Farming and Homesteading Heritage Poultry

[bnjrob]

Just keep in mind that there is one potential "fallacy" in using the Hogan method....ALL of the hens need to be in the same "state of laying" in order for the method to work. People who've used this method on hens that were "out of production" reported discarding as poor layers what turned out to be really good laying hens. Per studies conducted at Cornell University, "...When the system was applied to a flock of birds toward the close of the laying season it was successful in detecting the best layers because these would be the only hens laying late int he fall; they would be the late molting, persistent layers."

I can't speak from direct experience and in no way want to disparage Walter Hogan for the amazing work he did in helping people improve the overall production levels of their flock, but I also don't want anyone to go into using this process without knowing the potential pitfalls lest they be disappointed. I'm only sharing what I've found in my research. I hope to also use this method once my flock has reached maturity and progressed through their laying years and actually plan to "test" the limitations of the method first-hand to either corroborate or refute the finding of other researchers.

And if you're interested in researching of what I've said yourself, you can find the review I quoted in the book, "Judging Poultry for Production" by James E. Rice. This book and "The Call of the Hand" are my primary go-to books for determining my breeder selections for flock vitality and production.

I've been seeing recently some more references to the early molting issue affecting egg production - that early molters are going to wind up being your poorest layers. Long molters will be worse layers just because they are spending forever regrowing feathers, but the early molting concept was something that I had not thought about, even though it makes sense now that it was pointed out. That way they are only slowing down once, for molting and loss of light at the same time, rather than slowing down for molt and then slowing down for loss of light.

 

[Lacy Blues]

Just keep in mind that there is one potential "fallacy" in using the Hogan method....ALL of the hens need to be in the same "state of laying" in order for the method to work. People who've used this method on hens that were "out of production" reported discarding as poor layers what turned out to be really good laying hens. Per studies conducted at Cornell University, "...When the system was applied to a flock of birds toward the close of the laying season it was successful in detecting the best layers because these would be the only hens laying late int he fall; they would be the late molting, persistent layers."

I can't speak from direct experience and in no way want to disparage Walter Hogan for the amazing work he did in helping people improve the overall production levels of their flock, but I also don't want anyone to go into using this process without knowing the potential pitfalls lest they be disappointed. I'm only sharing what I've found in my research. I hope to also use this method once my flock has reached maturity and progressed through their laying years and actually plan to "test" the limitations of the method first-hand to either corroborate or refute the finding of other researchers.

And if you're interested in researching of what I've said yourself, you can find the review I quoted in the book, "Judging Poultry for Production" by James E. Rice. This book and "The Call of the Hand" are my primary go-to books for determining my breeder selections for flock vitality and production.

This is definitely true. You want to select your layers that are in a current state of laying and it is also true that you want to do it late in the season if you're culling. I tend to do it each time I pick up a bird... as a matter of habit. I make a mental note and watch that bird. When it comes time for culling, I check them all.

bnjrob I pressed "multi" on your message as well but I guess the multi button STILL is not working correctly.

I believe most of the bird that Hogan is using this method on were production leghorns. However, the "why" of his selection doesn't really apply to a specific breed. He is selecting for abdominal capacity and you should aim for standard weight with the best abdominal capacity to get your best layers.

 

[bnjrob]

This is definitely true. You want to select your layers that are in a current state of laying and it is also true that you want to do it late in the season if you're culling. I tend to do it each time I pick up a bird... as a matter of habit. I make a mental note and watch that bird. When it comes time for culling, I check them all.

bnjrob I pressed "multi" on your message as well but I guess the multi button STILL is not working correctly.

I believe most of the bird that Hogan is using this method on were production leghorns. However, the "why" of his selection doesn't really apply to a specific breed. He is selecting for abdominal capacity and you should aim for standard weight with the best abdominal capacity to get your best layers.

That's what we've done thus far. Size has been too small for a long time in Javas, so we've been working on choosing larger birds that also have larger capacity measurements. The crummy thing is, they are not as good of layers as our smaller, pinched tailed hens. Drives me crazy trying to figure out why the smaller, pinched tailed, poorly typed hens lay better than the larger hens with a wider pelvis.

