Farming and Homesteading Heritage Poultry

[bnjrob]

Love it!!

I am trying to pull together the best of both times. Modern science can be used in beneficial ways or not.

I understand GMO's and that we have created business models in which sustainability is not the goal, profit is. And we have a large population that requires feeding because they do not have the means of prooducing any to all of their own food. Here all the farms are about gone. Mayble a handful left because of the urban sprall from Boston. Fields turned into houses. Houses don't feed us. $350,000 houses. 30-40 on one cow pasture. sigh. Now covered by hot top manacured lawns and pestacides and herbicdes, oh my!

I am trying to be a little funny, because otherwise I would cry.

I have a few acres and abbutt state land that can never be developed. across the strett-- the forest has been cleared and som 45 houses are p lanned though the current economy has put a halt on that. NEar the end of one strett a HUGE house $500,000 went in-- and they buy my eggs.

When people understand that the quality of food is the deciding factor of good health, maybe they will care. FOr now the government food adinistration promotes a food plate that supports high consumption of grains. How silly when all the vegies both low carb and high carb vegies have far more nutrients than the grains which are mostly calories. When talking to a pediatrition of Indian decent I explained that I had switched the food pyramid portions-- 5-7 vegies aday and 3-5 grains aday, he loved that.

I see my chickens as a source of nutritious food for my family. Eggs and meat. WHat they eat becomes a high quality food for me and my family. THe high omega 3's and the betacaratines in the yellow eggs and the yellow fats. Yellow because of the grasses not the yellow food coloring agents in the commercial chickens. I don't need to eat fish and contribute to the over harvesting of the ocean fish because I get the omegas's from eggs and other vegie sources. ( No one ever mentions many vegies have high omega 3)

It is slow progess to get the land producing the food for the chickens. I will never be so self sustaining that I can produce everything on my farm that we need for food, but I can certainly try to see how har I can reasonably get. AND now that I have improved the lives of my animals and my family by doing this. Production will be less, and little or no pay for my work, but what is good health worth . . . .

I love this thread because it isthe only one that addresses home grown foods like chickens for our families, and our communities.

That's where we are heading also. Don't know when or if we will every be fully self-sustaining, but that's the goal. Eventually I want a milk cow. Feels kinda dumb to have to buy cream at the store to make my own butter with but at least I'm in the habit now of making my own butter and we think it tastes better than store bought butter since we culture the cream instead of using "sweet cream".

In addition to chickens being a food source, also like our chickens for their poop - makes things grow so nicely. Now my next thing to get done is to get them to help with the gardening and get them to concentrate their digging and scratching to turn over the garden beds.

 

[Fentress]

The actual wording was "... very low egg laying ability." They are next to impossible to communicate with. I will know soon enough how well they actually do. 150 eggs per year from a true dual purpose breed that also has decent meat qualities would be good enough for me. It's just not something I was expecting, from a hatchery, granted they are a small mom & pop type hatchery, but you still would expect their stock to be diverse and vigorous.

 

[bnjrob]

The actual wording was "... very low egg laying ability." They are next to impossible to communicate with. I will know soon enough how well they actually do. 150 eggs per year from a true dual purpose breed that also has decent meat qualities would be good enough for me. It's just not something I was expecting, from a hatchery, granted they are a small mom & pop type hatchery, but you still would expect their stock to be diverse and vigorous.

That is just too weird.

 

[bnjrob]

For people that are interested in "cooking from scratch" - real from scratch not just buy stuff at the store and mix it together, antique cookbooks are great. Especially when you are interested in homesteading and being self-sufficient. Although people that don't know how to cook very well may find the antique cookbooks intimidating because they don't always give specific measurements or even complete instructions because cooking was such general knowledge among women back then. The closer to the end of the 1800s and the 20th century cookbooks usually have more modern instructions. Some of these books will take you from how to butcher your animals right through to cooking and even serving the meat. Some of these old books also have home remedies you can make - some of which are hazardous to your health, but others are simple herbal remedies that can be efficacious. I enjoy reading them for getting a sense of the culture of the time period and I've tried some of the recipes and they are really are good.

For people that have a kindle or want to download the free kindle reading devices for tablets/PCs/phones, there are a good number of antique cookbooks on Amazon. If you will go to the cookbook section and tell it to display books lowest in price to highest in price, you'll be able to find the old cookbooks that people have scanned in and made into kindle books. Usually these will not have a fancy "cover" image, they will have a generic looking cover image and often weird or long names. There are a ton of them that are free. There are even some antique vegetarian cookbooks.

There is also a website with antique cookbooks that are in PDF format - for free. Some of them are very large files, so if you are on satellite internet like I am and have a bandwidth restriction, you may want to wait until the free download time during the night or have to pay to reset your bandwidth limit. The PDF books are the scanned copies of the antique books so unlike most of the kindle books, the PDF books have the illustrations, such as illustrations of parts of animals and how they are divided into different cuts of meat. The site is: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/ This site will let you browse cookbooks by time period if you want.

And www.archive.org is always a great place to pick up old books in various electronic formats for free.

