How To Begin A Successful Journey With Poultry: Part 1

0:00 Understanding how and why things happen will help you find your groove and develop practice and systems that will lead to a successful poultry operation Coming up. We're going to help begin this journey to real accomplishment. The laying cycle is pretty much square one of the beginning of what you can grow your flock from. It's probably one of the most important things when it comes to poultry, because you're not going to get very far if those girls aren't laying good. So we're going to talk a little bit about how they lay, the variations of laying between the varieties and how to select for those laying traits, especially with how lighting can affect the cycle and the regional variances you might encounter with your different climates and how that could also affect the laying cycle.

0:56 You want to have reasonable goals when breeding for the production improvement with the laying and you also want to have good record keeping. That can be very important as well, and John has some thoughts on how he keeps his records and I want to know how he does it. Ideally my record keeping starts the minute the egg is collected. Literally I write the time down on the egg as well as the hen and, if known, the rooster, and that gets set in the collection tray and I just stack my eggs by date and when it comes time to set the best eggs, they invariably come from very specific hens.

1:37 Now the sorting process is pretty easy when you look at a tray and go that's a winner, that's a winner, that's a winner, that's a winner, and they're all from the same hen. It makes it easy. Now when you start getting 200 layers in a laying flock, we had the luxury of only selecting eggs that were laid before 9 am, under the premise that we were selecting for better production by that initial toll gate in the collection process. See, and I give my girls up until like 2 o'clock to lay and if they lay later than that they take the next day off. So I'm always out there looking at who's laying when and figuring out the feel for that particular hen's schedule.

2:21 And then once you see the hen lay her egg and you can identify what she lays, because there is a lot of consistency from egg to egg. If they're not having any problems then they may lay the perfect egg every single day. Some of them will have their own variations and then off that egg variation you can figure out who was laying it and how often they lay the luxury of having five laying hens and two roosters right now, set up in a couple of mating clans. it's really easy to identify which hen laid which egg. When you start getting into dozens, it gets a little more difficult, for me at least. Yeah, that makes sense Now, Rick, you had some notes here, crazy hen that goes over the fence to lay somewhere in the yard every day that I need to track those are always a challenge to keep up with, aren't they?

3:11 They are. And when I find those eggs, those are the first ones. I crack and mix them with their feed and feed back to the flock because they have the highest immunoglobulin properties to build flock immunity. Oh, that's true. I've read about that, but I've never practiced it. Yeah, find that rogue hen and collect her eggs and crack them open, feed them back in the feed. That's how scientists in laboratories make vaccines, so why can't the farmer inoculate against the pathogens the same way? Getting back to the record keeping saying most of my breeding was done by family, so I would have multiple females and one male in each breeding pen.

3:55 All the females were related. They were either moms, daughters, sisters, aunts, grandparents, but all the females were related in that one family. So I just simply wrote the pen number on the egg and the date that it was laid and then went from there later on, as I began to become more aware of the need for improving production in my bird, and so I was tuned in to I need to know exactly which hen laid which egg and which rooster she was mated with, and I switched over to small individual pens.

4:43 The other option is to pat nesting. But I was working, I was leaving the house before daylight and getting home after dark, so it wasn't possible for me to check pat nesting on a periodic basis. You need to check those every hour and a half at least throughout the day, because once that hen is in that nest she can't get out. So you know which hen laid which egg and you can get a pretty good handle on what time of day that egg was laid. I should be doing that with how much time available I have and get down to pair hatching out of my little clan groups. I don't have large groups, I've only averaged about six hens per male per pen.

5:28 But I could be a lot more organized with trap nests, since I am here to go and check them. Well, a little bit different than what you're talking about. I didn't do pair matings. I would have three or four females all mated to one male, and then I would just rotate the male from pen to pen to pen every day, day and a half two days, something like that. I did that earlier this season because I had a male that was a big fan of the idea to where, when I opened up his pen door, he'd walk right out. We'd walk down to the other pen together. I'd open the door, he'd hop in, do his thing and I could put him back on the other pen. An hour later he had what I call vigor.

