Breeds for a breeding project! Thoughts and opinions please!

[TheWannabeFarmer]

I want to have a few breeds, eith a focus on producing exceptionally pretty eggs. Unique colors like deep browns and olives, and blues.

My other hope is to be able to have them either sex linked, or autosexing as I live in an area where many people can only have females.

My ideas were:

Pen 1: cream legbar roo, bielefelder hens, cream legbar hens =

Produce pure legbars, and autosexing olive eggers/green eggs

Pen 2: black copper maran hens and roos, cream legbar hens
Olive egger hens from Pen 1 can come into this pen to try to darken the olives, and will still be sex linked.

Produce pure BCM and sex link olive eggers

Sell some chicks, and keep purebreds with good sex link traits/breed traits back. Select future hens for nice egg color.

Would this be a decent start for a project? Would you suggest any different breeds?

I feel like the problem may come in that I won't be able to grow the colored egg quality as easily without keeping a lot of growouts, and I don't have a ton of room...

Why is it so hard to decide!

 

[Iluveggers]

 

[fluffycrow]

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Seems pretty sound to me, but you are correct, it's hard to improve on a trait without hatching many chicks to grow out and only keeping the best from them. Some say only 1 in 10 chicks will actually be a solid individual to keep back for breeding. Unfortunately, with a focus on egg color, it's impossible to pick and choose chicks early on as opposed to with physical traits like strong autosexing, so that means a lot of birds growing out until at minimum laying age to select from. A solid course of action would be to save back all the money you make on selling chicks and use that to build another pen just to grow birds out in so that you can progress on that front, unless of course by not having much room you meant not even for building another pen. Whatever you end up doing, good luck! I'll certainly be jealous of all those pretty eggs now that my flock is mostly Cochin bantams!

 

[TheWannabeFarmer]

Seems pretty sound to me, but you are correct, it's hard to improve on a trait without hatching many chicks to grow out and only keeping the best from them. Some say only 1 in 10 chicks will actually be a solid individual to keep back for breeding. Unfortunately, with a focus on egg color, it's impossible to pick and choose chicks early on as opposed to with physical traits like strong autosexing, so that means a lot of birds growing out until at minimum laying age to select from. A solid course of action would be to save back all the money you make on selling chicks and use that to build another pen just to grow birds out in so that you can progress on that front, unless of course by not having much room you meant not even for building another pen. Whatever you end up doing, good luck! I'll certainly be jealous of all those pretty eggs now that my flock is mostly Cochin bantams!

I have a decent amount of room, but yes, money and structures are the problem. Plus my bottom field with all the room backs onto a forest and we have had bears and cougars through before... so im going to have to put up some serious fencing and protection to make it safe for chickens. That is a definite future goal.

 

[drangle]

There seems to be a lot of demand for BCMs that lay super dark brown eggs. I would focus on that first then add the legbars in for olive eggers.

 

[LuciferRoo]

I have a decent amount of room, but yes, money and structures are the problem. Plus my bottom field with all the room backs onto a forest and we have had bears and cougars through before... so im going to have to put up some serious fencing and protection to make it safe for chickens. That is a definite future goal.

Consider electric fencing as the outside perimeter. It should prevent the big predators from physically testing your fences and is much less expensive.