Insights and Strategies for Poultry Breeding - Part 1

0:00 Starting a breeding program can seem like a daunting task. Coming up, we'll discuss things to consider to start your breeding program off right. Let's just start with breeding message. I'll go first here and then y'all can fill in the blanks and give us all carried away or something out of there. You know, whatever works, the first thing to consider when you're starting to breed is what are your goals for your flock? What do you want to accomplish? Sometimes you're going to be more important than others, but, mandy, what are you thought?

0:43 Well, the goal set the stage for the type of birds that you want to get started with and your avenue of approach in where you're going to source them from. So I was just thinking about this the other day the fewer birds you're equipped to keep and hatch and grow for yourself, the better stock you need to be starting with, because it's going to take a lot of the work of breeding out of it if you're already starting off with quality. But if you want to go down that learning adventure and learn the ins and outs of selection and you are able to have a larger flock, then it's not a bad idea to start with 100 chicks and sort and select your way down to just the best 10 and then get going from there.

1:29 But if you don't have the space, then you do need to be looking for those better quality breeders so that you don't waste your resources on getting started with a small number of birds that may or may not pan out, depending on the program that they came from. So knowing your goals will help you find your source. Knowing your scale will let you know how picky you need to be starting out and the learning process though there's a lot to know we're going to break down a lot of that in this episode today and go into some details there. I'm sure John also has thoughts on this. Yeah. John, what's your thoughts?

2:09 For my perspective, I think how I look at it is I'm looking for the specific phenotypical expression of the genotype that's going to do best for me in my environment, with my husband's three practices and just the totality of living here on this farm. So if I start with 100 eggs from the same breeder and somebody else started with those same 100 eggs across the country, what I select as my prime breeding stock to move forward is almost definitely not going to be the same chicks that would have hatched for that other person, and I think that's part of the selection and culling process is the birds are naturally going to respond or not favorably, not, to how you treat them and how you raise them, and finding the ones that do best for you in that place and time is going to set the stage for your future breeding.

3:02 That's very true About. The only thing I can add to that and Mandy touched on it is that there is tremendous value in starting off with high quality breeder birds, particularly if you're buying adult and two, three hundred dollars for a trio of birds may sound like horribly expensive, and I guess in one sense it is. But look at it this way If you spend three hundred dollars to buy trio breeders, you're going to spend more than that. If you bought 100 chicks, probably you could spend $500 to $1,000 on those chicks, and then you've got the cost of raising those chicks and by the time you cull them down to the best eight or 10 birds you're into it for thousands at that point.

3:52 You know that's getting way out of sight. And if you're into showing birds, I want to add this, and it just starting out I would not suggest that you breed from show quality birds. Very, very often show birds are not your best breeders, particularly if you're working with the birds that's more than one color. White birds are a little easier, black birds a little easier, but you throw in patterned birds like lace pencils or even just blue. I mean you know that has to have the lacing chain for it to look right. And are there some birds that require specific sets of grandparents and then parents to come together for them to show, and you can't breed them forward.

4:37 Oh yeah, and there's also having a male and female line that could come into play on some patterns and you have to have two flocks to get the one result. That's what I was referring to. It's called double mating and that you know I tried that for a couple of years with some old English game band-aims I had and I thought this is kind of not fun anymore because you're you got a Male line and a female line and and it's a real headache, trust me sure. But there's a bunch of do that and thrive on it. No well, it takes dedication to do that for sure, and I don't have the patience for it. Well, it does take a lot of dedication and it takes an awful lot of record-keeping, but with that and it's a real tricky place to start with.

5:20 So some people will pick off the birds they want just because they like how they look, but they don't yet know the ins and outs of Replicating that result unless they've got a mentor well, I think if I could leave folks with one piece of advice is, when you're starting out, get good, high-quality adults because what you see is what you're gonna have and and spend some time talking with the person that you got them from to find out how they bred their birds. That's, if you can breed along those same lines, you're gonna do better with that line of birds than if you're just Kind of going that it willy-nilly. Trust me, been there, done that. You know I don't want to repeat it Just moving the hands is gonna disrupt their laying cycle for a week or three.