6:12 Yes, indeed. Well, you know, speaking of vigor, I think that's one thing that kind of gets overlooked in breeding. They forget the importance of vigor in birds, and when you lose vigor you lose so much. I mean you lose feed conversion, you lose meat production, you lose egg production. Poor vigor affects everything. You can almost lose your entire flock if you've lost the vigor in it. Absolutely. I kind of digress there, but we were talking about breeding for production qualities or leading up to talking about that. The first thing that I look for when I'm doing that sort of a meeting program, like I said, is vigor, and then I look for the proper confirmation.

6:58 I want to be sure that the females, and the males too, have the body structure, skeletal structure and the body structure they need to be good productive birds. If they don't have the right body capacity, you're pretty much just spending your wheel. So proper bodies, and then I would fine tune it. For egg production. I looked at things like the rate of feathering. The faster bird feathers used to, the faster they mature and start laying eggs. That's one of the earliest indicators to a vigorous bird is selecting their feathering rate.

7:40 Who comes in the fastest? I looked at the day to hen laid her first egg, because I tracked those females and those special breeding fans for a year. I tracked their production for a year, so I knew how many eggs they laid in a year. But I wanted to track their lengths of persistency, and by that I mean how many eggs did that of hen lay for how long? Of course she took a pause, right, and the pause is the other thing that I looked at. Well, I think that's a good topic. Is the schedule that hen lay eggs on?

8:23 If you have a hen that's laid five or six eggs and then pauses for one day and then starts laying again, that old gal's a keeper. That's what I look, for I look for those five to six eggs a week. They take a day off, they get right back to it. So that persistency then is week by week and month into month, and how many months are they going to carry that on with? Because I've had girls before where they were persistent layers for a good six months and then they took a five month break and that's not going to work for keeping your eggs supply up. You want the most persistent girls and sometimes you might get better longevity if they're doing four eggs a week.

9:08 They'll keep at it for a longer period of time, but the amount of variation I've seen in laying that was eye opening Once. I started building the flock into a quantity and I started to see the real range that was in there. Then it let me know how I needed to select for that persistency and watch them when they take a break and how long that break is for. Because if she's going to take all the space and the resources but then sit there and not be productive for more than what do you guys think is a good length of break, like when they go through a molt or when they take a pause, or maybe they don't lay that great in the winter.

9:51 How much time do you give them for a break? Are you talking about applause or are you talking about the break from molting? A break. Just the weekly break. I think that ties back into me selecting eggs that are laid earlier in the morning, because the chicken doesn't lay on a 24 hour cycle. She lays on a 25 or 26 hour cycle. And then she'll get to a point later and later in the day where she no longer feels safe and comfortable laying her egg, and she'll hold it until the next sunrise and then start laying really early in the morning again, hopefully, and that's why, selecting earlier in the morning, I believe you're selecting for a more productive hen.

10:35 I've been talking about mandage break. I knew what my goals were to increase production. I knew where my birds were at, where I started from, and I was only getting about 130 to 150 eggs per. Did they do it all at once, or did they do it for a while and then take a long break? What did that look like? For that, 150 eggs. I wasn't tracking that at that point, I just knew what the average block production was. But ideally, the more eggs you get in a row, followed by just a one day break, those are the kinds of birds you want to look at for starting a foundation program for egg production.

11:20 Okay, if you've got a hen that lays three eggs and takes a break for two days or three days, that's an automatic. You had your chance, you're out. Yeah, at least for me. Agreed. The longer the persistence he is and the shorter the pause is is what you're looking for. You may not have that at first, so you have to sort of establish some baseline data going into this thing once you start this kind of program. You got to know where you started and you got to know where you want to go and by where you want to go. I want to encourage folks to be reasonable in their expectation.

12:03 If you've got a dual purpose bird and you're trying to get it up to what today's modern hybrid slate 300 plus eggs a year you're not going to make it. That's the bottom line. I think a reasonable goal is is 200 to maybe 230, 40 eggs a year for a dual purpose bird. I haven't done the math yet, but I've got a bird who I think is my rock star, who will lay between four and five eggs and then take a day pause and start up again 3732. And she just is consistent like that all the way through. Other birds will take longer pauses and they usually lay later in the day.

12:49 Now, when they mention the eggs per year for certain breed, when you look up a breed and it says they'll lay 250 or 150. When they're saying that, how many years of that bird's life are they going to do that? Because that can vary tremendously as well and I think most of that's based off of first year performance. I just started to say. Most of those numbers are based off of their pull it year, their first year of laying production. And after that it'll dwindle down. And it's a matter of how much it dwindles, because sometimes your best, best offspring come from the two year old hands rather than the one year old hands.

