Help w/ Genetics and Breeding

[Sylverfly]

So I was thinking of starting a breeding program and I’m wondering how many chickens I need to start with to provide a wide enough genetic background for healthy chickens. I would have breed A of hens and B and C breeds of roosters. I would breed A and B and A and C together and the offspring would be AB and AC. I would then breed AB with AC to produce the finished product D. After that I would be breeding Ds with Ds. So How many A hens do I need to start with and how many B and Cs do I need. I know this would make sense better if I just mentioned the colors or breeds I’d be using but it’s a classified breeding program, and I don’t want to let anything out of the bag, yet. I will be sharing the results in a few years with the BYC community. Any help would be awesome, thanks.

 

[Henk69]

If you are just introducing a dominant color gene into an existing breed you could just keep backcrossing to unrelated members of that breed.

If you want to do inbreeding calculations: http://kippenjungle.nl/COI/COIcalculator.html

Enter a pedigree like this:

D1,AC2,AB,F
D2,AC2,AB,M
D3,AB2,AC,F
D4,AB2,AC,M
AC,C,A,F
AC2,C,A,M
AB,B,A,F
AB2,B,A,M
A,,,F
B,,,M
C,,,M