Yes, I had a Blue Breda before and she was a laying machine for 10+ consecutive months. The eggs were 1.75-oz -- not quite LG size. She's a lightweight breed at about 4 to 4.5-lbs. She and the Silkies were running around foraging the backyard on the hottest of days. One thing about Breda is that they are always looking for food whether it's at the feeding stations, foraging, or treats so keeping a varied and fortified diet always available with added vitamin supplementation is vital for high production breeds.
BLUE BREDA'S feathered feet as a pullet
FEATHERED FEET on Blue Breda (and our Silkies) wear down when outside foraging and dust-bathing
Finding a method to feed chickens where the wild birds aren't mooching is difficult. I choose not to have a dog while i have backyard chickens so the treadle feeder works for us. I used to get dozens and dozens of birds flocking into the yard all day long when I had open feeders but once we went to treadles the populations are down to 4 or 5 visiting sparrows at a time and they're more interested in my raised garden bed spiders than the rest of the yard. We don't water the yard because of a State-declared drought and the wild birds can't get to the nipple valve waterers. I like our 2-gallon Brite Tap Rubbermaid jugs because I don't fill them with more than a gallon with only 3 chickens right now and makes it easy to carry into the house when I clean them out. I can go up to 2 weeks without cleaning a jug and then use a diluted bleach solution to clean the jug and Brite Tap and rinse well. I've never had a mold issue -- keeping the jugs in shade all day helps tremendously and adding ice cubes is great on hot days. Nipple valve waterers are so much easier than having to fill and re-fill filthy poopy bowls of chicken water 3 and 4x a day. Our tap water is so harsh and heavily mineralized that crust develops quickly on taps and spigots so it's not an option for us to use tap water as drinking water for animals or humans. We only use tap water for bathing or washing dishes. For cooking or drinking water we get filtered bottled water and keep about 10@ 5-gallon jugs of filtered drinking water on hand. Because the filtered water stays clean in the nipple valve jugs we don't have a waste of filtered water like we did when we had open bowl water. It's just something that has finally worked for our situation. As someone once told me -- we need to find what works best for ourselves since we don't all have the same circumstances.