13:31 I agree, they're much stronger, more vigorous chicks. Yeah, the eggs, I think. But knowing what a pull it lays in their first year is important, because then you know to expect about 85% in her second year Of lay. You know she's laying 200 eggs a year. You can expect 85% of that in her second year of lay. And then the next year it drops a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more. But another thing to look at is how long are your hands productive for? Yeah, because some of those production breeds, especially in the hybrids, they'll have a steep Some of you can't even get to go to two years for a decent production rate.

14:18 Commercially? Don't they cycle them out at like 18 months old? When we had our commercial leg, leg and flock, we'd bring in a flock of pull it and in 12 months we'd bring in another group of pull it and just replace the original flock. I know I usually grow my favorites up to their first year than after that. Every six months I'm thinning them out some more. So if I have roughly 30 birds at one year old, by the time they're two, I've got 15 of them left Because those are the ones that still have good performance going on. And then I hatch everything they lay. So you have that luxury to sort and patch out and see what they throw and then really focus in on your selection.

15:07 Next season is going to be a good season because I've got a pretty healthy batch that'll be coming two years old then. That incubator is going to be busy. You're going to need a bigger incubator. That's about I'm going to need another bar. Another thing I want to tell folks to be mindful of when they're trying to improve production is their molting rate. In other words, how fast does a mol and get back to lay it? And I know by the looks on your face you're gonna ask me how long is that? Well, it's gonna vary from breed to breed and it's gonna vary with the quality of the stock that she started with. So there's not a hard and fast rule.

15:49 But if you've got a female, that man, and just two or three days she's dropping tons of feathers. She grows them back. She's ready to go back and start laying again. That's the kind of females you want. You don't want birds start dropping a few feathers here and a few feathers there. They may mold all of their wing feathers at one time. They may not. And they may drop all of their tail feathers. That bird goes down the road. They're not gonna do you any good because they're dragging that out and the longer that molding process goes, the fewer eggs he's gonna lay. Well, we've already talked about managing our molt in the previous episode, so we should be there and watching our birds very carefully and managing them through the mold and again making a decision as to who's gonna carry on and be our breeding stock and who's gonna head to noodle camp.

16:41 Another thing to look at is your total cost to produce a dozen eggs. I'm not talking just feed cost. You got a factory in labor and all of those other associated costs To really know what that dozen eggs cost you and it's gonna surprise you. So I'm gonna be, about flipped out when I saw it. And I try to avoid that kind of man. There was a page of it in Jeff's book and I just I looked at it and I went, yeah, let's just tear that out, Nobody needs to see that. Some of those things make my eyes cross, I would admit. I mean what I should be charging for a dozen eggs at farmers market, what it cost me to produce a dozen eggs I couldn't sell.

17:28 One, especially if some of those eggs are coming from some prime breeding. Examples too I've had some very, very expensive omelets. Yes probably should have been chickens. We get hungry, so I'm not above eating prime hatching eggs if I have to. I've been there, done that. I'm not gonna go buy eggs at the store, that's for sure they can taste a little fishy, though, if you're on a breeder supplemented diet. I'm just saying Only if it exceeds 10% for that fish meal I can do that at lower levels, honestly. Can you? He's sensitive. Yes, I am sensitive, that's true. And I'm not a super dexter.

18:08 I was tested. Another thing I think we need to track when we're working on production quality. Really, you need to track it whether you're working on production quality or not. But that's the rate of fertility and the rate of hatchability. Getting a hen to lay an egg, that's spectacular. Getting a hen to lay a fertile egg is even better. That's sort of the icing on the cake. I've had hens that laid eggs. Tell her hens that I really wanted chicks from. Never got a fertile egg from those gals the whole time I had them. I haven't counted that before, and sometimes it was the boy, sometimes it was the female, and how she didn't want to be around the boy I picked for, yes, and other times they'd be fertile.

18:58 They just would not do a gosh dang thing. I had an entire flock of really rare birds and I had a male and five females and I set every single egg those birds laid and I got one scrawny, pathetic cockerel out of it and I tried probably a year and a half or two years. I changed the diet, I changed everything. Mm-hmm. And nothing hatched, so I had to cycle them out. It can be so frustrating when that happened and that's another thing that we need to be tracking on our birds Not only what the percentage of fertility is, but what's the percentage of strong, healthy chicks hatched. Yes, very important stuff I've called out birds based on their hatch results Mm-hmm.

