How can I identify Parent Stock Chickens?

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

ANY of the chickens CAN be used to reproduce. Offspring WILL have laying abilities similar to their parents. That does NOT disappear just because the birds were crossed.

YES, you CAN breed and reproduce from sex-linked birds. The laying ability will continue, the sex-linked colouring will not, so you will end up with a flock who are a variety of colours, none of which are gender-specific at hatching.

The biggest issue you will have with more of the heavy laying breeds and crosses is that they will not go broody, so you will need to use an incubator to hatch chicks.

The laying ability will not continue, because the heterosis levels become much lower and some of the genes are lost.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

Hi, I've always been curious how to know if a certain breed of chicken is parent stock or normal. What are the differences between the parent stock and the babies of the parent stock? and how to know the parent stock for leghorns?

Parent stock has the parental qualities higher and more balanced. Children have the production qualities higher.
Parent stocks produce feather sexable chicks. The terminal crosses can't produce feather sexable chicks.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

The term 'parent stock' comes from the commercial poultry world.
Big egg companies or broiler companies spend a lot of money and research to produce the best layers and meat birds.
The 'parent stock' are the breeders used to produce the layers or broilers used in the production houses. Usually the parent stock consists of a male line and a female line. There are 'Grandparent stock' breeders that produce the male parents and female parent lines. The layers and broilers produced are the final product and are never intended to be used as breeders.

This type of breeding usually won't apply to a back yard or small farm breeding program. The commercial farms are producing thousands of birds. Most of us are only hatching a couple of dozen or at most a few hundred chicks each year. If you had the space, you could use some modification of this program to improve your particular strain of poultry.

pocopoyo

I had honestly never heard of grandparent or parent stock before, and this description definitely helped clear it up for me. Thanks!