Vote for the best HYBRID layer!!!

[CCUK]

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

I have a white araucana cockerel! So hopefully the results will be good. The whitestars, even though they are hybrid, produce a good amount of eggs. They seem alot more hardy and haven't had the health issues I have with the Warren's.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

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".

The amount of xanthophyll, omega-3 fatty acids, and meats in a hens diet is the cause of rich egg yokes, or the lack there of. But just to be sure I am including a link to a photo of a white leghorn rooster who has evidently used up all of the pigment in his feet and beak to enrich the egg yokes that this rooster has been laying.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=QZ1GHzS0&id=57367D53EAF2B0A696D976CE2DA94446CAFBBB1E&thid=OIP.QZ1GHzS0uLFaPB2OJu9BCQAAAA&mediaurl=http://www.piwakawakavalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/rooster-1267208_640-225x300.jpg&exph=300&expw=225&q=youtube+white+leghorn+roosters&simid=608043620878647969&selectedIndex=12&ajaxhist=0

 

[The Moonshiner]

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.

Honestly after about the first two sentences of that I lost interest.
Not a fan of those type birds and all that info is boring to read for me.
I did get the last paragraph and you're reason supporting the balanced and sustainable is exactly why I don't see them asbalanced and sustainable.
We're just worlds apart.

 

[The Moonshiner]

But hey on a side note...
We have a saying over here.
"It's all greek to me."
Now I feel like I understand it a little better.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

y

I have a white araucana cockerel! So hopefully the results will be good. The whitestars, even though they are hybrid, produce a good amount of eggs. They seem alot more hardy and haven't had the health issues I have with the Warren's.

You will breed from the paternal araucana rooster, never keep an easter egger rooster.
And hatch only from the pearl white eggs.
Or keep separate for 4-5 days the leghorns to collect the white eggs for hatching.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

The amount of xanthophyll, omega-3 fatty acids, and meats in a hens diet is the cause of rich egg yokes, or the lack there of. But just to be sure I am including a link to a photo of a white leghorn rooster who has evidently used up all of the pigment in his feet and beak to enrich the egg yokes that this rooster has been laying.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=QZ1GHzS0&id=57367D53EAF2B0A696D976CE2DA94446CAFBBB1E&thid=OIP.QZ1GHzS0uLFaPB2OJu9BCQAAAA&mediaurl=http://www.piwakawakavalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/rooster-1267208_640-225x300.jpg&exph=300&expw=225&q=youtube+white+leghorn+roosters&simid=608043620878647969&selectedIndex=12&ajaxhist=0

I think he is black australorp X white leghorn cross.
Leghorns have very deep yellow legs, even the ones coming from big companies.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

But hey on a side note...
We have a saying over here.
"It's all greek to me."
Now I feel like I understand it a little better.

The opposite is the white meat birds, which are in the other side. The parents are capable of reproducing and have a smaller size than the birds which are enormous, grow fast and can't reproduce normally.

I was always keeping females of heritage breeds, because they lay for many years, but it is hard to slaughter a pure-bred chicken, because it will start laying the next spring and it is more expensive and harder to find.

 

[Australorpe]

White leghorns aren't hybrids. They aren't the result of two breeds crossed together to create a mixed breed bird.

The leghorn breed originated in Italy. It comes in several colors. It's accepted by the APA and has a breed standard. Maybe hatcheries are selling hybrid birds under the name of leghorn, but as was said they also sell easter eggers under the name ameraucana, and that's also not true. And really anything you get from a hatchery is going to be a poor representation of its breed.

Or maybe they have their own lines or strains of leghorn and are, for some reason, calling those hybrids, but those aren't hybrids unless they crossed another breed in at some point. And if that happened, then those birds aren't actually leghorns. There's a hatchery here that's done that - and they sell the resulting hybrids under the name Ideal 236, because they're not leghorns.

As was said, if you have actual white leghorns and you cross them to another strain of white leghorns, you haven't made a mixed breed hybrid, you've only made a flock of leghorns with more genetic diversity than before.

Info on the breed:

https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/leghorn

As to the original question, none of the high production breeds or hybrids are really what I would consider sustainable, since broodiness has been bred out of them to increase egg production. You'd need to keep either a second breed that does go broody or an incubator to continue to propagate them on your farm. Short of that, you'd have to keep buying new birds to replace the old as they stop laying.

If I was shooting for sustainable on a homestead, I wouldn't be looking at any of these breeds. Rather, I would be looking at a breed that both lays decently and will hatch its own chicks.

I have leghorn, black Australorpe, buff Orpington, barred rock, red sex link and my own sex link cross.
I have silkies too. I have a barred rock went broody and I also have an incubator. I have a leghorn hybrid, it’s completely white. I have no idea what the rooster was. But it’s not very big but has been laying hog arr we hold now. I’m going to make more and cross it with buff Orpington

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

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

If you use seeds of a plant called pimpinella anisum in the chicken feed (about 7% in their feed), leghorns do hatch eggs naturally. You can also leave some eggs in the nests and make nests darker by covering them.