19:39 Okay, do you find the best meat? Producing flocks produce the best chicks. Yes. I should. Okay, just checking, because we haven't gotten into that yet. I don't know where, when or how it happened. But there's some sort of a like when folks say that they have a egg bred flock and then you get in there and you start handling the hens and they are very lean, lean lean, lean and that makes, you know, typically a productive layer. But some of my best layers are also very stacked in the fleshing department and I have to be careful on obesity and make sure that it's meat, not fat, because fat hens don't lay that well.

20:26 But I've had really meaty birds that laid every bit, as well as a leaner, lighter weight bird. I had a set of silver lace bramas that were a project variety from a pretty well-known breeder, and it took every bit of nine months before they started laying, and when they did, the eggs were very small and they only came three days a week. And it stayed that way. The eggs never got bigger. They were fantastic broodies, though I'll give them a hand. Which. Talking about bigger eggs, that's another thing you should be tracking. What is the egg size? What is the average egg size of that female, if it's mediums or smalls?

21:06 She's not doing you any good. You want large, mostly large and then extra large. Yeah. I know some folks are selecting it for the big jumbos and they love the double jokers. I know one breeder who ran into a problem with the block of Delaware's because he was selecting based on egg size. And they were a bunch of double yolks. Yep, he finally got them to where they were laying a bunch of double yolk eggs and his hatchability hit rock bottom. So you know it's case that too much of a thing is bad for you. Normally my girls have a couple of weeks where they change their egg size from the small politics and then they balloon up into a double yolk and then they level off after that and do a nice solid 60 gram, 65 gram.

21:56 But I'm not surprised when I see new layers popping out 96 grams, 100 grams for double yolks, and they go in the breakfast basket until they figure out their system. You know we've been go ahead. It's. One thing I won't do for science is to try to hatch double yolks. It's not. It's not a novelty to me to even mess around with that it's a waste of effort and resources to do that I know some folks have hatched them, but those Y'all aren't great. No, I just started to say. Those hatches come few and far between. There was somebody that hatched one by accident. I counted 11 eggs and there was 12 chicks and they were about half size when she weighed them.

22:43 Yeah, it happened. I wonder how they're doing now, because it's very rare to actually get twins to hatch and to live. Yes, let's talk. We've been talking about egg production. Let's talk about what those folks that want to focus on meat production should be looking at and their breeders. I think you want to track your breeders so you can identify how many days it took them to go from hatch to market weight that varies a lot by individual. It does Sometimes. It does Then track what their average daily gain was. That's good to know, well, even weekly would be good to have.

23:26 Yeah, oh yeah. Just a weekly flock weight, if nothing else. We can get caught up into this rapid grizzly rate For meat production in a way. That's good, but with a long term success of the flock you may not want that extreme rate of maturity. Well, there's some breeds of skeletons can't handle it. The bottom line is the longer that goes, excuse me, the shorter the period to maturity, those birds tend to burn out and the longevity is just not there.

24:08 Then we have birds dying of heart attacks at 12 weeks old. I like to look for more moderate but still productive period to get those birds to market weight. The adult purpose thing. I've noticed that your fast maturing birds, when they really hit the ground running and both males and females are finished early, to where those boys can go to the table at 14 weeks and the girls turn around and start laying at 16 weeks. They do burn out there is such a thing as taking it too far. I put myself there when I was chasing growth rate and I was like whoa, whoa, whoa.

24:49 I got to back this up a little bit. I'm as guilty of this as anybody, but when I overemphasize one trait, I lose focus on the entire bird. Anytime we're breeding, we got to keep the big picture of where we are and where we're trying to go in mind, because once you start focusing on just a single thing, it usually comes back to bite you. Another thing that I like to look at is what's the feed conversion rate? How much feed does it take to put a pound of weight on that bird?

25:32 You better birds grow and gain weight well on a lesser amount of feed. Check the birds fleshing rate. Mandy, I know you're really good about this, but you got to handle your birds. You got to feel the bodies. You got to actually feel how much flesh is on that scales. Yeah, I found out that when you weigh them, if you're not also feeling them, you might be weighing more bone than fleshing you might be weighing more fleshing than bone. I've had to slow myself down quite a bit in what I select for and when, without calling through too soon for too much, because I put myself in the corners before by doing that.