 

[call ducks]

Quote:
OK. We keep chicks wayyy wayy wayyy different than we did 70 years ago, let alone 100. If you were to purse a fields of farmers 100-150 years ago you would see basicly mobs of chickens - Thousands of birds... There were no breeds... I don't believe they separated they sexes but that's not saying they did not.

Farmers breeding flocks have never been purebred - frankly purebred's really suck for meat production. Farmers brought new blood in every year or two. They were extremely more productive in years gone past.... Because the popular colours of breeds allowed farmers to cross other chickens in while still having a 'purebred' take barred or cuckoo you cross anything with those colours with another chicken of another colour you will get barred F1's. Hobbyists don't breed and won't ever breed in the same way a farmer breeds. Most hobbyists care about how it looks because it's easier to judge a chicken on how it looks than it's egg laying abilities, easier to judge a colour than how good of a skeletal structure the chicken has.

Let's use broilers for example.

When they were being created they did not skillfully breed and choose the foundation stock, in fact there was little to no science involved. A slew of each breed was put in to a building with a lot of other breeds ( 10+) and they hatched thousands of chicks.

if the breeding for conformity to meet the SOP has been responsible (all or in part) for causing a decrease in the size of chickens.

Bingo - We have a winner! Yes honestly breeding for SOP has be in part why dual purpose birds rarely exist. Another part is we are losing the old poultrymen / poultrywomen and no one is mentoring with them. Good poultry breeding is not something you can learn in school. I have seen a case of SQ light sussex - this breeder has said he is lucky if he get's 30 eggs a year! Egg production is directly related to hen size. The smaller the hen the larger and more eggs you get. And let's be honest most people now only want hens for laying.

ps. bnjorb becareful chicken manure contains a lot of nitrogen and can "burn" your plants. One of the best manure combo's we have ever used on our market garden is chicken and cow manure.

I am very lucky, my mentor has a very good relationship with the best poultry breeders in NA (The ones that played a very critical support in Agriculture). I am very lucky to be able to go and visit with her when ever I need to. And I am so fortunate that we are planing a trip to Europe to meet with production breeders in France,Belgium. To see truly productive birds.

 

[Arielle]

Quote:
OK. We keep chicks wayyy wayy wayyy different than we did 70 years ago, let alone 100. If you were to purse a fields of farmers 100-150 years ago you would see basicly mobs of chickens - Thousands of birds... There were no breeds... I don't believe they separated they sexes but that's not saying they did not.

Farmers breeding flocks have never been purebred - frankly purebred's really suck for meat production. Farmers brought new blood in every year or two. They were extremely more productive in years gone past.... Because the popular colours of breeds allowed farmers to cross other chickens in while still having a 'purebred' take barred or cuckoo you cross anything with those colours with another chicken of another colour you will get barred F1's. Hobbyists don't breed and won't ever breed in the same way a farmer breeds. Most hobbyists care about how it looks because it's easier to judge a chicken on how it looks than it's egg laying abilities, easier to judge a colour than how good of a skeletal structure the chicken has.

Let's use broilers for example.

When they were being created they did not skillfully breed and choose the foundation stock, in fact there was little to no science involved. A slew of each breed was put in to a building with a lot of other breeds ( 10+) and they hatched thousands of chicks.

if the breeding for conformity to meet the SOP has been responsible (all or in part) for causing a decrease in the size of chickens.

Bingo - We have a winner! Yes honestly breeding for SOP has be in part why dual purpose birds rarely exist. Another part is we are losing the old poultrymen / poultrywomen and no one is mentoring with them. Good poultry breeding is not something you can learn in school. I have seen a case of SQ light sussex - this breeder has said he is lucky if he get's 30 eggs a year! Egg production is directly related to hen size. The smaller the hen the larger and more eggs you get. And let's be honest most people now only want hens for laying.

ps. bnjorb becareful chicken manure contains a lot of nitrogen and can "burn" your plants. One of the best manure combo's we have ever used on our market garden is chicken and cow manure.

I am very lucky, my mentor has a very good relationship with the best poultry breeders in NA (The ones that played a very critical support in Agriculture). I am very lucky to be able to go and visit with her when ever I need to. And I am so fortunate that we are planing a trip to Europe to meet with production breeders in France,Belgium. To see truly productive birds.
THis will be a trip of a life time!! I went to Holland some years ago and spent 11 days in the countryside at the horse farms.YOu will have a wonderful time-- their ag is much different than ours!

 

[BGMatt]

OK. We keep chicks wayyy wayy wayyy different than we did 70 years ago, let alone 100. If you were to purse a fields of farmers 100-150 years ago you would see basicly mobs of chickens - Thousands of birds... There were no breeds... I don't believe they separated they sexes but that's not saying they did not.

Farmers breeding flocks have never been purebred - frankly purebred's really suck for meat production. Farmers brought new blood in every year or two. They were extremely more productive in years gone past.... Because the popular colours of breeds allowed farmers to cross other chickens in while still having a 'purebred' take barred or cuckoo you cross anything with those colours with another chicken of another colour you will get barred F1's. Hobbyists don't breed and won't ever breed in the same way a farmer breeds. Most hobbyists care about how it looks because it's easier to judge a chicken on how it looks than it's egg laying abilities, easier to judge a colour than how good of a skeletal structure the chicken has.

