Quantity over quality in most cases...and with that many birds on location u hve inbreeding and fence hopping im sure!
Quantity over quality - definitely. Fence hopping is possible, although you can have no instance of fence hopping and still wind up with chickens that have poor type and size and do not come close to the Standard.
No chicken is perfect, even a show chicken. So when you have a chicken with a flaw (which all chickens do) and you breed it indiscriminately to a chicken with a similar flaw, rather than balancing out the problem and hopefully coming up with offspring that has improvement in that flawed area, you wind up with offspring that have flaws worse than their parents. This indiscriminate breeding just continues until color is often the only thing that is similar to what it should be.
Since chicken genetics are more complicated than the simplest Mendelian genetics, it is very easy to wind up with not-so-great birds even when you have carefully bred the best birds you have. This is why hatchery birds decline so quickly - it takes careful observation and planning specific breeding in order to maintain and/or improve birds. Hatcheries can't make money if they do this - they just wouldn't get enough eggs laid and hatched if they bred to the Standard of Perfection.
Even when you get chickens from breeders, you still aren't guaranteed that what you get will be close to the SOP. Found this out personally and decided not to even breed one color of the chickens we have because their type was so bad even though they supposedly came from good stock originally. It would take way too long to try to improve the flaws in them if we were to breed them - just not worth it.
Because no chicken is perfect, and people get angry that the eggs or chicks that they got from a breeder aren't perfect, there are some breeders that will only sell adult birds so that they can be picky about choosing birds closest to the SOP to sell.
Many people will say they have this line or that line of birds. But the reality is that unless you have continued to breed to the standard (including the traits that the original breeder bred for), saying you have a particular line of birds is moot. Once you start breeding them, they are your line of birds and the offspring will show your breeding choices, not necessarily the breeding choices of the famous breeder that originally had them. It doesn't take long for a line of birds to look different from the line they originally came from.
Most people don't notice the difference in standard-bred vs nonstandard-bred chickens since people's eyes are drawn to the coloring of birds first and not necessarily their size and type. Once you start learning the SOP and realizing that there are many components that make up a chicken's breed besides color, you get this "aha" moment and are amazed at the differences in chickens, particularly standard-bred (aka heritage) chickens. When you can recognize black and white photos of chickens, rather than going by color, you really notice the difference.