Honestly, a chicken that lays every other day or every couple of days is fine for us and our better typed birds do that. A handful of hens gives us way more eggs than we need unless we're hatching. If production could be improved more than that though, it would take even less hens to meet someone's needs, making Javas more popular with people. It's hard to get people's mindsets away from the supersized, superfast mentality, so if Javas could be a little more competitive with production, we might get more folks interested in keeping them so they don't come so close to dying out. Then too, they were once touted as *excellent* layers. But without a frame of reference as to how many eggs they considered as *excellent*, it is hard to know if we are already at the max capacity of what Javas laid in their heyday, or if they have fallen way far down in production since then.

 

[Fentress]

That's what is bothering me - the idea that ANY hen has to be small in order to be a good layer. I have not yet decided if that is one of those observations that were made that really had some validity across all breeds, or if it was just a strong opinion but only factual in very specific situations. Sometimes those old books have stuff that sounds like old wive's tales that turn out to be true and other times the stuff is way off base. But you still have to weed through things and see if it applies to your flock.

Our breed is large, over 5 lbs for females. We have differences in individuals as well as in groups depending on where we obtained them from. We have one group that we know was pushed for egg production. More of them lay every day with great consistency than any of our other groups. However these guys that lay better are too small for their standard and smaller than the other groups by comparison. They also have a number of other breed standard flaws too. We will not even sell culls because they are too far from the standard and I don't want someone backyard breeding them thinking that they are good representations of their breed.

So I'm not sure if the small size on them is what really helped them be better layers than the others, or if it is just coincidental that they turned out to be small. One of those things to make you go hmmmmmm.

A "layer type" will put more of its energy into organ development necessary for egg production. A "meat type" will put more energy into developing flesh and the larger/heavier skeleton necessary to support the flesh. That is the general correlation, with lots of other factors that play a role as well.

 

[DesertChic]

That's what is bothering me - the idea that ANY hen has to be small in order to be a good layer. I have not yet decided if that is one of those observations that were made that really had some validity across all breeds, or if it was just a strong opinion but only factual in very specific situations. Sometimes those old books have stuff that sounds like old wive's tales that turn out to be true and other times the stuff is way off base. But you still have to weed through things and see if it applies to your flock.

Our breed is large, over 5 lbs for females. We have differences in individuals as well as in groups depending on where we obtained them from. We have one group that we know was pushed for egg production. More of them lay every day with great consistency than any of our other groups. However these guys that lay better are too small for their standard and smaller than the other groups by comparison. They also have a number of other breed standard flaws too. We will not even sell culls because they are too far from the standard and I don't want someone backyard breeding them thinking that they are good representations of their breed.

So I'm not sure if the small size on them is what really helped them be better layers than the others, or if it is just coincidental that they turned out to be small. One of those things to make you go hmmmmmm.

Keep in mind that when many of these books were written there were far fewer known breeds in this country than there are now and a few particular breeds dominated even among those that were known. Huge Asiatic breeds like the Brahma simply did not lay as many eggs as the small and leaner White Leghorn. I don't think their references are so much about "wive's tales" as they were about what was well-known for that time. Even among my current mix flock I have birds of the same breed that I recognize as having bodies conforming more to be layers while others look more like meat birds.

A "layer type" will put more of its energy into organ development necessary for egg production. A "meat type" will put more energy into developing flesh and the larger/heavier skeleton necessary to support the flesh. That is the general correlation, with lots of other factors that play a role as well.

Precisely!!!! My two-week old flock of NN Turkens is already dividing itself up into chicks packing on more meat and skeleton while others show leaner frames and more feathering. Hence the "dual purpose" aspect of the dual purpose birds. And this is even more obvious when you compare a bird like a White Cornish with a good egg layer like a White Leghorn. Completely different appearance correlating to their individual functions.

 

[bnjrob]

A "layer type" will put more of its energy into organ development necessary for egg production. A "meat type" will put more energy into developing flesh and the larger/heavier skeleton necessary to support the flesh. That is the general correlation, with lots of other factors that play a role as well.

True. And when you have a dual purpose, they can be *good* but not excel at both eggs and meat and the same time.

It's this thought that makes me lean toward the idea is almost universally true, that to have the better laying, you have to have the smaller birds no matter what the breed. In which case I would have to stop breeding to the standard, and lose a lot of Java-specific characteristics, in order to improve laying much more.

 

[bnjrob]

Keep in mind that when many of these books were written there were far fewer known breeds in this country than there are now and a few particular breeds dominated even among those that were known. Huge Asiatic breeds like the Brahma simply did not lay as many eggs as the small and leaner White Leghorn. I don't think their references are so much about "wive's tales" as they were about what was well-known for that time. Even among my current mix flock I have birds of the same breed that I recognize as having bodies conforming more to be layers while others look more like meat birds.


