Keeping everything seperate

[kfacres]

Question for all..

How do you keep your breeding pens seperate, but still keep fertility high during the season?

I remember when I was younger, and really big into breeding poultry (more than 250 birds), I always had my breeding pens set up, and a general egg production pen. However, it seemed that after seperating these birds off from the rest, the general fertiltiy and chick vitality seemed to suffer as compared to the general egg production pen that was allowed to free roam every day.

To help combat this I tried several things- the first being rotating which pen was let to range outside, however this didn't quite work out as when it came time to roost the breeder pens wanted to go back into the general henhouse; their residence when not in breeding season. (Dont' worry, our rehoming 'adjustement' period was always atleast a week before getting let out of the pen).

The 2nd, and seemed most successful method was feeding cat food to the birds-- that was per somebody's advice (at the time), and seemed to work out just fine, but became a hassle to keep several feeders full and clean, and out of the weather.

Regardless of which pens the birds were in, they always received the same nutrition ratio: layer mash/ pellets, scratch, and limestone.

 

[kfacres]

So, I guess nobody does any seperated breeding by breeds?

 

[Nicole01]

I wish, hubby won't let me keep a rooster.

. He says the neighbors are too close. We are allowed roosters in our area. My neighbor across the street and there is one down the road that have a rooster. My neighbor across the street has agreed to breed her rooster with my frizzle. We both are keeping the chicks. I'm not quite sure how we are going to do this. I need an incubator for the fertalized eggs first.

Sorry, I'm no help.