To be blunt, I'm going to quote one of my mentors, "the biggest problem with chicken people is they don't eat enough chicken." We are behind because we don't select hard enough and cull hard enough for those traits. There are some that do...I am very sure you will make progress towards your production goals you stated in this thread in the last few pages. But when there's so many "breeders" out there that tolerate less, and can't bring themselves to cull birds, or allow late bloomers to stay in breeding programs, not keep records, develop emotional attachments to their livestock rather than make decisions based on what is best for the breed as a whole...as a whole the breed, the poultry fancy is going to fall further and further behind. I'm definitely not saying I'm immune to that either, I'm almost positive that there are birds in my barn that should be in the freezer (only partially excused by just getting started again).And there in lies the rub. What is appropriate? The records of the early 20th century suggest pullets beginning to lay at 28 weeks. These were birds with extraordinarily nice barring. Hefty broilers were taken for food at about the same time. Wind the clock forward a century to 2013 and while we have some stunning Barred Rocks and we certainly have made great strides in dietary science; we don't come close to those earlier development dates. We are a full 6-8 weeks slower and that is a long time and a lot of feed.
The obvious question of "why" must be addressed and addressing it is the challenge that we face. Some of us believe deeply that we've got to work harder and place higher emphasis upon these issues.
How do we start making progress? Go out to your breeding pens...does that third hen in the pen REALLY have all the qualities you need? Is the third string cockerel going to contribute to the betterment of the breed? It's starting to hit winter time, is that young bird that spends most their time hunched up and hiding from the elements the picture of health and vigor that will improve your line?
Now obviously change doesn't happen all at once. What we can do is year after year set goals and grade off our birds. Take all your pullets and if one of your goals is improving the average point of lay, mark the top 10% that lay eggs first this year, then from those, select the top 10% for size, or barring/lacing or whatever else you're working on. You can't select for everything every year, but you need to know everything you want to improve and make sure you're not letting too many negatives go through. Someone mentioned Dorkings and size, ok, they're undersized and some of the slower growing ones might get bigger, but slow growth is undesirable from a production point of view. So take the birds that are biggest at 4 months and pick from them, they will still have offspring that will get bigger than they are and increase your size, but they also will not have the slow growth. Or go the other way, say you have three cockerels that are just turning a year, two are 8 lbs and one is 7.7 lbs. At six months they were 6, 6.5 and 7 lbs respectively. Is .3 of a lb really worth feeding those birds for an additional 6 months? Perhaps over simplification but things like that are why our "Heritage" breeds don't produce as much and as early as they did in the past.