Precisely!!!! My two-week old flock of NN Turkens is already dividing itself up into chicks packing on more meat and skeleton while others show leaner frames and more feathering. Hence the "dual purpose" aspect of the dual purpose birds. And this is even more obvious when you compare a bird like a White Cornish with a good egg layer like a White Leghorn. Completely different appearance correlating to their individual functions.

This makes me wonder about all the breeding and the APA and such. I get told that these really old birds had breed standards that corresponded with their utility purpose. But when you have these differences of the meatier large birds and smaller layer type birds in the same group and you see that the better layers don't meet the breed standard, then how did they balance both appearance and production traits back then? Or maybe they couldn't and so they showed the big dual purpose birds that were well typed and let the smaller, laying birds reproduce their flocks? And of course nobody likes to tell about their trials and problems they run into when they're breeding, so maybe that bit of info got left out of the antique literature? Hmmmmmm.

 

[DesertChic]

This makes me wonder about all the breeding and the APA and such. I get told that these really old birds had breed standards that corresponded with their utility purpose. But when you have these differences of the meatier large birds and smaller layer type birds in the same group and you see that the better layers don't meet the breed standard, then how did they balance both appearance and production traits back then? Or maybe they couldn't and so they showed the big dual purpose birds that were well typed and let the smaller, laying birds reproduce their flocks? And of course nobody likes to tell about their trials and problems they run into when they're breeding, so maybe that bit of info got left out of the antique literature? Hmmmmmm.

Well, SOP via the APA has changed repeatedly over the years, and even in the old literature I've encountered extensive discussion about how challenging its been to find and train judges to evaluate based on productivity, not just aesthetics. Personally I think the one area or weakness with working to SOP is that it doesn't necessarily take into consideration the ultimate original purpose of keeping chickens...production, whether for meat or eggs. I've encountered a lot of people who have outstanding production birds that fail miserably per SOP standards. Don't get me wrong...there's a lot of value in having at least a rudimentary understanding of the standards, such as being able to recognize crooked breast bones or any defect that might negatively impact production, but some of the other standards seem purely aesthetic. I mean, does one extra point on a comb render a rooster infertile? Or too pale "dull" of barring make a hen less of a layer? Sure, there may be other genetics either directly or indirectly linked to such "defects", but in and of themselves I don't think they have much impact on the bird's abilities to function properly.

I guess that's my long-winded way of saying that maybe they didn't "balance both appearance and production traits" quite as well as we're led to believe.

 

[bnjrob]

Well, SOP via the APA has changed repeatedly over the years, and even in the old literature I've encountered extensive discussion about how challenging its been to find and train judges to evaluate based on productivity, not just aesthetics. Personally I think the one area or weakness with working to SOP is that it doesn't necessarily take into consideration the ultimate original purpose of keeping chickens...production, whether for meat or eggs. I've encountered a lot of people who have outstanding production birds that fail miserably per SOP standards. Don't get me wrong...there's a lot of value in having at least a rudimentary understanding of the standards, such as being able to recognize crooked breast bones or any defect that might negatively impact production, but some of the other standards seem purely aesthetic. I mean, does one extra point on a comb render a rooster infertile? Or too pale "dull" of barring make a hen less of a layer? Sure, there may be other genetics either directly or indirectly linked to such "defects", but in and of themselves I don't think they have much impact on the bird's abilities to function properly.

I guess that's my long-winded way of saying that maybe they didn't "balance both appearance and production traits" quite as well as we're led to believe.

LOL, that's what I'm thinking. Some of that stuff is piddly stuff that I don't worry about so much. The Java SOP hasn't changed much since it was originally written in the 1880s, so that's why I find some things odd when I start looking at the old literature and then try to compare where we are now. I'm actually starting to think that maybe Javas have not actually decreased in their production as much as we think they have, maybe it's more that our perceptions and expectations have gotten accustomed to supersized, superfast, all the time mentality.

 

[Fentress]

I enjoy the old poultry farmer pictures from early part of the 20th century and would like to see some more if any one has any handy. I'll bet the stock was not very standard, but Maybe more productive than you think. These breeds have been ignored for a long time. Will a new group of breeders emerge that emphasize productive standard bred poultry? What's the definition of standard bred? Obviously, the commercial hatcheries are not concerned about this. LOL. If a chicken would not get disqualified at a show is that good enough to claim the standard bred label?