6:05 Oh yeah in my experience, yeah so this is unrelated to our topic today, but I do find that when I intentionally stress my birds out early, then when they get older, when I stress them out, it's not stressful to them anymore. So a lot of my adults I could flip them from this pen to this pen to this pen and they'll lay an egg the next day, and all the way through without interruption, because they're used. They're like desensitized. Well, I think it's a case that are also used to your management program. It's normal, your management style, so they're. They're comfortable, in other words. Yeah, so I didn't, you know, pamper them and protect them and keep them in the same environment For a year, because when you do that, then when you do change things, they're gonna flip out and they can lay a break.

6:51 That goes on for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, until they're comfortable again. Yeah, another thing and this is where I fell down Planned on my face so many times when I was just starting out. Okay, I need better combs, I need better color. Oh, the leg color needs some help and all the tail angles are not right. I was trying to correct all of that in one year. If we just starting out, focus on one thing, get that established or corrected in your line, then go on to something else, because you will drive yourself absolutely nuts trying to correct Multiple things in one breeding season. And not only that, you're gonna wind up producing inferior birds in the law, right?

7:34 This is also true. I've been there and I realized like the only efficient way to work on more than one thing is to do it in different pens. Yes, but you're still gonna end up with the same result of the traits coming forward desirable in these birds, but you don't have everything ruled into individual birds. So if you were doing tails on one pen and lay color in another pen and some other thing in another pen, you still have to go through the Selection hoops to try to get all of that rolled into singular birds. So you can make it simple or complicated, but either way you can't do too much in one season. Well, you know, I've reached the age where simple is for me. Yes, I don't know whether that's because I'm wiser or lazier, but it just works that.

8:19 That's why my birds are white. Easy Patterns are tricky near. Some patterns are very, very tricky pencil varieties, for example. I Just didn't have the patience to work with those and people who do and and some of them do an amazing job. You know, I've got a friend out in Oregon who has Beautiful dark brown but he's a master at working with the pencil varieties and they drove me nuts when I had absolutely nuts but when it's well done, it's gorgeous, oh yeah. When it's right. It's stunning. I'm not a little bit marbling at these old English pheasant foul that I acquired.

9:03 I've never had a bird that has been so Elaborate it there. They're really nice. I need to find somebody that can take them over for me, because I just don't have room, for I'm here and can't do them justice. But they're very pretty birds. What do y'all saw on Outcrossing good or bad for new folks? It? depends. So if the flock is missing something and none of the birds in the flock have it, you're kind of forced into the situation of if you're going to acquire that missing trait, it's gonna have to come from the outside. But if you have all of the ingredients already in the flock, then you just need to take a look at who needs to be mated with who and you don't have to do an outcross Because really it can have more ramifications than benefits and you never want to commit the whole flock to it, like you don't want to have.

9:56 You know, a group of 10 females, then put a new male over all of them. That's a mistake because you're putting all of your eggs in one basket and if those genetics don't align in a favorable way, now what You've got to start all over and salvage what you can. So you always want to do it on the side. If you're going to do it, john, what's? your thought. I am not going to do it. I spent way too much time and effort to find the foundation stock that I wanted. I don't have the space or the financial resources, but I also have the luxury, I guess, of having the breeder that I acquired my stock from, who will bring in occasional outcrosses, test them on his farm, hatch them out, check them out and if he likes them, he's like hey, I have some eggs you know available if you want to grow them out and see how you like them.

10:48 But then the work of waiting the three generations though. Sometimes those ramifications, Right, you get these early maturing boys, so sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, we just don't know. But letting somebody else who's a little better at it and has the space to do it than I, that's fine. Is that third generation where it gets tricky though. So it won't show that first or second season, it'll be later if there's some wonky stuff hiding in those recessive traits. Sure. Well, that's where your grandparents and great grandparents genes are going to start to pop up in weird combinations. Yeah, this is weird combinations that you've got to sort through. Yep, you roll the dice every time you mix a male and a female.

11:33 You know, personally I don't advise new folks to outcrop too soon and by too soon. If you've started with good birds that have been lined bread, you should go in years without having to outcross. But, like Mandy said, if you're lacking in quality in your flock and you don't have the parts to and one bird you can line breed it to, then you're going to have to go outside. But here's what I would suggest. I got, let's say, a trio of breasts from Mandy and after about 10 or 12 years I knew that I needed to improve a certain quality. But I didn't have it in my flock.

