Insights and Strategies for Poultry Breeding - Part 3

0:00 We're going to finish our discussion on starting your breathing program, so why don't we just jump right in there and get started? And if you're showing your birds. You should not lose points for having a wing band and you won't, you know well, that's a common. That's the only real detractor I hear from people's like I want to show my birds, but so what? if they're gonna, they'll show bird with a leg band on it and I'll think twice. Well, they think that that may cause the wing to droop a little it doesn't if it's properly on there. It's not gonna bother them at all and putting it in is Doesn't cause the bird.

0:44 Even an opyr doesn't cause them any distress. Right. Well, you've been an APA judge for quite a while and you've never it's not part of the chicken. Not part of the chicken, I'm just a chicken. Not the application of the wing band or leg band. Question when y'all put wing bands on, do you put it in the birds left wing or the birds right wing? I was planning to use that as an organizational method. I've been using the right wing for it then to this point and reserving the left wing for future use. For what? Another secondary tag? Yes for what? explain, identify other traits or or other other things you want to track.

1:26 I Always put mine in the birds left wing. And you never had cause to use the right? Or did you hold that in the wings for future? use, never use the right. Well, I hold the bird in my left hand. Yeah. I fan out the what would be the birds Right wing and find my tag and read it. So to me it needs to be on that right wing. Try it on the left wing is a lot easier. Then the birds facing forward. Yeah, I always hold a bird in my hand. I want the Tip of the Q bomb, front tip of the Q bomb, touching up against the heel of my hand. I'm supporting the bird. I've got the two fingers in the middle, or the three fingers in the middle underneath the birds body.

2:11 I hold the birds wings. Left wing was my right thumb, right wing Excuse me, they're right wing in my right thumb and their left wing Clamp down against them. Mine are too big to do that I can have. No, they're not no. We'll find out November. You got the little, teeny, tiny hands, and the reason I use that left wing is because my tendency is, when I'm holding them facing me, I Just fan out to. I learned this in judging. First thing I do is I hold a bird. I'm feeling the link to the key bone as I hold in it in my hand and you know how far does the Q bone go from the heel of my hand towards the tips of finger?

2:53 And you have your fingertips towards the backside of that keel. Yeah, the whole keel bones run it through my palm and Right down to my middle finger. I've been doing it from the other direction and maybe that's what makes it goofy sometimes. It can make it different, but I'm also that's. I'm using my right hand to examine the bird. I fold out the wing to check the prime agent. Second days that's the first thing I do. All right, so I automatically begin Putting the wing band in their left wing, because that's the wing I go to first. Actually, I wonder if that's a difference between showing and Growing for meat and the way that I've always seen, in the way that I naturally started handling birds.

3:34 Nobody ever taught me how to pick up and hold a bird. Yeah, that's where I'm at. No one taught me I'm, just when I figured out that if I put it in the palm of my hand with the legs dangling through my fingers and I can tuck the head kind of underneath this arm to shield its eyes. It pretty much just goes to sleep in my arm, yeah, and I can do whatever I want. Yeah, exactly right. The reason the bird against the front of me so I can check the wing on that side and. All right, I'm complicating it then is a flap around a lot. Some of them you do. I'm not supporting them properly exactly. Birds have a fear of falling and when they start flopping around it's because they're not comfortable. They're afraid they're gonna fall.

4:15 Support them in your hand, some, holding one wing pinky finger, holding another wing against the body, and if you have to stick to the head under your arm, they will not struggle so when your finger, you're pinky in your thumb and they're holding the wing, what part of the wing are you making contact with? is it like the tip of feathers? Yeah, tip of the, and that's enough yeah, if they, I will say 99 times out of 100 is that's enough. If they still struggle, it goes under my arm. They get dark, they relax yeah we skipped over the part of talking about the Scale of points in the SOP, to help what.

4:56 And she's right, we didn't need to touch on that. I use the scale of points in the standard for perfection To help me guide my breeding decisions. Every bird is going to have their faults and every flock Usually will have the same general classification of faults, but common fault it's, and it keeps you from getting fixated on an insignificant trait. Yeah, you know exactly. How many times have we seen people obsessing over the number of points on a single convert? All the time in my all the time.

5:37 Yeah Well it's. it's an itty-bitty, it's an every would you necessarily call a sidespring, oh absolutely. That's a Corruption would you call six points instead of five? No no. If everything goes as good, six points doesn't mean anything, because if you go to the scale of points, you know when. When you're evaluating and selecting birds, every bird starts off at a hundred points and defects Count a Individual number of points. The higher the point value, that's, the more that tells you where you need to start putting your emphasis. An extra point on a comb is only a half point cut.

