Yes I guess what I explained is a scaled down version of spiral breeding. Keeping just one pen head rooster stays indefinitely and each year you add his best daughter. I see the downfall is that when the head cock eventually will need to be replaced either with out crossing (and all the issues that come with this) or with a son of his Which will result in sibling breeding to my understanding this is ok for a few generations but I would still end up needing to out cross at some point.
I like your idea of multiple cock birds and rotating. I need to convince my husband he has to build me a bachelor pad so I can keep more roosters.
I don’t plan on hatching 100’s a year, maybe a few dozen. I know this will be slow and I may end up with no keepers. I just don’t have the room to keep the amount of silkie hens it would take to hatch that many.
I hatched 400 last year with a combination 8 pullets and hens. It's a whole other story but i use preincubation techniques to store eggs and set every 7 days. Heritage cornish aren't known to be great egg layers. I can count on just 4 eggs per week per hen, more or less. It really doesnt take many females to get a lot of eggs.
I hatched 400 eggs this year but 350 were culled before they left the brooder. I don't know anything about silkies but my techniques can apply to all breeds.
Each breed has an SOP. I'll have to use my cornish as an example. Heritage cornish should be THE example of the supreme meat bird. So they need to be large double breasted wide backed birds. When i pull the Leahy drawer out on hatch day the smallest 10% at a minimum are culled before they even make it to the brooder. Small marbles will never grow into supreme meat birds. At the end of one week there are always several chicks that just aren't growing as aggressively as their hatch mates. They are immediately culled. Too carry all that meat they need to have large bone. At the end of 2 weeks there will be chicks with noticeably larger shanks than the others. All the thin, small round shaped shank birds are culled. I could go on and on with examples and beat a dead horse in the ground.
It is impossible to look at a 2 or 3 week old chick and see characteristics that support the SOP. it is possible though to see those chicks that have glaring deficiencies that wont develop the characteristics that suppory the SOP however. The SOP for my cornish calls for large bone that is visible in the shanks. In the chick stage i don't select for that large shank, i select those that dont have the large shanks and cull those. When the Standard call for 'X' in the adult bird i look for the chicks that are exhibiting the 'Y' . As a chick grows their shanks will increase in size however a thin shanked cornish chick will NEVER have shanks as thick as an adult cornish that had noticeably thicker shanks as a chick.
No matter the quanity or quality of feed provided or how long its allowed to grow out a bad chick will NEVER develop good characteristics and a good chick will only get better. Why invest feed dollars, our time and valuable space on growing birds out that we know wont grow into good birds when we can see that during the chick stage.
It's not how much space you have to grow out birds that counts, it's how many you can hatch and cull before they go to the grow out pen. Knowing and being able to identify what characteristics support the SOP is crucial in the grow out pen. I consider knowing and being able to identify those characteristics that dont support the SOP and culling those individuals during the chick stage to be more important than the former. The later creates an overall higher quality population of juevenilles to select from when considering the SOP.
It is no small act of faith that first season to start aggressively culling while the chicks are still in the brooder and ending up with a handful of chicks out of the original tray of 40 and infrequently none.
The one significant weakness i think you have created iin your program is your cock bird. If he hasn't been replaced by a superior son by the third year your quality is not improving or is deteriorating. Nothing in my beeding program remains in active use after the second season of breeding. Most have served their purpose after the first season.
One of my young cockerels matched up wonderfully genetically with nearly all the females. Each of his cockerel sons were better than he was by light years. I had 3 options.
1. Keep him and his harem together as a unit and hope they would throw something better than this year.
2. Allow him to breed to pullets hoping for the same result as the previous year.
3. Send him to camp Kenmore, keep the 2 best hens and 4 pullets and use his cockerel sons.
Option 3 is the only viable option imo. Option 1 is posdible but very improbable i would get something significantly better by repeating last year's breeding group. By breeding him to any of his pullet daughters in option 2 i would be breeding down since i would be reinforcing his weaknesses as well.as his strengths.
Quality improvent is all about exerting extreme selective pressure in the breeding program.
