Farming and Homesteading Heritage Poultry

[neopolitancrazy]

Okay...you guys have convinced me. When I'm ready to begin this commitment, I'll only purchase from qualified breeders. But that brings me to my next question - how many breeders will I need to purchase from to ensure there's no inbreeding? I plan to employ spiral/clan breeding to minimize inbreeding, but as I understand it, that technique typically requires purchasing from at least three different sources. I can only start with roughly 30 chicks total, not the 100+ I would prefer, but as I've seen indicated here there are few if any breeders willing to part with that many of their chicks. Should I start with a smaller selection? If so, can I get all of them from a single breeder, or do I still need to locate three separate breeders? When I start this I'm in it for the long haul, which is why I'm taking my time and conducting as much research as possible, setting up my property accordingly, etc. 

Ummm....I'm not sure what you meant in this post......

What do you mean by "qualified" breeders and who in the heck has the authority to qualify one?

Why complicate things? If you want to use clan breeding, just buy starter birds from a breeder who clan breeds, and have your breeder tell you which males go with which females your first year.

Why would you want to start with chicks when you can get higher quality breeders as adults for a lot less work and money?

Why would you expect breeders of relatively rare chickens to have "100+" chicks that they were "willing to part with" at any given time? (That large number implies a commercial hatchery, where quality has been sacrificed for the sake of quantity.)

Since you are in the research phase of chicken breeding, I would recommend further study of managed breeding. Without some degree of inbreeding, your chickens will be randomly but completely different in size, shape, coloring, health and temperament as well as their egg and meat production characteristics. In other words, you will be feeding a lot of disappointing birds, either because you find them unproductive or unappealing. All of the various types of line breeding are simply attempts to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of inbreeding. Without some degree of inbreeding, there are no recognizable breeds.

Best wishes,
Angela

 

[3riverschick]

Yellow House Farm, could you elaborate on the phenotypical indicators of egg production?

I am not YHF , here is what I learned in my Sussex study.
1. width of back and depth of body are needed.
2. Fine-ness of skin and scales on head and legs are indicators of fine texture of the skin. This is important because fine textured skin stretches to accommodate the swelling of the reproductive organ during egg laying season. Coarse skin on comb, face and wattles plus scales on legs indicates coarse skin on the rest of the body. Coarse skin tends to accumulate fat. Fat does not stretch and thus the skin is more inflexible, hampering the room needed for the reproductive organs, thus egg production.
3. Head indicators of egg production. See the Hogan method or "Breeding and Culling by Head Points" by Steup. Both readable online at archive.org, Google books or Hathi Digital Trust.
4. Hogan method also explains importance of the bones of the rear assembly and their arrangement which indicates production ability.
Best,
Karen
Bob Blosl taught that increasing your hens egg production by 25 eggs a year would cause the hens to be more close feathered. Personal opinion, no ref. available at hand right now, close feathered birds are better layers than their looser feathered counterrparts. Of course generally speaking, as strains also vary within breeds.

 

[3riverschick]

Ummm....I'm not sure what you meant in this post......

What do you mean by "qualified" breeders and who in the heck has the authority to qualify one?

Why complicate things? If you want to use clan breeding, just buy starter birds from a breeder who clan breeds, and have your breeder tell you which males go with which females your first year.

Why would you want to start with chicks when you can get higher quality breeders as adults for a lot less work and money?

Why would you expect breeders of relatively rare chickens to have "100+" chicks that they were "willing to part with" at any given time? (That large number implies a commercial hatchery, where quality has been sacrificed for the sake of quantity.)

Since you are in the research phase of chicken breeding, I would recommend further study of managed breeding. Without some degree of inbreeding, your chickens will be randomly but completely different in size, shape, coloring, health and temperament as well as their egg and meat production characteristics. In other words, you will be feeding a lot of disappointing birds, either because you find them unproductive or unappealing. All of the various types of line breeding are simply attempts to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of inbreeding. Without some degree of inbreeding, there are no recognizable breeds.