Let's use broilers for example.

When they were being created they did not skillfully breed and choose the foundation stock, in fact there was little to no science involved. A slew of each breed was put in to a building with a lot of other breeds ( 10+) and they hatched thousands of chicks.



Bingo - We have a winner! Yes honestly breeding for SOP has be in part why dual purpose birds rarely exist. Another part is we are losing the old poultrymen / poultrywomen and no one is mentoring with them. Good poultry breeding is not something you can learn in school. I have seen a case of SQ light sussex - this breeder has said he is lucky if he get's 30 eggs a year! Egg production is directly related to hen size. The smaller the hen the larger and more eggs you get. And let's be honest most people now only want hens for laying.

ps. bnjorb becareful chicken manure contains a lot of nitrogen and can "burn" your plants. One of the best manure combo's we have ever used on our market garden is chicken and cow manure.

I am very lucky, my mentor has a very good relationship with the best poultry breeders in NA (The ones that played a very critical support in Agriculture). I am very lucky to be able to go and visit with her when ever I need to. And I am so fortunate that we are planing a trip to Europe to meet with production breeders in France,Belgium. To see truly productive birds.

This is very very wrong. Who do you think WROTE the Standards? Yes Flocks were huge, because they weren't pet chicken people (thank whatever you think is holy). But they were breeds. By the way, the people I remember as a kid most preaching about separating the sexes while growing out were people that started in the early 1900's. When businesses, not farmers got involved is when the dual purpose fowl fell off. What has happened is there's no market because the traditional birds couldn't keep pace with commercial birds, the "show only" people don't put emphasis on production (although I think they should, and I do as a show person) because what's the use? Why would the Sussex breeder in your example need his bird to lay 150+ eggs a year? He can't raise an infinite number of birds, there's no market for his birds, they've been surpassed commercially by the hybrid layers and cornishX.

I agree the state of noncommercial poultry is not in a good place due to the lack of mentoring going on. But it's the new folk that are on the backyard bandwagon and pets that refuse to listen to the old ways that's causing it.

 

[Rhinoman]

This is very very wrong. Who do you think WROTE the Standards? Yes Flocks were huge, because they weren't pet chicken people (thank whatever you think is holy). But they were breeds. By the way, the people I remember as a kid most preaching about separating the sexes while growing out were people that started in the early 1900's. When businesses, not farmers got involved is when the dual purpose fowl fell off. What has happened is there's no market because the traditional birds couldn't keep pace with commercial birds, the "show only" people don't put emphasis on production (although I think they should, and I do as a show person) because what's the use? Why would the Sussex breeder in your example need his bird to lay 150+ eggs a year? He can't raise an infinite number of birds, there's no market for his birds, they've been surpassed commercially by the hybrid layers and cornishX.

I agree the state of noncommercial poultry is not in a good place due to the lack of mentoring going on. But it's the new folk that are on the backyard bandwagon and pets that refuse to listen to the old ways that's causing it.

I can't imagine a New England farmer keeping more than a couple dozen birds over the winter? There are a lot of old homes around here, 150+ years old. The barns are as large as the houses. I could see a couple dozen chicken foraging for food through the winter, who needs a barn cat. How though without incubators would they have raised huge flocks starting this way in the spring?

 

[BGMatt]

I can't imagine a New England farmer keeping more than a couple dozen birds over the winter? There are a lot of old homes around here, 150+ years old. The barns are as large as the houses. I could see a couple dozen chicken foraging for food through the winter, who needs a barn cat. How though without incubators would they have raised huge flocks starting this way in the spring?

Incubators, aren't really a new invention. Matter of fact a lot of modern hobby breeders still prefer the old redwood incubators. Sears made huge cabinet incubators in the early 1900's (Like the incubator itself was 6'x8'). I'd imagine serious poultry operations used them, smaller operations could make do with broody hens (I think I recall one of the poultry historians on here saying on of the early pioneers of Rhode Island Reds or Plymouth Rocks kept a large flock of silkies around to hatch chicks?) or smaller incubators, or maybe buying from bigger operations much as today.

 

[Fred's Hens]

Just by way of example, Townline Hatchery in Zeeland, MI has been in continuous business since 1913. Yes, that is 100 years. Townline was just one of 5 hatcheries that once populated the area around Zeeland-Holland. This is just one such example.

There were many small hatcheries producing chicks for farmers dotted throughout rural and small town America.

It is interesting to read old poultry publications from a century ago. Many are still readable online. The interest in well bred stock a century ago was actually more intense than many folks today imagine. There was massive bragging, top breeders earned pretty big money, hundreds of advertisements fill the pages of the magazines, top shows paid pretty good money too. There was fairly big money involved back then. Top birds brought more and eggs brought more too. Adjusted to current dollar evaluations? We'd be pretty stunned to see our poultry and eggs demand such big prices today.