Future Breed Creation Project

[Alex_Zurago]

Hi Alex,

You've brought up a great topic! I think it's great that you want to make a new breed. To answer your question on what is needed as far as numbers, only two. One rooster and one hen. The topic of inbreeding does not relate to chickens in the same way that it does to many other animals. The reason for this is their productivity. If you're breeding cattle and you only have one cow and one bull, you will only have one calf from which to make your selection. If that solitary calf turns out to be infertile you would be in trouble. Contrast that with chickens, if you have a decently productive hen, you can get 250+ chicks per year. Now of course if you're making a new breed you will likely be using more than two breeds as your foundation, so you would naturally be starting with more than two birds; but to make my point, even years down the road you could cull down to just one rooster and one hen and still carry your breed forward.

I write that just to illustrate that inbreeding in itself is not much of a concern. In practicality, you'll probably find that there's a sweet spot as to how many hens/roosters to retain for breeding each year. I would want to keep few enough in that I've culled them hard and there is a degree of uniformity, while still having enough hens to produce big numbers of chicks to select from. If you're going to be working with a lot of different genes, you will need to hatch significant numbers. Every additional gene that you're dealing with exponentially increases the number of chicks you will need to hatch in order to get one that has them all.

It's amazing that so few breeds have been created in the last one hundred years, but our society is much less agrarian than it used to be. The amount of people who have a deep understanding of chicken phenotype genetics is very small. The percentage of those people who also have the vision, time, space, and dedication is of course even smaller.

If you aren't aware of him already, check out Dr. Tom Whiting of Whiting Farms. The articles on his website as well as the videos of him on youtube contain some valuable information to anyone working on chicken breeding and genetics.

Ryan

yeah I was thinking of setting up the project by crossing Indio Gigante to a Cemani or fibro easter egger, and breeding that to a black Jersey Giant cross that was mixed with Silkie and breda. Ive had trouble finding a fibro easter egger thats large enough so I was thinking maybe breed the blue egg gene into the JG cross and fibro in from Cemani to the IG. Either way it will take a long time