Best wishes,
Angela

Woot! Woot ! Worthy words! Qualified breeder from whom to purchase foundation
quality birds. In my opinion and research : a veteran breeder who has a vintage
line bred strain which has won in quality competition over multiple generations. Or
a breeder who has high quality stock from such a breeder and has kept the faith
of the strain.
Best,
Karen

 

[3riverschick]

Just curious, who told you to found flock on 3 strains. Maybe in mammals. Not in Poultry. If you have been listening to bio diversity advocates, just stop. It doesn't work in poultry unless you are working with a landrace like Swedish Flower hens or Icelandic fowl. Inbreeding is a time-honored method for stabilizing the gene pool in a flock. It is necessary because there are so many sex-linked genes in poultry. neopolitancrazy posted some great advice.
Best,
Karen

 

[gjensen]

Some are confused and believe that line breeding is synonymous with inbreeding depression. We cannot make progress without some degree of control. A healthy, vigorous, productive, uniform flock of quality is a mark of success.

Mixed breeds randomly mating on a yard will lead to inbreeding depression faster than intelligent line breeding or inbreeding.

There is nothing wrong with starting with more than one strain, but it is a mistake to claim that it is important or necessary. Generally speaking, we would be better off to start with one, and become familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of that strain. Every strain has it's tendencies, and we cannot know them all in a single generation. Including an additional strain should be an intelligent decision and with a clearly defined goal in mind.

Some have started rebuilding projects with very rare breeds where mixing the pot with what was available was a good idea. These are also people that either themselves, or as part of a collective, was able to hatch and rear an enormous amount of birds. Many of us cannot do that. Still after the start, the good birds are used, and the line tightens up out of necessity. What is important is to know where too tight is. The necessity of an outcross is an eventual reality, but we can go a long time without one. How long depends on what you started with, how many you raise, how many you breed, your breeding choices, etc. You can run a family into the ground, but the birds will start warning you before you do.

Adding anything should be with caution, because you risk losing progress that was made. Many would recommend the introduction be done with the offspring from a cross with your strain, and then use a hen or hens so that the influence is limited. You are trying to introduce a trait or two, and not start over again. That would not make any sense. Breeding anything with clearly defined goals for any length of time will inspire some degree of caution. There is always bad that comes with the good. Even if the bad is not immediately evident.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Linda, how did you come to the conclusion that the Rocks would do better in the heat than the Dorkings?

Rocks would have no heat advantage over Dorkings. This, however, is a misleading statement. On breed is not better than another breed in any trait barring where their breed standard predisposes them to be so. Remember, the only breed traits are standard-based traits; i.e. the Rock single comb is ideally smaller than the Dorking single comb, which would make it more cold hardy, save that the White Dorking is rose combed, so it is the hardiest of them all. Now, in theory, the large comb is an adaptation for cooling. Therefore, the large single comb of a Dorking would, to an extent, make the Dorking more heat tolerant than the Rock.

Having said that, though, the most important mode of realized heat tolerance is to breed for heat tolerance. So the true question is whether a particular strain has been selected for heat tolerance, and, if it hasn't, then it will be on the breeder to begin to do so.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Read this one slowly, maybe a couple of times, but once you grab it, it will be like an ah-ha moment.


One of the best little tidbits, probably the single best, in the book Start Where You are with What You Have, a book that Bob recommended a few years back and which I was finally able to get a copy of, is that:

breeding poultry is ultimately maintaining a strain an flushing out all of the negative recessives while fixing the positives

Eliminating negative and fixing positive dominant traits is fairly straightforward. They're easy to get rid of, and they're easy to hold onto. It's all of the various recessive genes that are harder to deal with and for which you have to go fishing. As you maintain a strain, the birds become more and more unified genetically. As this happens they share in common the many traits which were more individually dispersed among their forebears. As more birds come to share recessive genes, there is an increased likeliness that progeny will manifest phenotypically a trait that was beforehand hidden deep in the genetic code of some of their ancestors. That quality might be positive; that quality might be negative. As one continues to maintain a strain, these traits will emerge; it then requires a little bit of genetic savvy to know how to eliminate them, if they are negative traits.


