Cull and cull heavy. How heavy?

I am no Orpington expert but I believe that you are culling way too many way too early. At 4 weeks I might be culling OBVIOUS defects and DQ's but not for breeding or show stock.

 

It's WAY too early to cull except for nasty flaws like side sprigs on combs. White wing tips molt out on the birds you mentioned.

 

Most black breeds do start out looking like a penguin. The white moults out as they get their mature plumage.

 

we only keep 1 out of every 15 we bred, some you can cull early for obvious reason like wrong comb, not enough foot feathering, etc, but some you got to wait longer.

 

Hey, just a thought, instead of culling, can't you find someone who'll take them from you for use in a plain, old backyard flock?

 

I think sometimes culling also means to disperse the flock, as in selling and giving away also, which is what I am thinking he is doing, rather than just killing them all

 

OH! Silly me. What do I know? He, he, he.

 

Not only does it sound like you're culling too early & too heavily your approach to developing a show line is flawed as well.
Randomly crossing lines from here there & everywhere is unlikely to produce a desireable outcome. There is more to breeding poultry [or anything else] than simply putting males & females together. You have to understand the breed & more importantly know the breeding background of the birds you are mating. A random outcross is the surest way to ruin a strain.
Also, I've never seen anything that looked "show quality" advertised on EBAY.

 

I know that silkies are far different than orpingtons and they mature much slower, but this is the approach that I've taken that seems to be working for us.

The first "cull" is at hatch where we check for foot dq's (like 4 toes) and we sell those chicks as pet quality chicks. The next is at about 4 months. At this time, we take a good hard look at everyone and can usually sex by that time, decide how many girls/boys we want to keep for our program and select that number...keeping the ones that we like the most and closest meet the APA standard of perfection for silkies.

The next "cull" is at about 7 months. We may, or may not sell any at this time...it depends on how they are maturing. This is a time when we note things like gold/silver in the hackles, etc.

After that we pretty much have the ones that we want to add to our breeding flock and they are right at POL and sexual maturity for the boys. We try to let the boys get to about a year before we select which ones we will keep as breeders as they sometimes take that long to really mature into a good bird.