12:14 So my preference would be to go back to Mandy, get a bird that has those qualities. Okay, I wouldn't go, john was. If the three of us were breeding birds and I got mine from Mandy, I wouldn't go to John for an outcross bird. I'll go back to Mandy because her birds are going to be related. You know it's very distantly related, but they're going to be related to the birds that I'm working with and so there's less wildcard genetic. You run a risk when you go to completely unrelated birds and bring those in. I think even going two steps away. For instance, I got eggs from Mandy.

12:54 You got eggs from Mandy Five years down the line. I sent you some eggs. I think that's too far removed now because you know we don't drive in the same direction. I'm up here in the cold, frigid northeast, you're down in Florida I think they've drifted apart enough by then, where you shouldn't be coming through me. I think that would be tolerable because it was still coming from the same genetic pool. Basically yes. If I had no other option, my first option would be go back to you. Second option would be to go to John. What about the best way to do an outcross? What's your thoughts on that?

13:35 I've heard that using a female is the best rather than a male, and a lot of the chatter I see online is people wanting to get a boy and do it that way. But RIP's experience will be good here. You commit a lot less of your inventory mouths to feed if you just use a female. I do prefer to bring new blood in through the female side Because, like Mandy said, some folks almost all folks, particularly newcomers will go get a totally unrelated male and you bring that male in and say, oh, this is a great bird, I'm going to breed all the females I've got.

14:15 Well, he may be a great bird, but all your chicks may produce crappy results. Well, you just basically thrown away a whole year's worth of breeding effort, feeding chicks, rearing chicks and going through them to wind up with junk. Hopefully you still have your original male around to recover from this. Yes. So I always like to bring in a female and hatch off 20, 25 chicks from her, bred to one of your males. If you like what you see, then I would take pullets from that mating and breed back to your own males and bring it in that way.

14:59 That kind of forces you to do it gradually. So you've got to evaluate every step along the way. Now you've got to be concerned about the whole hybrid vigor thing because your first year of cross you may get really fast growing, fast developing, fast maturing heavy birds. Yeah, and it might not last. That hybrid vigor usually only lasts you one to two years and then it goes downhill really quick. It can go downhill just as fast as it brought things up. So just be careful with your outcrossing. To me it was always sort of a last route situation to do an outcross.

15:45 You're looking for birds that have that. What's the term you used years ago? Spizarinctum. Spizarinctum. That's right. Love me some spizar. It's a real word. Is that code for vigor? It is exactly what it means that is that chick that hatches in the middle of the pack or at the low end of the pack and at three weeks is bigger than everybody and at eight is bigger than everybody. On cold day you're like no way, you're not going in the freezer. Those are my favorite birds. That's one in a hundred in my book. Oh yeah, ms Donaldson, an old red breeder up in Georgia. He used that term a lot because she said I always liked chicks that hatched.

16:26 It was a lot of spizarinctum. For many, many years I thought it was a term that my grandmother made up, but no, it's a real, genuine word. You can look it up in the dictionary and find the definition, trust me, let's get into flock mating. There's some advantages to using flock mating, I think, and there's some bigger disadvantages for me and my situation. If you're breeding a bird just to preserve that breed, flock mating is a really good program to use and that's where you're using one male for every 10 or 12 females. The downside to be effective, flock mating for preservation people think they can do it with a tree or two birds.

17:10 Oh no, it takes the whole family. It takes at least 200 females and 10 or 15 males to really do a flock mating program properly. I had always heard that the bare minimum was 50. That would be the very, very, very low end, I know. Okay. Don Strider before and he and I both feel that flock mating you've got 200 females to get the most genetic diversity over time. It's difficult to make I shouldn't say make progress but it's difficult to improve a flock of birds just doing flock mating, because there's so much variability from bird to bird to bird.