6:19 Versus too short of a back would, because the back itself is ten points exactly, when the comb is a total of five, if I remember right. I don't have it in front of me. Standard bread heritage bird will have all the production qualities because it's going to have the body capacity in theory. And and. I'll be, I'll tell you. You're breeding a dual-purpose bird, or whatever your standard is. That's what you should be breeding, not just a pretty bird. There's a whole section in the standard of perfection that in monitor exhibitors and judges To pay attention to the production of ability of a bird Does it happen often, very infrequently, to people who are showing birds pay attention to that and and that's what really damaged a lot of our dual-purpose birds and standard red birds.

7:15 Yeah, and I was late to the party. So we do have the preservation of genetics to thank for them to get absolutely even the genetics are still alive today Is because of the show people exactly, mandy. You started to say something and we walked all over you there. Yeah, and I forgot what it was. I feel like I was late to the party on Doing this whole utility thing in the midst of how exhibition has gone over the past 50 years or so, where a lot of those dual-purpose attributes were lost in favor of aesthetics. And when I'm at a show and I'm walking the aisles, I really will walk every single aisle of every single breed in the entire building.

8:01 And well, when you go to the L I national this year, you bet have two pairs of good walking shoes with you, because you're gonna wear a couple. Now just wear my favorites, we'll be alright. There's probably. I walked it twice. Last time I was up at Ohio. Yeah, and then when I would go out on. Smoke breaks, I'd find some other people and we cluster up and talk about chickens until we were Well educated that's a fun part about going to shows folks is the friendships and the fellowship. That's the best part. That means more to me than winning prizes just being around other poultry, people that understand our Whatever we want to call it our passion. So once you get a gaggle of bird people together man, is it a?

8:44 Gaggle or a flock and Is whatever bird term you want to use. Well, I use a non bird term. It's a train load of folks. Well, that's vintage. Well, what would you expect from me? I've been it myself, getting back to reading, to the standard. If we don't breed to a written standard, we're gonna wind up breeding birds that don't look like that don't perform like Breeds, what the as the breed was developed to do. Well, you can get dangerously close to having birds that are more similar to Well, what's the term?

9:25 Barnyard mixes and stuff where you can't Accurately figure out what they are like. One hybrid that comes to mind is Easter eggers and how they interchangeably use Americana as a breed name, and that's doing the purebred birds a disservice, because they're dramatically different, because an actual SOP bred. Americana has set color parameters, yeah, set standards and there's Goals to achieve in their breeding versus an Easter egg or that can be any color and lay any color egg and. Well, mandy, that can happen in a lot of other breeds to Rhode Island reds, for example, hantry Rhode Island reds and standard bred reds do not look like the same breed.

10:15 I heard that the hatchery Rhode Islands are more of a production red type of bird. Exactly. Well, they're satisfying a requirement from a different customer. Exactly. And that's breaking like the standard manding. If you just look through a hatchery catalog online or if you've got a hard copy, just flip through there. Take a good look at the birds bodies. You will see the vast majority of birds in that catalog or online catalog have the same identical body shape. There's no body differences. There's no type differences. That's if they're even using real pictures. Some of them use art. Well, I don't know if we can mention specific hatcheries, but I know Murray Mcmurray has pictures of their parent flocks at the very.

11:01 You know they're proud of the fact that they have Amish farmers who keep their parent flocks and will tour them at least twice a year. But aren't they one of the only hatcheries that actually went through the certification process for SOP? I? think they have like five varieties Four or five varieties. I'm really interested to see what becomes of this, because that's something that's desperately needed on a larger scale. Yeah, they have the resources to do this. Well, not only that, that certification process requires them to be certified by licensed APA judges. Yes. So there is definitely value in that certification process.

11:42 And it has to be a majority that meet it. Not just some, but a majority. More than 50%. Yeah, I think that's great. It's going to help move the poultry industry forward. Only if the consumers care. I think they will, and I'm seeing that shift in the consumers acquiring the knowledge to realize that there is a difference between hatchery stock and standard bred stock and almost 100%, when they look at the two side by side, prefer the look and the appearance of standard bred poultry over. The same breed has just not been selected for that.

12:23 If we have some of these hatcheries that are going to close that gap, I'm all for that. We'll see how it all pans out in the future. Yeah, it's like anything else in life. You know, change takes time. Well, it's going to give the new perspective poultry keeper, slash breeder the ability to, you know, start with better stock, and I think that's a good thing. Yeah, and they're going to be breeding to this standard of perfection, so they should. The new poultry person should be able to continue that very easily. They have the blueprint in the book. All they have to do is continue it Exactly right. And I know people like us talking about it. That's a big reason why we're do what we do.

