I have been trying to keep up with this thread for the last couple of weeks. It seems to have kicked into overdrive. I don't post a lot but I want to kick my to cents in. I don't know if it will help anyone understand any of this any better but here goes.
As far as the term "Heritage" goes...it means many different things to different people. To some it means Non Hatchery pure bred birds as they were intended to be by the originators of each breed. There is no disputing that what the hatcheries sell are poor representations of what these breeds were originally meant to look like. To others the term "Heritage" means they can get $10.00 a chick for their birds instead of $2.00 a chick. And there are yet others that it means various others things between the 2 things that I have mentioned. Now, knowing Bob like I do I think when he started this thread he was meaning "Non Hatchery" or "Pure Bred"....nothing more and nothing less. I think some of you are trying to make it more complicated than it really is.
As far as breeders being hard to get stock from....I am a breeder and I can speak for myself when I say that some of you guys make it sound so easy to just pump out thousands of chicks each year so that everyone that wants some can get them. Well, it is not that easy. I have many orders for several different breeds that I raise and show each year and as hard I try I never fill them all. For example this past year I had about 25 orders for RIR chicks. I managed to fill about half of them. As a show person my first objective is to hatch for myself. I will always hatch for myself first because if something were to happen like predator attack or bad weather or disease, I have to make sure that I get what I need to carry on. After I hatched for myself I started hatching for orders. First problem I had was a light malfunction where my light timer wasn't working for about a week before I realized it. It took me a week or so to get them back to laying right again so I could continue setting eggs. About the time I got going good again I had a hen go broody and that messed the other hens up because they all want to lay in the same nest so it took me about a week to get that straightened out and I was back in business again. Well, about 3 weeks and I had another hen go broody so that set me back another week. I'm telling you all this because it is not as easy as it may seem. I guess the other thing that will make all this make sense is that most breeders that I know as well as myself don't breed from 20-30 hens. I breed from one or two Trios and that is it. I don't flock mate, I only breed my best birds. I don't know any serious show breeders that have 20 or even 10 hens that they would consider good enough to breed from to produce possible winners. What that means is you can only hatch a certain amount of chicks out of a limited amount of hens each year. Getting back to my story, after about 4-5 months of hatching chicks and many days that i had to take off work to make trips to the post office to ship chicks I got my fill and shut the incubators down so could give the hens and myself a rest. Now most of the people that I didn't fill the orders for were understanding but a few were pretty ugly about it. There is one more thing that I and many breeders have learned....that is that alot of beginners think that they can get chicks from you after they saw a picture of a bird that you won with in Poultry Press and that every chick that they get is going to grow up and look just like that and when they don't they call raising sand about how their birds don't look like that bird that they seen at the show. Well, there are alot of factors that go into that bird that they seen in the Poultry Press or at the show. The living conditions, quality of feed, and conditioning. Anyway, these are just a few examples of why it is not as easy as it may seem to get everyone the birds that they desire.
Matt
