Vote for the best HYBRID layer!!!

[chickengeorgeto]

Too be fair you can make a first generation cross and if you have enough life remaining or some other way to carry on the breeding program you can set your crossbreed chickens as a strain or breed that is if you have enough money and hired help to keep and breed enough birds so as to get a good selection to choose your brood stock from. Something else that no one seems to want to talk about is that you'll need to be heartless as all get out because in the beginning you will need to cull, cull, cull, cull and then cull some more.
Look at pictures of White Leghorns and tell me how many different colors you see. I'm betting that you will see both white legged and yellow legged Leghorns but rarely a blood line that consistently produces both a white and a yellow legged bird.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

Eggzactly! There are several breeds that do this quite well & what we plan to focus on in the future.

Focus on having a coop with paternal stock and a coop with the childrem.
Always cross two different breeds to give hybrid vigor to the children and to help the biodiversity maintain.
As an example, you can create your own sex links by crossing black leghorns over barred rocks or buff orpingtons (the english ones) over light sussex.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

Too be fair you can make a first generation cross and if you have enough life remaining or some other way to carry on the breeding program you can set your crossbreed chickens as a strain or breed that is if you have enough money and hired help to keep and breed enough birds so as to get a good selection to choose your brood stock from. Something else that no one seems to want to talk about is that you'll need to be heartless as all get out because in the beginning you will need to cull, cull, cull, cull and then cull some more.
Look at pictures of White Leghorns and tell me how many different colors you see. I'm betting that you will see both white legged and yellow legged Leghorns but rarely a blood line that consistently produces both a white and a yellow legged bird.

Leghorns have yellow legs, which later become white because the yellow color of the legs and of the beak is drained to colorize the egg yolks and make them "rich".
There is no point to cross terminal layers with a white leghorn rooster and I believe that it is a bit immoral to use rooster from the company X to layers of the company Y (I have done it in the past and they were my best hatch), because you "steal" what a geneticist is doing by working more than 16 hours a day to improve the layers.
You can use the white pullets to create your own red-shouldered piles (USING BROWN LEGHORNS TOO). You can use them to create your own easter eggers.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

A hybrid means crossing 2 or more separate breeds together when it comes to chickens. Crossing different strains of the same breed does not create a hybrid. When different strains of Leghorns are bred together for the purpose of increasing production, and some other breed characteristics are ignored, then those birds are production Leghorns, not hybrid Leghorns. Red sex links, California grays, California whites, Austrawhites, etc. are examples of hybrids with Leghorns as one parents.

As far the best producers among the hybrid layers goes, it really depends on what you want. Here, brown eggs fetch a better price than white eggs. If I was interested in shear quantity, as well as feed to lay ratio, then red sex links would be the best choice. And they are all similar, in my opinion-- the hatcheries do a good job of maintaining productivity in their red sex links, regardless of the brand name used.

Personally, I prefer black sex links to red. They are calmer, prettier, and lay larger eggs even if they don't lay quite so many. And they seem to have less problems with blowout and other reproductive disorders that are prevalent in the layer hybrids.

Sapphire Gems look like a good option, too.

Sapphire Gems are the best choice for pinkish brown eggs.
They are dominant blue d107, a hybrid created in Chech Republic and they are sex-linked by color, they are sth like a blue SL plymouth rock.
I was hatching them for years and they had extremely high hatching rates and excellent livability and adaptability in harsh conditions.
They lay excellent for many years, their egg size is optimum and they just eat a bit more than a hy-line brown which is so small and has the best feed to egg conversion rate than any other layer of brown eggs in the world.
Their official link is here:
https://dominant-cz.cz/produkt/dominant-blue-d-107/?lang=en

 

[The Moonshiner]

Looks like this thread has jumped the tracks.
I'd have a hard time answering the question because IMO sex links and production birds shouldn't be in the same sentence as sustainable or balanced.
Then there's the debate of what a hybrid is.
Outside of chickens I'd always thought a hybrid was a cross of two species like horse/donkey or lion/tiger. Crossing two different breeds I thought was just cross breeds.
Idk it seems that certain specific chicken breed crosses get labeled as hybrids, others as crossed or mixed breeds while yet others get named as if they're a breed themselves.
Another thing to consider is that the OP is from Greece. Birds over there are a far cry from what's in the US. Most everything the OP is talking about are these big company layer creations. They're a lot like some of our high production trademarked layers or our cornish meat birds.
I wouldn't consider any of their leghorn types to be leghorns and I'd bet the OP could never go pick up a leghorn there that is like our standard leghorns.
I can see his point of calling them hybrids just because there's different ideas of what constitutes a hybrid. Also with the 4 way crosses of unknown lines who's to say all 4 are even leghorns themselves.
I'd never own one if I was looking for a true leghorn production or otherwise.
Interesting he mentioned the duckwing leghorns there are more of an exhibition bird. It shows just how wide of a gap there is over there between a brown and white leghorn. That's telling in just how far their white leghorns have been removed from the leghorn family.
Hard to argue a point when we're in different worlds.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

