Farming and Homesteading Heritage Poultry

[Arielle]

Quote: Yes, that was something that made canning all the more attractive-- tenderizes the tough ole birds. lol Like one year old turkeys. lol

 

[galanie]

Learning comes slow. I thought that because the horse kept the paddock bare, all the weed seed was gone. NO,just slow to sprout. This led me to think about how to use animals like sheep to graze down an area to make travel easier for the birds. It's complicated. SOme days I just want to go to the store to buy my chicken.

Oh yes, I remember from my years of having horses that anything sprouting will just get either eaten or torn up by the hooves if it's a small area. Removed the horse and you have green stuff everywhere. Weed seeds are everywhere and prolific. Given a chance, old momma Nature will fill a bare spot in a hurry. Got to agree about chicks being outside with momma having a lot more health. Got one now that is tough as nails. Momma wasn't very attentive but this little pullet survived it all and I don't think anything will kill her now.

 

[PineTopFarm]

On this thread I saw mention of fattening and finishing of chickens by limiting movement and feeding milk and grain. Is finishing a standard practice and does it contribute to the taste and texture of the chicken?

 

[Fentress]

On this thread I saw mention of fattening and finishing of chickens by limiting movement and feeding milk and grain. Is finishing a standard practice and does it contribute to the taste and texture of the chicken?

Good question. I'm trying to find a Heritage breed that has good egg and meat qualities and I'm not sure to what extent it is breed based and/or management based.

 

[Arielle]

On this thread I saw mention of fattening and finishing of chickens by limiting movement and feeding milk and grain. Is finishing a standard practice and does it contribute to the taste and texture of the chicken?

THis is a good question. ONe that I have not seen good solid information on. More anicdotal.

I like fat and eat plenty of it to get my weight down. So I value fat. However, the gobs of fat on the grocery commercial cornish x is even too much for me. I think, this is my opionon, that there is some fat on even the thinnest birds. THis is based on butchering a turkey and a layer. So how much is enough.

As a cook, much of the fat renders out, and in doing so rovides some protection to the meat to prevent drying out the meat. Especially roasting. I also do not brine, as I find the drippings already far too salty. Perhaps ther is value in tenderizing the met IDK as I have not researched or tested this. I do know red wine is good for tenderizing, and have had many lamb rosts prepared with it, not because the lamb needed it but because it tasted so good! lol I only recently picked upon the effects of red wines on the fibers.

Fat is flavor. Maybe more reflective of what they eat than the genetics of the bird. To me chicken fat is chicken fat, not pork fat, not beef fat. A chicken fed primarily corn and soy , imo, cannot taste like a bird fed grass and bugs in addition to the commercial grains. Again just my opinion. Please consider that my tastes are broader than most AMericans. If you are selling to customers, I suspect that most want a product close to what they are used to ( commercial cornishx)

Texture-- the older the bird the tougher the meat. I"m not complaining here. I like both cornish x and a 12 mo turkey. Cooking method and chilling process maybe the key factor in tenderness. HOnestly I really like the home grown heritage types best. THen my homegrown cornish x, lastly the commercial cornish x. Each have a diferent texture.

ANd I have rambled on and probably not really answered your question!

 

[cybercat]

On this thread I saw mention of fattening and finishing of chickens by limiting movement and feeding milk and grain. Is finishing a standard practice and does it contribute to the taste and texture of the chicken?

OK mostly this is done with pigs and cows but can be done with chickens. What we are doing here is that chickens free range all day long and get fed in the evening before they coop up at night. Now I have alot of cockerals to butcher this year. We will be penning them up and grain feeding then as we are doing now for evening meal. But the penning will limit exercise so their meat will not be as tough if we just butchered them straight from free ranging. This will only be done for a few weeks to a month before butchering. As of right now everyone free ranges and gets fed evening grain but soon pullets will be going into the laying coop and cockerals left in the raising coop. I will be moving my breeding cockerals I am keeping to their own coop but the rest stay in the one with a pen to be finished off for BD.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

This was posted on the APPPA yahoo group forum in response to a question regarding the nutritional benefits of pasture. He cites to some numbers regarding egg production on traditional farms which some of you might find interesting, I know I did. It was posted by Mr. Robert Plamandon.

The economics of egg production have been measured in great detail for over 100 years. During most of that period, modern hybrids didn't exist. When I reviewed the literature of the 20th century, the following conclusions seemed universal:

* Pasture alone can feed only a very small number of hens. The only source that I saw venture a stocking density for fully unfed hens was by Brown, around 1900, where he estimated that 1-2 hens per acre could be sustained this way (in England). Such hens will be underfed much of the year and will lay only in spring. This is the problem with old texts--they're incorrect. If an an acre of pasture can only maintain 1-2 hens it is very, very poor pasture.

* Traditional farms involve, among other things, cattle and horses spilling a lot of grain. This, along with other waste products, can support a small flock of chickens year-round. In 1900, this was the standard way of keeping hens, and the average hen produced only 83 eggs. Yup, the problem is that chickens aren't grazers. Their beak tells you what they want to eat, and it's not grass.

* In the same period, hens from high-producing strains would produce between 125 and 150 eggs per year, when fed all they wanted, including grain and a protein supplement (typically steamed beef scrap), given outdoor range, and fed green feed every day. Yup. It's important to remember that 100-110 years ago they were just starting to amass a corpus of knowledge, and much of what they thought early on was later disproven. 125-150 eggs per annum was a step on the ladder.

* "You can't starve profit into a cow." Profitability has always been highly correlated to the availability of wholesome and well-balanced feed. Pasture is very high in protein, high in vitamins, and okay in minerals, but it's way short on calories -- and it's only digestible when it's green. Chickens can only/will only process so much fiber--less than turkeys. They want the weed seeds and the insect life.

