The American Poultry Assn. National Meet is being held at the Southern Ohio Poultry Assn. Fall show the first weekend in October at the fairgrounds in Lucasville, OH. About 50 miles from Hillsboro. At this show you will see many of the recognized breeds. Many of which are considered "heritage". Remember though, these birds are raised without consideration to production qualities.
There will not be a meat bird in the place. The Cornish,Giants, New Hampshire's, etc. of the exhibition type can hardly be considered meat birds. Since they grow so slowly and are very uneconomical. Beautiful yes, practical - no.
Layers- There will be Leghorns there that lay pretty well. Some other exhibition birds lay fairly well. Those would be the RIRs, Rocks, NH's. But none of them will even come close to what their commercial cousins will do.
Remember that all the birds bred to the APA Standard, the exhibition birds, are today not much more than "ornamentals." No matter what the left over nomenclature of the 1920's says they are little more than flowers.
Remember that just because someone has an incubator that hardly makes them a breeder intent on improving the breed. It makes them a "hatcher".
Remember that commercial hatcheries that supply the backyard purchasers with utility chicks are hatchers. The chicks of "breeds" they provide will never look like the pictures in the Standard and seldom do they look as good as the picture the hatchery uses to promote them. You will find that hatchery stock tends to mature faster than exhibition stock. Exhibition large chickens will become much larger but only with a lot of time an feed expended doing so. Hatchery bantam chickens will always be larger than those from an exhibition line. Hatchery birds can be expected to lay better than their show cousins.
Commercial birds are awesome at what they do.-
Meat chickens, white egg layers, brown egg layers and meat ducks are excelled at producing what they are bred to produce. If you want something more than meat or eggs look to something else. You may get that something else that you were looking for but from those birds you will never get as much meat or as many eggs as the commercial types. And what you do get from either the exhibition or utility breeds will cost more feed dollars than you want to think about.