It is important to recognize the difference between maintaining a strain with a pedigree of related birds, i.e. birds of a clan versus breeding higgledy-piggledy without records and ending up pairing siblings indiscriminately and other such folly, which causes too many negative recessives to emerge at once creating a great big mess of negative traits.

So, as one is maintaining a, broadly speaking, inbred clan, which we call a strain, one is constantly selecting for vigor and health as well as breed specific positive traits while flushing out and culling for the many negative recessives which emerge.

Now, say one begins to inbreed and after so many years a deformity arises, what can be done?

Well, one typical response is to panic and to bring in new blood. What happens in this scenario is that the resultant heterogeneity introduced by the new blood causes the flushed out gene to recess; ergo, it goes back into hiding. One might think, "Oh thank God for that new blood", but one hasn't eliminated the trait; it is still there; it is merely in hiding, as it was before. If one continues to breed, it will emerge again. On the other hand, introducing the new blood, has also introduced into the mix a whole host of new recessives, which over time will have their chance to emerge as well. Thus, it's a quick fix but a compounded problem. Moreover, the flock has, at this point, lost the coveted, standard-based uniformity it was beginning to achieve.

On the other hand, breeding is about cultivating an ever deepened awareness. This is why mentors and show attendance are so very necessary for becoming an excellent breeder. There are so very many traits of which one must be aware. If a negative recessive emerges, and if it is not caught, meaning if it is not perceived and culled, and then if those birds are then bred from, the result will be a strengthening of that recessive in the phenotype, i.e. one starts to see more and more birds with the deformity. If this is allowed to go on for too long such that one's flock becomes homozygous for a recessive trait, we say that the trait is "locked in" or "fixed", which means that the only way to get rid of it is to actually bring in new blood that is able to first mask it and then as it begins to reappear, which it eventually will, one will have the sense to recognize it and to cull for it accordingly.

So the trick is not to cover up the recessives but to know how to get rid of them. For this, one uses the progeny test.

To promote understanding, in order for a recessive trait to emerge visibly a chick must receive that gene from both parents. So, only if both parents have that gene will it emerge.

Thus, for a progeny test, on takes the bird, or birds, with the deformity and breeds them to birds that appear to lack the deformity. Then, one hatches the eggs from specific pairings and keeps meticulous track of who's who. It is important to hatch enough chicks, perhaps a couple of dozen, in order to have a large enough control group. NB: These chicks are not meant to become breeders; all of these chicks are destined to be culled from the flock because every single one of them will have the negative gene regardless of whether or not it is visible. Now, as they develop, some the chicks from some pairings will exhibit the negative recessive trait, while other pairings will not. What this means is that in the breedings where some of the chicks--not all, but some--are manifesting the recessive trait, that trait is present in both parents, the one that visibly possesses the trait as well as in the parent that does not visibly (phenotypically) appear to have it. That seemingly innocent parent is a carrier; even though it appears not to have it, it will disperse the trait throughout the flock and must be culled.
Then, among other test matings, there will be groups in which none of the chicks manifest the negative trait, assuming the control group is large enough (two dozen chicks as opposed to only three chicks) one can assume that the parent, who does not appear to have the negative trait, actually does not. This parent is then saved for future breeding.

Only these parents are allowed to move forward, these parents who, when paired with a bird that visibly manifested the negative trait, threw no chicks with that trait. They can be assumed to be clean of that trait. All other breeders are then culled, and only these birds are used moving forward. Your flock will then be clean of the negative gene.

Thus inbreeding allows us to draw to the fore and maintain all of the hidden positive recessives that are needed for an excellent bird, and it allows us to concentrate in our flocks a high level of good things, including vigor and disease resistance. On the other hand, inbreeding also allows us, whether we like it or not, to flush out the latent negatives and then, through the art and science of breeding, to eliminate them.

