BREEDING FOR PRODUCTION...EGGS AND OR MEAT.

[hellbender]

Bourbon Reds have been in the SOP for 100+ years - can't imagine why someone would say they can't breed naturally. Maybe they mixed them up with the Broad-breasted Bronze turkey.

Hmmm, I see that some hatcheries are claiming that the broad breasted bronze and broad breasted white turkeys are recognized by the APA. Guess they thought that because there are white and bronze turkeys in the SOP, that they could claim that even the broad-breasted commercial turkeys are the same thing. Seems a bit disingenuous to me, but then hatcheries are in business to make a buck, not to tell the truth.

Some folks will argue with a sign post. lol In fact, the BR hens were very good brooders and took excellent care of their poults, for the most part. While we don't eat turkey here, I will say that the BR hens were much more flavorful when mom/grandma baked one instead of a tom. Even a mature bird was better than good and were always moist....might have been the very slow roasting process.

 

[bnjrob]

Some folks will argue with a sign post. lol In fact, the BR hens were very good brooders and took excellent care of their poults, for the most part. While we don't eat turkey here, I will say that the BR hens were much more flavorful when mom/grandma baked one instead of a tom. Even a mature bird was better than good and were always moist....might have been the very slow roasting process.

LOL. We may end up eating a turkey hen as early as next year - depends on what everyone turns out to look like for picking breeders. The tom we butchered was a cull that we'd had to leave with the hens when we separated the group into male/female housing. He had a bad bowed leg and the larger he got, the harder time he was having being able to get around with all the chest bumping that the toms do. He was still running and flying with the hens though.

 

[varidgerunner]

I read on here a lot about people with breeding programs geared toward maximizing carcass traits. Most of my chicken experience has been in raising pullets to point of lay and selling them in town where people can't raise straight run and have roosters or can't have but so many, excluding most minimum orders from hatcheries. I generally butchered the roosters myself or sold them at a discount for meat. I will share some knowledge I have gained from being in a cow calf beef operation for several decades.

Hybrid vigor is a real thing, it's the closest thing you will get to free pounds. There are limitations to this. If you cross breed A and breed B, there is hybrid vigor to be had. The more dissimilar and unrelated those breeds are, the more hybrid vigor is available. In other words, there is probably more hybrid vigor to be had in a Shamo Orpington cross than in a White Rock Barred Rock cross. There is such a thing as maternal hybrid vigor. This means that, say a brood cow, will have hybrid vigor that will give her a boost, she will be more hardy and produce more milk for the same feed input and this will help her offspring. She can be a cross of two of what are considered maternal breeds and then she can be crossed on a "terminal" breed known for carcass traits, (if care is taken to make sure the terminal sire doesn't throw offspring too large for her to have.) This might not have much impact on the chickens size, as chickens don't give milk, although most game breeders that are looking for size use two year old hens to make sure the egg is going to be nice and big and throw big chicks to give them a little head start. Where maternal hybrid vigor might come into play is more eggs to set, all other things being equal, a hybrid hen should be slightly more productive as she should be more hardy.

Beyond a three way cross, there are actually studies on cattle showing that hybrid vigor starts to be less evident. Also, when using composite breeds and crossing onto breeds that are components of that composite. At some point hybrid vigor can turn into "mutt regression" it would seem. Consider if you are using hatchery birds that are, let's say hatchery RIR and crossing them on hatchery BO that are just hatchery RIR with buff color added. There will be less on the table than if using a pure line of each from a breeder. There is a certain amount of hybrid vigor to be had from crossing two pure inbred lines of the same breed. If you are making an 8 way cross, there might not be as much hybrid vigor to be had compared to making two 4 way crosses and linebreeding them and selecting them to aworking standard of uniformity, and then crossing those two lines to produce your meat birds. Or maybe just sticking to a two way cross.


Likewise, when making your composite breed, don't guage your success until the hybrid vigor wave has run out several generations into your breeding program. If breed A and breed B are crossed the offspring should be bigger than either parent, it happened because of hybrid vigor and not because of your brilliance in combining those two or three lines. When you get several generations in, this size boost COULD disappear. If you cross a big breed with a small breed, you can select the biggest offspring with the desired traits of the smaller parent and breed them back to each other until those traits are stabilized, but that is selective breeding.

It seems the active goal of many is to have a self sustaining flock that produces fast growing roosters, The benefits of hybrid vigor can be lost in trying to produce one line of birds with all of the production traits you want. It might be better to buy pure hens and a different breed rooster, and once you have cross bred hens, buy a different rooster of a third breed and then sell off the three way cross hens and start new with pure hens. I know this goes against the idea of in house self sustainability, but something to ponder.

Just thought I would add some things for prospective backyard producers to mull over.

 

[speney]

Thank you, all the information is helpful. I actually was already considering the bourbon red but also read that they don't reproduce well. I want taste I'm not worried about have a large dress out wait(we have two ovens if worse comes to worse) and prefer a heritage breed . Also I want to keep breeding I don't want to have to buy more every year.

 

[hellbender]

Thank you, all the information is helpful. I actually was already considering the bourbon red but also read that they don't reproduce well. I want taste I'm not worried about have a large dress out wait(we have two ovens if worse comes to worse) and prefer a heritage breed . Also I want to keep breeding I don't want to have to buy more every year.

Unless the breed has changed dramatically in the last few years...you heard wrong.

 

[Beer can]

I plan on ordering Holland Whites from this place, one of the very few that have them.
http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0LE...eys.com//RK=0/RS=VARHfLl32S.Erz12eVU20AmZQmA-

 

[hellbender]

I plan on ordering Holland Whites from this place, one of the very few that have them.
http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0LE...eys.com//RK=0/RS=VARHfLl32S.Erz12eVU20AmZQmA-

I couldn't get the link to work for me but Porters has a good reputation.

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

Here's a link to Porter's white holland turkeys. http://www.porterturkeys.com/whiteholland.htm

I'm reading through this entire thread (got to page 151 so far, it's slow because there's so much great information to digest) but I skip ahead from time to time and when I saw White Hollands I though it was the chicken breed- almost got heart palpitations! Darn, I was hoping! Rumors of Lamonas are floating around the Internet too...........

 

[DesertChic]

Here's a link to Porter's white holland turkeys. http://www.porterturkeys.com/whiteholland.htm

I'm reading through this entire thread (got to page 151 so far, it's slow because there's so much great information to digest) but I skip ahead from time to time and when I saw White Hollands I though it was the chicken breed- almost got heart palpitations! Darn, I was hoping! Rumors of Lamonas are floating around the Internet too...........

I have a huge Word document full of posts that I've copied and pasted from this thread. It's nearly a book now. Yeah....LOTS of great info here.

Thanks for the link. I never knew there were so many gorgeous breeds of heritage turkeys!

 

[bnjrob]

Thanks for the link. I never knew there were so many gorgeous breeds of heritage turkeys!

The number of heritage turkey varieties would depend on what your definition of *heritage* is. Porter's has a large variety of different colored turkeys, but they are not *heritage* turkeys per the definitions that most APA and even Livestock Conservancy folks go by. Porter's is playing around with getting different feather colors in turkeys but beyond that, I have yet to see much in the way of production breeding/husbandry information coming from them or in the online groups that they are involved with. They're out to make money on the fad poultry color craze just like everyone else. So far the groups that discuss turkeys online are all about feather color or turkey husbandry type questions like *help, my turkey is doing this, what antibiotic should I give them?" kinds of questions. I found a serious APA breeder turkey group but like too many other serious groups devoted to standard-bred poultry, it seems to have died out. True heritage birds just aren't popular with the masses. Not flashy enough.