* Careful estimates I've seen on the nutritional benefits of pasture for hens range from none to about 30%. The latter value was for summertime only. 10% is often quoted. I'm convinced that, during much of the year, my own flock eats MORE feed than a confined flock would, because foraging in damp Oregon winters forces much of the food energy to be used just to keep warm. The more modern sources I've consulted place it around 30%. I wouldn't think much higher.

* Back when people kept all kinds of poultry on pasture, no one ever claimed that hybrid layers foraged less than standard breeds. If anything, people claimed the opposite, noting the vigor of the hybrids. I see this myself. My hybrid Leghorns and Black Sex-Links are driving us crazy at the moment, since a fence-savvy cadre of veteran escapees is always in the garden. Meanwhile, the Barred Rocks stay home. They didn't have hybrid layers. They had mutts. True production hybrid layers are an industrial art form; they're not simply crossing a couple of hatchery birds to see what might happen. Towards the end of the 1800's the rise in purebred poultry heralded a new era in poultry production. Most early crosses had to do with broiler production and not egg production. Good egg production, like good milk production, is not an accident.

* Chickens are destructive to pasture and typically don't range far. Hence, portable houses. You just move the chickens away from the problem -- end of problem.With hens, you can do this just a few times a year, so it's no big deal if the fence is reasonably easy to move, and the house isn't too big for your tractor. With fixed houses and two or more yards, the yards have to be plowed and reseeded, or, within a couple of years, the manure buildup will make it hard to establish grass there. Also, pathogens don't build up as much if you plow them under. (So if you use yards, they should be tractor-friendly.) Chickens are only destructive to pasture if they're overstocked--like all farm life. Pasture management is highly important for long-term pasture health and optimal pasture use--for anything: chickens, geese, cows, hogs, what have you.

For us, the key to profitability has always been in selling the eggs at high prices, not in saving on feed costs. Definitely. Trying to match the "big boys" in price points is a very effective way to loose one's shirt. Our pasture management uses lots of acreage to allow looser management, less labor, and the ability to abandon a bare patch of ground for a season or two, move the hens, and have the option of letting the bare patch take as long as it likes to recover, because there's plenty more pasture where that came from. Fencing the hens in too tightly is like a straitjacket on the farmer. By far the most effective system from grazing management to date is "Intensive Rotational Grazing".

(Karen just had an interesting experience of the power of selling -- she went to one of the stores that sells our eggs and offered hard-boiled egg samples to shoppers for two hours. On one of the slowest shopping days of the week, the store sold more of our $4.99 eggs in two hours than they had in the previous week! And we can hope that at least some of these customers will stick with us long-term. Another store has chosen to price our eggs well above the others, and we're selling better there -- "on sale" at $5.99 per dozen -- than at the other store. Prices are way more important to the farmer than the consumer.) Our minimum price per dozen has always been $5.00 direct sales, no middle man.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Mark, how long have you been harvesting eggs from your sex links? My understanding is that your average hatchery mix for production has high numbers for 2 maybe 3 years tops, then production plummets hard and/or they have literal "blow-outs" and mortality starts spiking. ALBC birds bred to SOP have a much longer average laying time, so over a given life, will produce more eggs. They are for different purposes, really. Most ALBC - SOP birds started out bred in homesteading situations for homesteading purposes... so USUALLY fit that profile better than birds bred for "battery" style production. That's a decent "sum up" of rules of thumb I learned reading this thread.
Just as an example there is a gentleman nearby that keeps hundreds of hatchery RIR, Leghorn, etc. He's on a 2 year butcher cycle on average and sells the layers as Coq de vin (I never get that right) or stewing hens, and gets top dollar for them, as he free ranges and treats 'em very nice. In his case, it's more profitable to go with the short life cycle hen. Me, I my least favorite part is raising the chicks, I'd be happy to only add laying hens every 4 or 5 years or so. And, my goal is to sell to people who will likely bond with their hens as pets also, so a longer lived/productive fowl would be better there.
Luck!

All chickens are really this way. The hens keep laying, but they also eat more an more with each passing season, making those eggs more and more expensive. Although holding onto exception producers into old age as breeders in order to retain and promote their genetics is important, the tops for maintaining a groups of birds for profitable egg production is 2 years--heritage or otherwise. Indeed, for a breeder, one idea make be to keep all of the pullets in a laying flock for a year, selling the eggs, and then moving yearling hens forward into breeding pens after they've proven themselves.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Does anyone know what the egg production from a hybrid would be, in terms of a percentage increase (guesses are welcome) over the parent stock. I am in the process. albeit slowly, of creating a flock from heritage breeds and I need to decide how low I can go with egg production and still be satisfied. Creating a few hybrids from the heritage stock (ie Black Sex Link) could help keep the egg numbers up.

Thanks,

Mark

Have Holderread has done a lot of experiments with this in ducks. What he finds corresponds with chicken knowledge quite well, i.e. the bulk of the egg laying comes from the sire's mother. So if you're crossing birds for laying, get cocks from high producers.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

The photo in my avatar is one of my first flocks, circa 1959. Most of those birds were Leghorns, the rest White Rocks. We raised those Leghorns for meat birds. Hard to believe now, eh?

Yes, they were solid, good eating fryers. True bred Leghorns, built to the Standard, are rare as hen's teeth today, but they're out there.

Yup. Our Anconas are good eating. On this note, though, for folks who actually want to take egg production and profit in the same sentence, the traditional Mediterranean white egg layers really should be the go to: Leghorns, Anconas, Minorcas.