13:06 I thought it was just hanging out. Well, that too it goes back to that whole trainload of folks, you know. But, Mandy, what's your thoughts on using extreme birds and what do you consider an extreme bird? Oh boy, do I have experience there. So you guys already know that I'm a big fan of utility and production traits. So there was a season where I got some incredibly monster birds as a result of what I had done leading up to that point, and I would call them extreme and their width and their growth rate and they were just monsters.

13:46 So I bred them and it gave me a ton of problems where form lost the function and I saw where it went too far and I had to scale it back and I had to go take some of my hands back to a dainty or more refined male to get back to the birds who could chicken well, and I saw some instances of leg issues where they were bow legged and they didn't have the bone density to support their mass and it got sloppy, it got messy, it got call heavy and that's where I was like, oh OK.

14:29 So that's the breaking point. Now we have to backtrack and go into salvage, because I took an extreme and bred it and it didn't work out well at all. Did you notice it doing anything to your fertility and your hatchability? Well, I didn't have them long enough to find that out. They just weren't chickening that great. They didn't have the gumption to get up and go. They couldn't get up on roost, they couldn't. I lost a lot of function so I didn't even give it the time to find out about the deeper ramifications there. I called that. That's the electrical structure. I went back to the drawing board that season. That's the wise leader in you. Well, thankfully I had the birds available to backtrack it.

15:10 I did not put my whole flock feature onto those monster birds. Going on, I'm going to make the biggest birds in the country. No, I didn't. It was an epic failure. That part alarms me with some breeds and I'm not going to pick on any breeds right here, but some folks are constantly selecting for fast maturity, big body size, fast maturity and big body size, the other ramification is you can lose that size as quick as you found it, because if your females mature too early and then that subsequent generation after that it's gone. Because her egg size didn't come up, the chick size suffered Like you'll see it once for a generation and then if you try to pursue it further it'll all fall apart on you.

15:56 Well, and the Cornish Cross Broiler is a classic example. Those birds are bred to be extreme. They have leg problems, they have heart problems, they can't handle heat, they can't handle cold weather very well. They can't move. All they do is just sit and eat and drink. And all of them are like a four-way terminal cross hybrid. No 16. I thought that was like the minimum generations that went into the development. That it takes 16 different crosses to produce the Cornish Cross we see as a broiler. I wish John's hand signals that he's going through right now were available for viewing.

16:39 The final and you've got two to make that, four made that, 16 made that. So it's one, two, three, four generations to make the final bird, and that is definitely a terminal cross. It's incapable. And each one of those generations of breeding crosses are made to produce a particular result. You know, it may be the obesity gene, it may be the dwarf gene. That's why so many broiler the slow growing broiler like the Red Rangers and stuff like that you cross those together you're going to get about 25% of those birds are going to be dwarf.

17:19 I heard somewhere, and I can't remember where, but that they had introduced the dwarf gene so that anyone who attempted to line breed to make their own flock from it would, within three generations, suffer the loss of size that they had to go back and reap. That could be speculation and rumor though to with the dwarf gene. It was very closely linked to the obesity gene. Interesting. And the, the broiler folks first grabbed onto that dwarf gene from a white legged, believe it or not, and if you, keep them short and compact. And if it was tied in with that obesity gene then you get that exploded size on that shorter structure.

18:02 Well and many you process a lot of your own birds. Like and explain the difference between the size of your birds, legs and wings to a Cornish cross. Bird legs and wings. Longer by a lot. Yes. Dwarf gene at work. Oh yeah, because it would shorten all that up and make it more compact and then you get that double muscle defect. And they don't walk around as much, so they're therefore not walking off weight. Yeah, what do you guys think of the folks who constrict the feeding regimen on the Cornish cross so that then they can use them briefly for hybridized projects? Because I always see that as like a really short term project, like it's going to, it's going to have a shelf life.

18:50 For how long that could be sustained? Giving example to that. To answer that, the New Hampshire's from the Henry and old line they the hatchery told me one time when I was thinking about using them in a cross, said when you breed them you're going to get about 25% dwarf birds and when you raise them you have to feed them just every other day or they get so big, they die early, they develop leg problems and they can't breathe and and to get good egg production you got to restrict their feet just because they grow so big. I had a friend and I had I helped him on year evaluate his New Hampshire's who's out on Ben.