26:18 But I do monitor growth and fleshing over the first 12 weeks and the body capacity. I like those bigger bodied birds and width is something that I probably pay the most attention to, but the underside of the bird, that's actually more important. Well, you select for bag appeal and table appeal. You have a very yeah, and then I keep growing those pellets and I keep letting them grow until they get to land and then I start looking at. So they were meaty for the duration of growth and now we're coming into egg season. So when did they start laying? How long did they lay? When did the egg size come up? Did they do anything funky when they were getting started laying?

27:01 And I always have to go into laying season, pull it heavy. If I've got 50 to 80 pellets I can have that by the time they're six months and then a year I can have that again, and then I don't have very many left at two just by sorting through for the laying traits. So I don't lose that by chasing the table traits and the different body structures. They can absolutely have different growth patterns too, and I like to see the girls start laying no earlier than 18 weeks. Before that they're not going to pass forward good table traits because they're going to be too small.

27:42 They fell too quickly and then got started too soon and they'll breed that forward very well. Those are typically the birds that's going to burn out on you and lose longevity. Those really fast matures I don't breed from. I will from the males, but I won't from the females. Be careful about that, because that can come back to buy it, because the male's gonna have more pen space, so let me ask you this on the male side. If we're looking on the commercial side, you know 12 pounds of feed to finish out a Cornish cross, 16 pounds for a Red Ranger. How much feed do you think it takes you to put a bird in a bag?

28:23 I've been how many weeks? Well, what's, what's your harvest? Are you 16, 20 week I? like between 16 and 18. After 18, when the tissues start tightening and the processing changes too, because not only does the texture for the table change, but so does your Prepare the fight. Well, the fight and how they respond to processing. Even because before 18 weeks I can twist a neck off, I don't need a knife after that, when everything starts tightening, now I have to use the knife a lot more, and Then it carries over into the cooking process too sure, and the cockerels are starting to develop testosterone in their system, it's gonna change the flavor of the meat a little bit as well.

29:07 Game here, but not much a little bit, but you know, it's these things that you need to keep in mind. Yeah, I my personal socks for dual purpose birds. Man is exactly right that 60 to 18 weeks Is the goal we ought to be aiming for for processing our bird. After that the growth levels off, but they're eating the same, so you lose efficiency for your feed conversion. Another thing to look for when you're reading for production Is you want good egg production. You're probably not gonna get the great egg production you did in a red delay flock, but you want good egg production. You want good egg fertility and good hatchability, because those are ever been this important.

29:52 And and meat flocks or Should be as important and meat flocks as laying flock. What's gonna be half of your hatch Are the males you're gonna need your you're not gonna keep them all, so they should be providing you with a source of income or sustenance. I can't tell you how many scrawny, lean, terrible cockerels that fit Three at a time into a crock pot, and they are 18, 19, 20 weeks old. I don't have birds like that anymore. You're losing money by raising them that long. Absolutely, and they are gonna be half the hatch, and if there's no market for them, why are you even hatching them?

30:34 So let's you know, make sure all of our non breeding birds are worthy of putting in, shrink, wrap and selling. You know we've talked about egg production if we talked about meat production and we've touched a little bit on dual purpose qualities in both of those categories. But ideally dual purpose breeds, you're gonna be somewhere between a Really good egg layer and a really good meat product. That's true and I found that to breed for that you have to come at it from a couple of different angles to avoid getting tunnel vision into one trait or another, and working out of at least three different pens so you can have your females collected for rate of lay and because I do like to take like a more Meat-style male and breed him with the females that are the best rock star layers, because the offspring tend to come up more balanced by doing it that way.

31:33 But I can't do it from a single pen. I have to have three different pens running that have been selected for what they're good at, and then Chris, crossing them through the line From there. I want to touch on Something that we can lose sight on sometimes, and that's learning how to identify good birds, great birds and truly exceptional bird, and there's a big difference. Going to pause right here because our original recording for this episode was an hour and a half long, we'll bring you part two of this conversation next week, as we continue our discussion on beginning your journey to real accomplishment with poultry.

32:14 Till then, make sure you keep your flock happy, healthy and productive. Thank you so much for listening to the poultry keepers podcast.