Looks like this thread has jumped the tracks.
I'd have a hard time answering the question because IMO sex links and production birds shouldn't be in the same sentence as sustainable or balanced.
Then there's the debate of what a hybrid is.
Outside of chickens I'd always thought a hybrid was a cross of two species like horse/donkey or lion/tiger. Crossing two different breeds I thought was just cross breeds.
Idk it seems that certain specific chicken breed crosses get labeled as hybrids, others as crossed or mixed breeds while yet others get named as if they're a breed themselves.
Another thing to consider is that the OP is from Greece. Birds over there are a far cry from what's in the US. Most everything the OP is talking about are these big company layer creations. They're a lot like some of our high production trademarked layers or our cornish meat birds.
I wouldn't consider any of their leghorn types to be leghorns and I'd bet the OP could never go pick up a leghorn there that is like our standard leghorns.
I can see his point of calling them hybrids just because there's different ideas of what constitutes a hybrid. Also with the 4 way crosses of unknown lines who's to say all 4 are even leghorns themselves.
I'd never own one if I was looking for a true leghorn production or otherwise.
Interesting he mentioned the duckwing leghorns there are more of an exhibition bird. It shows just how wide of a gap there is over there between a brown and white leghorn. That's telling in just how far their white leghorns have been removed from the leghorn family.
Hard to argue a point when we're in different worlds.

There are four steps.

1. Four groups of pedigree white leghorns with an average weight of 2,1-2,5kg for the females, like all the other colorations. They lay like the brown, the black, the red, the pile. In my opinion, red-shouldered pile is the best by far.
2. Grandparents with a smaller body weight than the pedigree.
3. Parents with smaller body weight than the grandparents.
4. Commercial layers ABCD or terminal crosses with the smallest body weight (most companies about 1,4 kg), the smallest appetites, the best layer feed to egg conversion rate and the sooner burn out, especially in cage systems. They lack all the characteristics that make them a pure breed and a good producer of healthy offsprings.
   
   I mainly use hy-line whites (best feed to egg conversion rate in the world) and dominant leghorns d 229 (best response in low-density feed rations, foraging and bad housing, best boiler when gets old). After 20 years of keeping hybrids of more than 20 companies, I chose them for being the best by far.
   
   Hybrid layers are balanced and sustainable because they can burn out sooner and become boilers sooner. You don't gain profit if you slaughter a heritage which is 3 ys old, because heritage layers burn out after the 9th winter.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

The ABCD system creates many animals, like commercial geese, commercial white pekin duck, commercial rourn ducks, commercial jumbo brown quail, commercial RIR (like the strain of dominant CZ), lacaune sheep etc.

The terminal crosses sold to us are designed to produce much better and grow (or burn out for the layers) much faster than the pedigree lines that companies keep for us.

 

[CCUK]

I have both isa brown/warren/red sex link or whatever you like to call them and leghorn hybrid that we call a white star in UK. The white star has both out layed and out lived my Warren's. The eggs imo are better. Larger and a better shell quality. They get fed the same and are in the same coop. I want to try and breed the white stars with an araucana cockerel next year to get some nice big blue eggs!

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

I have both isa brown/warren/red sex link or whatever you like to call them and leghorn hybrid that we call a white star in UK. The white star has both out layed and out lived my Warren's. The eggs imo are better. Larger and a better shell quality. They get fed the same and are in the same coop. I want to try and breed the white stars with an araucana cockerel next year to get some nice big blue eggs!

Very good idea, you will create your own easter eggers. Choose white araucanas to have white easter eggers. Pearl white everything.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

I have both isa brown/warren/red sex link or whatever you like to call them and leghorn hybrid that we call a white star in UK. The white star has both out layed and out lived my Warren's. The eggs imo are better. Larger and a better shell quality. They get fed the same and are in the same coop. I want to try and breed the white stars with an araucana cockerel next year to get some nice big blue eggs!

Leghorns rule the world of poultry.