keeping a rooster and breeding younger generations?

[Beakz]

when my roo's daughter pullets grow up, it it weird for him to breed them? will the chicks be defected? should i get a new rooster for every time a new generetion is incorporated into the flock? thanks

 

[Ridgerunner]

You don’t have to get a new rooster every generation. You do need to select which chickens breed.

When chickens inbreed like that, father-daughter, mother-son, siblings, or cousins, you lose some genetic diversity. If they are of decent stock, that’s not a bad thing for a few generations. Actually, that is how every breed out there has been developed and how grand champions at chicken shows are made. You breed a certain amount of the genetic diversity out so they all look the same and have the same characteristics and traits. If you lose too much genetic diversity you can run into problems though, loss of fertility, poor egg laying, weaker immune systems, different things. There are different techniques to handle that, such as pen breeding used by practically all the hatcheries or spiral breeding or other techniques used by many breeders.

When you inbreed, recessive genes are going to pair up. These may be good recessive genes you want to pair up, they may be bad recessive genes you don’t want to pair up, or they may be neutral, neither good or bad. This is where you have to be ruthless and only hatch eggs from the chickens you want to hatch eggs from. If a chicken shows a defect don’t allow it to reproduce. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to kill it, just don’t allow it to reproduce. This is a technique used by some breeders to identify which recessive traits they have in their flock and which chickens still have those recessive traits so they can try to eliminate that trait, make them more purebred.

The technique I use is that every four to five generations I bring in an outside rooster to boost genetic diversity. I try to pick the males and females I keep for my breeding flock based on traits important to me, appearance, productivity, and behaviors. They do pretty well and are the types of chickens I want for my goals. When you introduce a new rooster, you introduce new genes. It’s possible you will be adding some traits you don’t want, so you are constantly selecting which chickens you want to breed every generation.

This is a technique used by small farmers worldwide for thousands of years. Every few generations, swap roosters with a neighbor. Some breeders use a variation of this technique. They have a buddy they trust breeding for the same traits and using certain techniques to maintain genetic diversity, but occasionally they will swap roosters to get that genetic diversity back up.