 

[TheBanditQueen]

I am not YHF , here is what I learned in my Sussex study.
1. width of back and depth of body are needed.
2. Fine-ness of skin and scales on head and legs are indicators of fine texture of the skin. This is important because fine textured skin stretches to accommodate the swelling of the reproductive organ during egg laying season. Coarse skin on comb, face and wattles plus scales on legs indicates coarse skin on the rest of the body. Coarse skin tends to accumulate fat. Fat does not stretch and thus the skin is more inflexible, hampering the room needed for the reproductive organs, thus egg production.
3. Head indicators of egg production. See the Hogan method or "Breeding and Culling by Head Points" by Steup. Both readable online at archive.org, Google books or Hathi Digital Trust.
4. Hogan method also explains importance of the bones of the rear assembly and their arrangement which indicates production ability.
Best,
Karen
Bob Blosl taught that increasing your hens egg production by 25 eggs a year would cause the hens to be more close feathered. Personal opinion, no ref. available at hand right now, close feathered birds are better layers than their looser feathered counterrparts. Of course generally speaking, as strains also vary within breeds.

I don't mind that you're not YHF. Thank you for the tips! I will go search out the books you mentioned.

This is fascinating. So much to learn.

The difference between close feathered and loose feathered birds...when I read "loose feathered", it makes me picture something fluffy like a Cochin. Close feathered makes me think of something not-fluffy, like a Mediterranean breed. Is that correct? Or am I picturing it wrongly?

 

[Yellow House Farm]

I don't mind that you're not YHF. Thank you for the tips! I will go search out the books you mentioned.

This is fascinating. So much to learn.

The difference between close feathered and loose feathered birds...when I read "loose feathered", it makes me picture something fluffy like a Cochin. Close feathered makes me think of something not-fluffy, like a Mediterranean breed. Is that correct? Or am I picturing it wrongly?

I don't mind that you're not YHF, either.

There would be much to consider before settling on this as fact. We'd have to come to understand how loose feathering is related to what other traits and then how those traits actually come to affect laying. Anecdotally, perhaps, it's safe to say to that most of the breeds traditionally prized for laying are at least "fairly close feathered".

Yet here is an opportunity for yet another SOP, food for thought moment. Turn to page 29 of your 2010 Standard of Perfection, which if you haven't yet ordered I'm sure you're going to run to the APA website and do so straight away:

"All American, all English except Cornish, all French and Langshans: Feathers should be moderately broad and long, fitting fairly close to the body.

All Mediterranean, Hamburgs, and Polish: Feathers moderately broad and long, fitting rather close to the body." (SOP 29)

So basically, every single breed ever prized as an egg layer is to have feathers "fairly" to "rather" tightly fit to their bodies.

Buy your Standard and then remember this mantra: weight, type, feather, and symmetry. Repeat it over and over again until in is ingrained in your way of thinking about poultry: weight, type, feather, and symmetry.

 

[capayvalleychick]

Now, in theory, the large comb is an adaptation for cooling. Therefore, the large single comb of a Dorking would, to an extent, make the Dorking more heat tolerant than the Rock.

Having said that, though, the most important mode of realized heat tolerance is to breed for heat tolerance. So the true question is whether a particular strain has been selected for heat tolerance, and, if it hasn't, then it will be on the breeder to begin to do so.

I have had three strains of Delawares here. Our summers start in May. Daytime temps rise to over 100 F, sometimes as high as 120 F. It doesn't cool down until Oct. Nature does my selection for me, in this regard. Two of the strains of Delawares fared well. One line started dropping dead as soon as the heat set in. Only a few survived. This demonstrated to me how it's the strain, not the breed, that determines heat tolerance.

My single combed Silver Dorkings do very well in this heat. I may lose one elderly bird each year. So yes, you can have Dorkings in the heat.

There are many chicken & egg farmers in this region. All have production breeds. All experience huge losses due to the heat. When the temps spike suddenly, they often lose the entire flock. Another example of the importance of having birds selected for your environment.

In addition, the birds who do best here, regardless of breed, seem to have the sense to seek out shade or water. It's usual to see my flock standing under the sprinklers or in the water pans.