17:57 There's so many males and so many females contributing to that variability that you don't know who produced what. Unless you know who produced what, you can't really make progress when you flock Trust me Like you'll see improvements but you won't be able to trace it back. It's only going to be certain individuals that show it. It's very difficult to breed it forward from one year to the next when you get those improvements, unless you know what's behind those birds. You know what the parentage and grandpactage is. But it definitely maintains your genetic diversity. Oh, yes, that is perfect for that. It's perfect for that.

18:38 But then the impetus is on the person selecting from there. Yeah, and with that many birds it could be a little tricky too, because the more quantity you have in there, how much time are you spending getting to know each bird? Well, and another downside to that is for the newcomers. If they're doing flock mating, they may keep. If they're only hatching a few, they'll probably keep every single female. So they got birdseed. If they're going to hatch from all of them. I've already been down that path, like I need 12 hens and then I get my 12 hens and I hatch from all of them, and not even 50% of the results were good once I hatched from them, because I kept them by quantity, not quality.

19:23 Yeah, so here's a conundrum then. So if your goal is to have a large production flock, do you go ahead and acquire the 500 or the 1000? Or do you slowly work on a smaller group to sort and select each generation to build yourself up to those numbers? Because one thing that I've seen is a lot of people wanting to get into certain varieties that could be like income producing for their farm or their homestead, and they tend to order the number they think they need and then proceed to breed from all of them, and then they run into the Try to sell the product and they for the same thing they pay for oh yeah, within that first season even.

20:16 Yeah. And then they wonder why it's not working out and why they don't have demand when they thought they were getting into a variety that had demand. Or they explode their population too much too soon to try to meet a demand, but then their quality suffers a lot. So what steps need to be taken to build to a level of quantity with quality? Is that even possible? Oh, sure it is. I started with two trios of Rhode Island Reds, orange Fountains, and I built the population slowly and if you stop and think about it, two trios of large fell four females.

21:00 Okay, if you get them to lay 150 eggs a year, even if you got a 75% hatch rate, do the numbers on it, that is a lot of chickens. So my preference is to start out slow with your birds, build it over time, because that's the only way I can see to make progress with my birds. Well, every hatch that I do now I'm setting the expectation that the bird is either going in the freezer in December or January, or maybe one in ten is good enough to stay alive to breed forward.

21:40 I agree with you. Maybe, If you're lucky, you have 10%. But I have a big freezer and we have plenty of people in the neighborhood that like eating fresh farm eggs. So having an ethical outlet for the breeding calls is always really important. The local raptor rehabilitation center has stopped accepting roosters. They usually do about this time of year. But we do have various wildlife recovery organizations in our state that will accept roosters or cull hens. I usually just put them out on one of the various social medias and somebody will come get them, because even to get them to 10 or 12 weeks you've invested a lot of money into it.

22:22 You just infeed in your time and labor. You know people who really there's folks who depend on it. They just go around collecting roosters and take them right back home and as soon as they get home process them right away. So they pretty much all they have into. You know four or five pounds of meat is the gas money to go and fetch them. So this brings us to. How do you begin to make good, solid improvements in your birds? To me, you know, and a lot of people think, line breeding is a huge no-no and they equate line breeding with breeding for showbirds only. That is so far from the truth.

23:04 It's not even funny, lock in your good traits. Yeah, call out. That's where consistency comes from. Absolutely. Line breeding will help you identify the penetration of your birds. It will help you remove the poor quality birds and individuals. So long term it gives you really good improvement in your flock. So okay, what is line breeding? Let me explain it and how I use how I did mine. I maintain my birds through what I called family line breeding. All the females in the pen were related and I maintained usually a minimum of three breeding pens.

23:48 So if I had pen one, two and three because all of the females related, I could grab a bird out of pen three that I thought had the qualities I needed to help improve pen one and breed them in there. And I might use them two or three years as long as I was getting good results. And then I may switch over to using a pen to mail and I could cross mail back and forth within my line. But because I was maintaining the lines through my female side of the reading, I got tremendous uniformity, tremendous consistency and tremendous results like that. And somebody says but yeah, but how long can you do that?

24:29 We have more information than we could possibly cover in one show, so we need to continue this discussion. In our next show you can get part two starting your breeding program next week. In the meantime, be sure to email us and share your thoughts at potporkieperspodcastcom. Until then, may all your birds be happy, healthy and productive. Thank you for listening.