Farming and Homesteading Heritage Poultry

[cybercat]

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Yellowhouse farm to answer your stement that I bold. Impossible. You will not get a breeder to sell that many chicks. Fact is a farmer would not want showbird lines for they lay rate is lower than normal. Fact is most heritage chickens are slow to mature making them not good for production farms. This is why they fell out of favor. Only a small farm/homestead could maske heritage poultry work since most just feed the family only. Also if the farmer is not breeding to the SOP he will loose size and production real fast. Like one generation fast. So knowing how to pick stock for meat and eggs is real important plus keeping type of breed in mind. Most production farmers do not have the time since their operations are so big. There is alot of record keeping in breeding up or maintance breeding in chickens. Moreso than in cattle for you do not have pedigrees to work from at all.

I think what you are doing is amazing. But most small farmers can not even sell meat off their farms in alot of states. Only live birds or animals. Which then have to be butcherd by either themselves or a liscensed FDA butcher. Those professional butchers that do chickens are almost as hard to find than good breeding chickens. This is why heritage poultry for the homesteader works since most do their own butchering to feed themselves.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Hi Buffalogal! I think you're reading an attack that is not in what I'm writing. I both acknowledge and honor the scale you are discussing. It is the scale I grew up with and that fed my family. It is the scale of our dear homesteading friend down the road with a flock of twenty RC Ancona or of our other good homesteading friend a mile beyond who maintains about a dozen Chanteclers. The vast majority of all of our clients function on this scale. We teach dozens of people each year how to maintain small flocks for home production. I'm a major believer in and supporter of this scale.

I am also a supporter of a larger scale, and it's a scale that has certain needs. Some are similar to those of the smaller flock, some are different. BY discussing the one, I'm not automatically insulting the other. Neither is it an insult to say that certain flocks will be able to function at certain levels while others will not be. An outstanding breeder I know, who is many ways is my mentor, whose brain I pick for all sorts of Standard-focused selection info, maintains a closed flock of 12 birds in four family groups. His birds are gorgeous--I mean gorgeous--you can see them a mile away at the shows. He likes to test me, he brings me over to his breed and asks, "Which are mine?" I honor his flock. Still, he doesn't emphasize production in his selection and only ship 15 chicks to a time because he cannot reliably produce more than this in any one shipment. Thus, if I am approached by a beginning farmer who needs a source for heritage fowl for the land s/he just leased and on which they need to begin a rather immediate production, I cannot recommend my mentor as a source because he will not be able to satisfy the farming needs. This isn't an insult.

You mentioned the "original" nature of the thread, but the reason I entitled it Farming and Homesteading Heritage Poultry was to imply a conversation on the whole range of scales. Perhaps it was naive, but then again who knows. A farmer with a conservation flock of White Orpingtons might have responded, and what a cool discovery that would have been.

Oh well, back to the drawing board......

 

[HaikuHeritageFarm]

I do agree that keeping breeds under slightly more commercial, controlled circumstances would make it MORE feasible instead of less to keep multiple breeds as opposed to a homestead where free ranging and foraging could be more utilized.

But still, jack of all trades...master of none? It's such an old cliche, but it is chock full o' truth.

 

[HaikuHeritageFarm]

Regarding finding large numbers of show bred birds....I thought the emphasis on this thread, as opposed to the size or scale of the operation, was simply to focus on production bred animals that at least loosely meet the standard and historical intent of the bird?

Seems the meat qualities of the old dual purpose homestead breeds have left the building, often to the great advantage of those breeds' egg laying ability.

What do you all think about utilizing the fact that some of these breeds have been recreated as egg-laying machines, and celebrating the fact that we now have lines that can pop out 250 eggs a year, instead of poo-pooing and completely discounting the dreaded hatchery bird? How do we go about getting that level of egg production, or closer to it, on a meaty bird that fits the standard in shape and type, if not color and pattern? Wouldn't that be the ultimate dual-purpose bird?

The Delaware comes to mind in this. This seems to be a breed that become the property of the hatcheries almost exclusively. Indeed, I don't believe it was ever a traditional homestead bird, but a production broiler that has turned into an amazingly reliable producer of a LOT of very LARGE brown eggs. I am so excited to see people interested in these birds right now and am eager to see these current egg-laying abilities retained while fanciers put the broiler type back on the breed. The Delawares are in the position to become the ultimate dual-purpose super chicken if people don't initially get too bogged down in color and pattern, IMO, but there's no reason all the old breeds couldn't be like that.

