BREEDING FOR PRODUCTION...EGGS AND OR MEAT.

[Dead Rabbit]

I appreciate your kind heart and humanity Canadian Buckeye.  However over the last 30 years my farm has gone from being an isolated, rural location to being literally surrounded by housing developments.  My losses of chickens, sheep and pigs are approaching 100 animals and thousands of dollars.  Dogs don't come once and take what they need to eat... they come again and again and kill for fun leaving carcasses everywhere.  I actually live in harmony with a mother coyote and her annual pups.  If I fail to do my job she will take the occasional chicken or piglet to feed her pups but it's a fair fight. Dogs have no boundaries unless their owners maintain them.  I don't blame the dogs but rather their irresponsible owners. But in their irresponsibility the owners never pay up.  I've been thru the court system and ultimately my only recourse for collection would have been to put a lean on their house.  I opted not to bother for a $4000 bill that I might collect in 20 years.

The rest of that story is that I went to their door and made the owners come watch as the pigs lay bleeding and dying.  The woman cried and begged for me not to take it out on the dog and promised to pay.  The dog was back the next day at its usual time.  I caught it and called animal control.  The dog was bailed out and back again two days later.  I shot it.  The owners had to appear in court  a month later.  They had replaced the dog, and it was already coming to my farm.  They stood there and lied to the judge saying they had a fence which I knew they didn't.  A few weeks later they were gone and the house abandoned.  

This is only one account among many over the last thirty years, and it is severely abridged leaving out many waisted calls to animal control and the police.  I intend no offense to animal control workers and police... their hands are usually tied by laws enacted by toxic nurturers.  Dogs have been my bane since a cockapoo broke into a pen and killed my pet guinea pigs when I was a teenager.  So to wrap up my rant, once a dog has crossed my property line... the only good dog is a dead dog.  

I'm all for eradicating the problem. And don't tolerate even a single offense. I've found nothing can come close to taking care of an issue before it becomes an issue than a very good livestock guardian dog. It must be a breed bred to take care of livestock and preferably born and raised around the type (s) of livestock he must protect.
Nothing else comes close.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

I don't know how many of us have Netflix but there is a show on there called Ted talks a Sheff named Dan barber has a two episodes one on foie Gras in Spain and a farmer named Edward Susa
Edward grows most of his feed by olives and lupine's he says that he can make more selling jest the olives instead of the foie Gras but he makes the best foie Gras
Any way it is pretty interesting that his family setup all this info structure to make it so the animals get what they want and all Edward has to do is maintain it looks like it cuts back on work
Not the most efficient but it maintains it's self
Chek it out

Thanks. I'll check it out. I always appreciate referrals to poultry/farming related programing/articles/etc.

I found it on Utube and watched it during supper. Now I want to totally change how I do things.

Netflix has that whole "pack" of food related TED talks called "Chew on This". They're so interesting. They used to have an excellent documentary called "Ingredients" but it fell off their list. If you ever see it again, watch it - very good!

If you like Dan Barber's TED talk, you should read his book, The Third Plate. It's AMAZING..... You would LOVE it.

- Ant Farm

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

I have no clue what the person who introduced me to this idea had in mind.

Long story short, I was sharing some info about my flock of Delawares (re-created line from preserved Standard Bred Barred Plymouth Rocks and German New Hampshires, currently at the F6 pullet/cockerel stage), with a Poultry Scientist at a research university who told me that if my pullets didn't start to lay in the summer this year then they are probably infected with a disease and I should send one in to get tested.

I've not done the NPIP testing thing, and know that testing is fairly limited to some specific things and that a necropsy can be more thorough. My birds "look healthy."

For whatever that's worth.

I treat for external parasites, and have recently started treating for internal parasites, too. But nothing else as I've not had a reason to suspect any problems.

These Delawares are my first experience with Standard Bred poultry, or birds not sourced from a feed store, and the hatchery birds (lots of "breeds") I have raised in the past do start laying a lot sooner than the Delawares. But it seems that is pretty expected. I hadn't thought twice about it except to start to plan to breed toward an early POL, if possible.

So, I thought I'd ask. And I thought this "breeding for production" thread would be a good place to have this conversation, as part of breeding toward any goal means getting a good grip on external environmental factors that impact the results.

I'm super eager to hear everyone's thoughts.

So far, I haven't had any pullets "volunteer" for necropsy. Meaning, I've not had any losses.

Interesting - I will be following this as well.

Given that I am a Board certified (human) Pathologist with extensive autopsy experience and a specialty in Medical Microbiology, you can BET if I lose any of my chickens to an unexplained disease, they will get a THOROUGH necropsy.

(I should add, though, that veterinarians and veterinary pathologists are all on average SO much smarter than human doctors - just look at how hard it is to get into vet school compared to medical school, and how many different anatomies and physiologies they need to know... Hug a vet today!)

- Ant Farm

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

Hey, I just got an email from our local "farm to table" food delivery service (I grow almost all my own food, but had previously been a member mostly for goat milk delivered to my door that I used for cheesemaking - service changing, though.) Guess what the hip new thing is? Pullet eggs, apparently. (I always specially requested these from my favorite chicken farmer before I ever had chickens - apparently I was cool before my time...

).

For those of you that sell to the public or to a group of customers, this might be a good idea to leverage/spin....

http://community.farmhousedelivery.com/pullet-eggs-big-things-come-in-small-packages/

- Ant Farm

 

[islafarm]

Hey, I just got an email from our local "farm to table" food delivery service (I grow almost all my own food, but had previously been a member mostly for goat milk delivered to my door that I used for cheesemaking - service changing, though.) Guess what the hip new thing is? Pullet eggs, apparently. (I always specially requested these from my favorite chicken farmer before I ever had chickens - apparently I was cool before my time...

).

For those of you that sell to the public or to a group of customers, this might be a good idea to leverage/spin....

http://community.farmhousedelivery.com/pullet-eggs-big-things-come-in-small-packages/

- Ant Farm

When I was a kid growing up in Scotland, pullet eggs were much more sought after than the regular chickens' eggs. That was really before the big out of town supermarkets came with their fancy egg displays. Same was true with capons - it was the advent of big supermarkets that changed the market. That was when you could actually buy mutton - now it's only lamb

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

What's special about pullet eggs?

OK never mind, read the link after I posted this.
Seriously? My dark cornish always lay pullet eggs

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

Any of you working with chickens that take a LONG time to reach Point Of Lay ever have your flock tested for sub-clinical diseases? If so, did you find anything? If so, did treating for it improve your POL statistics?

Mycoplasma- could this be the issue?

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

What's special about pullet eggs?

OK never mind, read the link after I posted this.
Seriously? My dark cornish always lay pullet eggs

But it's HIP! And COOL! And a new word! (Sez the hipster...)

In all seriousness, I do actually like small eggs a lot, and would buy them preferentially... And I'm considering quail for next year...

- Ant Farm

 

[Beer can]

I think it's a great way to make money by adding nothing but a name. I've been eating pullet eggs right alongside the other's and didn't notice any difference. Now I'm going to be double checking and critiqueing my eggs in the morning. What about the leghorn pullet eggs I had last yr, 86 gram monster double yolkers, I thought they were going to blow themselves out. Could those be marketed as pullet eggs? Theirs got smaller as they got older, just large single yolkers.
Kinda like the certified Angus beef stores charge premium for. Last halfa beef we bought was a white face black hereford, holstien milk cow cross. It's meat was awesome, blew away that certified Angus stuff

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

It's like AnthNDacula said re: bantam eggs as "cocktail" eggs. It's all about the marketing...

- Ant Farm