The same person who designs a model around needing 100 chickens to produce 400-500 chicks each year.
Or who can only squeeze four chicks under their broodies.
I'm getting the feeling that their chickens must all be extremely unimpressive carcass birds. Like they've gotta be eating leghorns at best.
Leghorns general refusal to go broody would also explain needing 100 birds to get 500 chicks. So maybe they are.
Leghorns are essentially battery chickens. They do not fare particularly well free ranging, don't tend to go broody easily and because of the breeding criteria that has produced them, don't tend to live very long. They do lay lots of eggs and carry a good weight.
The idea here is to set up a semi feral flock that will reproduce itself.
The breed needs to be very predator aware and fast enough to evade hawk attacks in particular. Maximising meat per bird isn't an issue.
The two breeds being considered are Fayoumies and Hamburgs.
Both these breeds are excellent foragers and if acquired from Middle Eastern countries, or North African countries they are not likely to have the genetic problems that are often associated with USA hatchery stock. Fayoumies fare well here where I live.
If part of the strategy is too produce pictures of beautiful looking birds that resemble game fowl and have excellent predator evading skills, low maintenance costs and feed costs, will survive roosting in trees in the event that they are reluctant to use the provided shelter, will go broody and make good mothers, have decent inter flock social skills and are apparently still highly adaptive birds then the picture is rather different.
The people that keep Fayoumies here state that a clutch size of 4 to 6 eggs is what produces the maximum number of adult birds from the hatch. More chicks and they tend not to survive. Apparently both Fayoumies and Hamburgs still have good hatching and rearing skills. This means fewer staggered hatches and higher hatch survival rates with fewer sick of weak chicks.
So, there are lots of important criteria apart from how much meat one can squeeze out of one bird and how many eggs they lay.
What the customer at these restaurants is prepared to pay top money for (according to the market research) is a meal form a chicken that could with a small stretch of the imagination be a wild chicken.
Because of the above criteria a flock that reproduces itself and remains stable which can operate as a closed flock becomes important. The best way to achieve this is to have elder birds teaching the younger birds. It also helps with flock dynamics and genetics if you let the senior hens sit and hatch the next generation and eat the offspring.
There are lots of other points relevant to keeping a closed free range semi feral flock that do not make any sense to a keeper who replaces their birds by incubation or purchase.