 

[Rathbone]

Just wanted to say how much I am enjoying this thread - and enjoying how hard everyone is working to keep it friendly and helpful
Me? I want a small family flock that is self sustaining. Must please my eye, must have a nice temperment, and will go on my table in the form of eggs or meat eventually. I don't know squat but want to learn. And I benefit by all of your varying viewpoints. Some of you are almost overwhelming in your levels of expertise - but again, I am here to learn.
I am new to chickens and tried a few different breeds and am narrowing my scope. So here is to learning (and I raise my glass of juice).

 

[kathyinmo]

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My New Hampshires came from Doug Akers. I have only 2 trios, and they have been laying for a couple months. I get 4 eggs a day from that pen. It is a rare occasion that I get only 3. I am very pleased with them. I will be hatching nearly every egg I get for awhile, so I can share these birds with others.

 

[junglebird]

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Yes, you do ... and thanks for doing it. I'm pretty connected to the farming practices in my area, and I don't know of one small commercial producer that is breeding their own poultry rather than using industrially produced stock. Which is funny, because there's plenty of breeding of pigs, goats, sheep, and cows. You could check into an NRCS producer grant to do sustainability studies on small scale breeding for commercial meat poultry production: NRCS Grants (I'm currently co-writing an EQUIP grant to study sustainable goat browse species.)

I think you're entirely right, small farmers and homesteaders do have different needs. I know small farmers with high ecological ideals who still forgo rotating land into green manure in order to eek out every needed penny the land will produce. I also know that organic farmers are buying Monsanto seeds, feeding with GMO grains, and are using irrigation ditch water contaminated by fertilizer and manure runoff. They're doing the best they can with what they've got, which is better than a lot of practices, and I'll continue to buy from them the things I am not producing myself. In my own attempts at a small farming business, I found myself thinking like a producer, and not like a gardener ... I couldn't see the tree for the forest. That's why I decided not to pursue small farming, and limit my work to homesteading. I find that the care I provide to my family as a homesteader is worth more than the small income I can produce as a farmer.

So, my risk taking isn't with economic competition, it's with affordability and practicability. I cannot afford to buy $6+ exhibition quality chicks each year to raise to slaughter for our table. I also can't afford to begin a breeding program with too limited a gene pool, that will exhaust itself (or be picked off by predators). Because I have numerous self-sufficiency projects running simultaneously (timber, vegetables, orchard, goats, construction, sewing, food preserving), I can't focus a disproportionate amount of energy or resources on any one project, like a highly complicated, resource intensive breeding protocol. I need a low maintenance breeding program that capitalizes on the best traits from sources at hand. For my purposes, I'm guessing my sources will be diverse, rather than rare, expensive, and/or specialized.)

So, here's my n00bie guess on how breeding goals might be different for a homesteader, and a small farmer:
Homesteader breeds for vigor through diversity at hand
Small farmer breeds for carcass (or egg) consistency through selection of similar traits

Because the heritage birds were constructed from mixes of older breeds, perhaps the homesteader can focus on cultivating the appropriate family of breeds in order to have the appropriate genetic diversity "at hand."

 

[Rathbone]

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Hmmmm JungleBird. I had a hard time deciding what of yours I would quote - I just kept nodding my head at most of what you were saying.

 

[HaikuHeritageFarm]

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These things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions in animal husbandry today is that every generation requires completely unrelated pairings to continue to produce healthy, vigorous offspring.

 

[buffalogal]

Not an attack necessarily, but an implication that serious conservation (selection for type, productivity and health) is possible only by those who choose to limit themseves to one breed. Personally, as breathtaking as it can be to see large numbers all of one kind, I would rather 50 breeders that each had a dozen birds than a dozen breeders with 50 birds each. As long as they aren't all concentrated in one state, or one part of the country, I think the breed is safer in the smaller flocks. (especially given today's emphasis on "disease control", AKA commercial poultry production protection, where a single outbreak of some virus could conceivably lead to the deliberate destruction of all the birds in a geographic location.)

To me, having more than one breed and keeping them pure and maintaining their productivity is no more difficult than growing several different varieties of garden vegetables. It's probably easier with the chickens than some of the vegetables; for example, carrots take two years to produce seed, and then you have to grow them out to be sure you did a good job with keeping them separate. If you messed up and planted something else too close and they cross pollinated, you don't get a "do over"without having to locate more seed.