I keep telling myself I need to cut back on number of breeds, then a new breed catches my fancy and I have to have them . . . familiar refrain to poultry hobbyists.
A few years back I emailed and offered to send some chicks of breeds/colors he did not have, no strings attached. It just sort of grew from that, I probably sent him 200 - 300 chicks this year, some of varieties I sent before, but these were Marek's vaccinated, so hopefully will survive better for him. He really wants to select for Marek's resistance, but you first need a healthy line of broodstock to produce large numbers of chicks to raise without vaccination, keeping the survivors from each generation. I've done that for several years and lose a lot fewer Legbars now than in the past, but started vaccinating to make life easier overall.
Unless someone wants to breed something that Sand Hill is the only source for, I think it is better to find an alternate source and breed those, then send chicks or eggs to Glen for him to grow out and compare to his lines. For example, he has a line of Legbars from before I sent him my stock that came from Greenfire (Jill Rees line). Now he has mine integrated into his line and his line is not very closely related to mine at all, so if I ever see inbreeding depression, I can get a few from him to outcross. Generally, inbreeding is a far less common problem than you would expect. The best defense is to raise a lot of chicks and cull heavily for anything that seems weak or otherwise not where you are going. Well bred lines can handle decades of inbreeding and only seem to get better.
