worst men oriented here, because this is where the good stuff is good stuff. Yeah, how did because we got to our flock go through the entire process of where we started, where we've been, all the little things that came along as we were going through that process all did its part for the goal setting.

22:09 So this conversation is all else going through that process of how we ended up To the decision-making points in our poultry adventure, which all goes back to our topic today and goal setting. We're not lost, we're doing fine. I'm gonna say one more thing and then I'm just gonna shut up. We'll go on something else. But I really didn't begin to have the appreciation and understanding of, and see the need for, dual-purpose birds until I was 50 years old. And that's sad, but it was like this BFO blinding flashes, obvious went off in my head that hey, you know we're losing this and If some of us don't grab this bull by the horns, you're gonna get away from us.

22:57 And that has almost happened, sadly, because you really have a hard time finding Good, productive dual-purpose birds to start your own flock with. We jumped in to the concept when the flocks were not there Easily available. The amount of trial and error that I had to go through to find a chicken that could do just the simple basic chicken things. Like I've read about it. So coming to terms with the birds I was acquiring not being what I read about. Because if you Google a breed and you read through the points that they're supposed to be able to meet and you get excited about that variety, like yeah, this is what I want, this breed as it reads for the traits they're supposed to have, yes, this breed sounds like it's what I want.

23:44 But then you order them in, probably the first one as you came across, and then you get them and they don't quite live up to the expectation. Not at all. Not at all. But we're beginning to see a resurgence or refocusing of poultry folks, because I see more and more people talking about this dual-purpose concept. Or, you know, I won't Birds for for eggs and they get some of these standard red birds and, like I said, you get 80 to 100 eggs a year off of them. You know, going back Polish, and Let me ask you to what do you think Polish were when they first came to America?

24:29 I have no idea what they were, but I know what they are now and I can say I Don't have a desire to go get some what? what do you see them as now? Oh, I'll obey you. Ornamental Hawk bait ornamental. In my case it's I will be. Do you know, back in the teens and twenties of the last century there were some lines of Polish that were outlaying leggers Play. Yeah, what happened? They lost the focus on production. They got fancy, they, they. They went strictly for the crest and the ornamental aspect. But you know, those birds came from Europe and they were egg laying machines.

25:13 Because they had to be egg laying machines, so they just we need a egg laying machines that had a little hairdo on them, that looked on the metal. So now it sounds like we need a three purpose bird. To keep them alive, we need to show quality and Economic quality and sustainability. You're to satisfy all the genres, and I'm always coming back to. Shouldn't the form follow the function? And if we're breeding them to standard, shouldn't these economic qualities come through? In your. You're getting close to hitting the nail on the head. We don't need really a three focus bird. We don't need a bird that. What we need is a good Standard bread bird, because when birds are bred to a written standard, they are should be capable of doing what they were bred for in the first place.

26:07 All right, well, sounds like a great topic for a podcast series. And and no. It's a shame no one's talking about this. Yeah, and it is, and it is, and I'm so glad we have the opportunity To talk about it and share with our listeners. So I'm gonna climb down off my soapbox now, but what's the question you have for us, mandy? oh, I don't know. My brain's on fire right now and I'm thinking about when I've ended up with poultry and where I hope to go and what I hope this podcast to cover, and I'm really glad that I fell in with you too. Oh. I think we're really gonna finding questions for the younger experience because we're so like.

26:51 I know Rip and I have similar beginnings, but he's been at it so much longer. And then we've got John Cullen, from Wherever he came, with his focus on Well, we gotta eat there in a sustainable agriculture and having that completely different Experience. But it still ends up in the same area of goals for just having useful Poultry that can do the things, with that side benefit of being Predictably pure bread, because there's a lot of value that's getting lost in pure bread poultry because you can go pick up hybrids pretty much anywhere and they're designed to be re-bots.

27:36 You're not supposed to breed those. You're supposed to trust the breeding of where they're coming from and refill as needed. But when all three of us are similar as we like that free standing, breed it yourself, guide your block, sort of thing. Well, the hatchery sort of Caught on to the potential of hybrid. And they made it very easy for the public, which is no fault of their own. They're filling what market they gave them sure they gave them what they wanted birds that laid well or birds that produced a bigger carcass but those birds are all what I would refer to as a terminal cross. That means they are not capable of reproducing themselves like a standard red bird.

28:21 Look, you can breed two standard red birds of the same breed and variety and you will get Chicks that will grow into birds up that look like that. You can take those oh Gosh layer hybrids and breed them together and you get a mishmash of colors. Oh man, you get production. That's all over the place. And and the same place with the Cornish cross birds. That's another terminal cross They've had. They can't even stay alive, mating age. Well, and that's because they're giving the market what they want. It's birds that grow fast. They raising them from chicks to Mark eating size birds in seven or eight weeks.

29:02 Sure, Mandy. So I think we've opened a can of worms and there's a lot more. We can probably go down with every episode we can come up with, and I'm hoping for this podcast To explore all the different avenues of approach, all the different glales you can have how to make sure your expectations are aligned with your goals and Preparing you guys for the learning adventure that it is. You can't learn it all at once. You can't read what can be done with it. There's a lot to go over. So, on that note, we've got a lot in store for you guys and we're gonna explore Rather extensively, talking amongst ourselves and looking at the research, looking at the data, our own personal experiences.

29:53 We're gonna try to talk about as much as we can. That's a really good background into who we are and what makes us tick and where this show is heading. I hope this falls in line with what you want to hear about, but we definitely want to hear from you folks, because your feedback will help guide us to make sure we're giving you the information that you want in a format that's accessible to you. And I just realized, folks, we had a whole list of questions we were going to bounce off of each other, but we got so fired up that we covered all the questions just with the first question. I think it's amazing.

30:35 I am excited about the possibility of what this podcast can bring to poultry keepers. Okay, I'm going to say it I'm the oldest amongst the group, so I have the best historical perspective of poultry and what it's been. I've studied it a lot. Andy has hands on building a better bird. That is dual purpose. John has the scientific background and the approach and he also brings a unique perspective as a chef. So, we're going to be getting into how to cook these rascals after we've raised them, because that's not the aspect of it too.

31:20 But coming up our next episode, we're going to be sharing with you some educational resources that you can use. We're going to take the guesswork out of it. We're going to tell you what we found that works for us. Some of it may be scientific. I don't give all those secrets. Scientific research, and some of it from many perspectives, is going to be very much hands on, and I'm going to try to add the historical perspective, because what I see for dual purpose birds is that we need to get back to raising them the way they used to raise them in 1920s and 1930s and early 1940s, because they were the backbone of the poultry industry.

32:06 All those stands bred birds. So until next time, folks. We have enjoyed this very, very much. I want to thank my co-host, mandy and John. Y'all have done a very admirable job and you helped bring out the best in all of us, and I really appreciate that. So until next time, I hope you keep your birds scratching and pecking. Yeah, there you go. Stay there scratching and pecking. Until then, enjoy your birds. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.