Mrs. FluffyPuffy...... You can have a barn full of these awesome birds too. Start out with the best you can and work your way up. Then be prepared to spend every last minute feeding, cleaning pens/brooders, and debating over which ones to breed to one another. Take out a mortgage on your house to keep up with all the sawdust, feed expenses, bug spray, incubators, new pens that have to go up, incubators, and of course the electricity to back all of it up. Build up a clientelle after your birds start winning at shows (another big expense). Eventually this little 'hobby' may eventually turn into a business too if you can consistently crank out decent birds. Eventually you lose all tolerance for sweet looking pets and have no mercy on off-colored culls or unproductive birds. I keep about 60-100 birds as breeding stock and hatch anywhere from 500-800 chicks per year. I sell off the vast majority of the chicks but retain about 100+ in the growout pens at any given time to see if they turn out good enough to replace the parent stock. Some days I have to wonder if going back to a few birds and simply enjoying them wouldn't be better.
Jen.... I just started with the bantam salmon faverolles this spring. I got eggs from my silkie friend Jaynie Knight from AL. She got her stock from Leisha Comers, the president of the faverolle association. I ended up with 10 cockerels and 9 pullets to work with. I sent 7 of the cockerels out to a friends place for yard pets, so 3 trios left to breed from. I've gone over that standard of perfection so dang many times and I still am doubting my own judgement sometimes. This weekend will be the first time I've taken them out of my barn and I'm more nervous about them than my silkies. Absolutely no one up here raises them and I haven't seen one at a show for years. Duane Urch had some of the standard ones years back and my mom got this wild hair that she had to have some. I got her the smaller version instead....
Jen... our goose class is way down from last year. The state BAH is all of a sudden enforcing PT on all waterfowl too now. Anything coming across state lines has to have a CVI also. We did end up with 69 geese at our show. OMG somehow we have 12 sebastopols...last year there were 0. The rest consist of africans, dewlap toulouse, emdens, american buff, pilgrim, roman tufted, egyptian, and chinese. Over 200 ducks still coming, 21 guineas, 1 turkey, and 596 chickens. Kind of glad its a bit smaller than last few years.