19:31 So as a newwick do have a Antiohen standard and I have, he pulled out some birds for me to look at. He said now these are my black ops bird and there was cockroach that were weighing 17 to 20 pounds. Wow, and a chicken, that's turkey weight. Those things worry you out, just picking them up and evaluating them. But what he had done? He'd crossed in a red but red Ranger and and literally their legs were big around his two of my fingers. Put together, they were huge like the lower leg, the scaly part. Yeah, the shanks, but he didn't keep that over and on.

20:11 I'd imagine. Not because they had to limit feed them. Matt has a whole other level of tedium to your daily chore list. Well, you bring up a very good topic of Feed and nutrition and its effect on the birds and the feed conversion rate Versus age of processing. And what's the sweet spot that keeps you in a sustainable territory rather than commercial? Well, I think, no matter what, we need a high quality, nutrient rich diet, and then oh yeah energy and calories. Well, Think of it this way if we need, what you feed those breeders translates directly To the quality of the hatching egg, which translates directly to the quality of the baby chick you get.

20:57 Absolutely. What's the first thing a human female does when she finds out she's pregnant? Start taking folic acid. Well, and everything else too. Yeah, it's so critical prenatal nutrition I. Can't express enough that you need to have a really good, high quality breeder diet, and and a good quality breeder diet is gonna have extra vitamins and minerals in it. I learned a long time ago that 16% layer feed is not a breeding ration. Nope, not even close, unless they've got free range to offset the nutritional differences and a lot of times that won't do it and then a commercial off the shelf. Even with, you know, several acres of free range, I would not consider less than an 18% if I was gonna use a commercial feed To get the additional nutrition to the pumped up amino acids, the pumped up vitamins and minerals, I Would use a feed supplement Designed to do just that.

21:55 Now I see a lot of folks oh, I'm not buying that supplement because it costs too much. They'll buy 16% layer, they'll go out and then buy High protein catfish feed or cat food to bump up the protein and the amino acids. When it winds up cuffs and we're to do that Then if they would invest it in a good bag or bag of good first trail breeders showbirds up. Well, the birds are gonna eat what they feel compelled to eat if it's there. And when you put down cheap food Full of fillers and stuff, they're gonna eat and eat, and eat and eat and still come up lacking to where? Then you're gonna run into the issues of them Wanting to eat on feathers and eggs and each other.

22:37 Yep, because they still feel that they're lacking in protein and the amino acids and all of that. And if you just set them up right from the get-go, you can save yourself a whole bunch of grief. And a whole bunch of money. Yeah that's who, if you're, and it's my caught. When I stopped trying to save money on feed is when I actually Started saving money on feed, and there's definitely an irony in that and the further down this rabbit hole I go, sourcing my whole grains and and you know, wheat, barley corn, getting the essential things that I don't have local access to shipped in or going to pick them up, has really helped bring my feed costs under control and increase the diversity of the birds diet and made it more resilient.

23:23 I think people just don't realize that when they shift from a lower quality big box store feed To a high quality good breeder feed, they're gonna save you anywhere from 15 to 25 percent in feed cost alone With well, also improving your hatch rate, improving your growth results, improving through the whole chain of the flock, even. Yeah, none of this is any good without grit appropriate. So, absolutely, you know, earlier we were talking about the importance of a big gizzards, well grits, one of these, one of the things that'll help build those big gizzards.

24:04 That gizzard needs to be working all the time To grind the food, to feed the birds body, so they can produce good, high quality change. And I saw recently where someone was feeding grass clippings and a cringed inside wondering how much grit they had provided. And it had started a debate on if that was healthy for the birds or not, because, yes, they need their leafy greens. But if you provide it to them pre-cut, it's a pre-determined size they have to swallow. And it took me back down memory lane when I had a very, very nice Maran's Pullet and she had just started laying that. A color was there, her color was there, she was a blue, she had that lacing. She was. She was a dang nice bird.

24:46 And she started going downhill and I was trying to figure out why, what's going on, and I did everything I knew how to do and then at the end of a week, I had to call her. So I called her and then I opened her up and guess what I found inside of her intestines a Giant blockage of grass. Yeah, that had come all the way through the crop, the gizzard and into her gut and Didn't work out well for and I've never fed grass clippings, ever, ever again. When I head of my mower. We were talking about this earlier, so they they learn this behavior where they don't follow the mower. They walk on each side of the mower and they catch all the bugs that jump out of the way. Lawn mower.

25:27 You know where. I learned that I was working with my uncle one summer on a big cattle ranch and we were putting up hay and there would be a whole line of birds walking just Crammed up against the front of that mower as it was cutting grass and man, they were grabbing bugs right and left. Yeah, at first I thought they were going after the grass clippings, but then I noticed it was the bugs that were jumping out of the Mower. Oh, they know what to eat. When I was a kid and I was doing labor on the Homestead I guess you'd call it and I was doing planting and digging holes with a shovel, I'd have at least five, six, seven birds following that shovel around. So as soon as I stuck it in the dirt they were there to collect all the worms and I'd be licking a shovel full of dirt out, with a chicken standing on it here again I'm going down this rabbit hole.

26:13 but people spend a lot of money to feed feats for their birds and Grow mealworms or whatever you know an easy way to give your birds a good high amino acid treats. What's that? Take a bale of hay and throw it out in a pen, let it sit for three or four weeks and then turn your birds in on it. That thing will be loaded with bugs and they'll turn that hay over 16 ways from Sunday. Have you seen the pastured poultry methods where they range on through an area of pasture and they set up compost within that area? I can't remember the guy's name, but he'll take a circle of wire and put it inside that area.

26:57 He'll take all of his bedding waste from the coop where he cleans it out. He puts a tarp inside of that coop so they can lift the tarp, carry it to the cage, drop it in there. Then they start putting all of their kitchen scraps in there and they build up this caged compost situation. When he would go out and put the chicken feed out, those birds didn't run for that feed first. They ran instead to the caged up compost and jumped into that and started eating there first. Then, when he would move the birds further down and he would rotate them through, they would take those piles and either spread them out where they were or they would collect it and then use it in the garden. It looks really efficient. And the birds? figured out. Very little can turn over a pile of compost better than a bunch of chickens.

27:41 Yeah, by the time he was working them down, he moved them forward just 10 feet at a time so that he could move that ring down. The older piles were still incorporated to some extent. I think it would go up to three or four piles before they moved too far away. Another side effect of that, though, is he's not allowing this extra foraging and scratching to dilute his base nutrition, not exceeding what we all refer to as that 10% threshold of treats. Another thing to bring up is empty proteins, because I see a lot of people trying to look for deals on the dried out mealworms. It's really important to know that once you dry a bug out, it no longer has the nutritional content and it's nothing but candy.

28:26 Once they're dried, the amino acids are not there anymore and it becomes an incomplete protein. They've got to be live. You can even gut load mealworms. You can give them a calcium bump like they do for reptiles. The thing that concerns me about even some live mealworms, but especially dried mealworms. Most of those come from China. Oh yeah. There is no telling what those mealworms have been fed to produce them. Well, if they're dried out, it doesn't much matter, unless there's residual contamination, yeah, the contamination why? are we importing mealworms from across the planet?

29:06 Because we import a lot from across the planet. We can get it cheap we can get it cheap. You can take your chicken feed and grow your own. Yeah. I mean it's one step removed. I mean it's a lot of extra effort, but you could raise worms on your chicken feed. Live bugs are the best bugs. Yeah, and if you want some good cheap entertainment, you've got 15 or 12. Give them a fish, give them a whole fish. Yeah. Maybe, Go out and get a handful of crickets and throw in the pen. That's good redneck entertainment, trust me. But I'll sum up the basics of what I think about for poultry breed or nutrition and then we'll probably close out.

29:52 We've kind of beaten this subject to death. But you get a breeder feed if you can't, If you can't see if there's a female close to you that makes or will make you a custom breeder food. If you do, there's recipes for that developed by Jeff Maddox on both our poultry keepers 360 Facebook group or in the poultry breeders nutrition Facebook group that Jeff has Just remember. Try to avoid using feeds that were created for other livestock. If it says for catfish, feed it to catfish. If it says for dogs and cats, feed it to dogs or cats. And the same thing goes for supplements.

30:33 You know, a supplement I see talked about is this colored cell stuff, and I was developed for horses. One developer chicken. And the go ahead. The metabolism is different, the nutritional needs are different. Everything's cultivated for the specific species. Right, right. And if you're feeding outside of your species, there's going to be something that's too much and something that's too little. So you know, feed them good, nutritionally fortified feeds, developed for the breed and the purpose, and by all means offer them grit, always, always, always grit and oyster shell and don't confuse oyster shell with grit, not saying to rely on oyster shell as their only source of grit to provide the action for their gizzard.

31:26 They're going to be up taking way too much calcium and have kidney problems, and it's just not a good. Not only that, as much. Oyster shell is much softer than grit, so it's just not as effective at grinding feed, particularly whole grain feeds. We appreciate you joining us, and until next week, be sure, and keep your birds happy healthy and productive. We'll see you folks. Bye, bye, bye now.