When the food is chicken scratch, ...

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

When the food is chicken scratch (low-density expensive feed), a heritage breed like minorca, australorp, sussex, plymouth rock, campine overlays by far a commercial brown layer.
When the food is layer feed (high-density expensive feed), the brown layer becomes the queen, but the others lay good too.
Why?
Genetical modification?

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

Oh I made a mistake.....Chicken scratch is cheap.

 

[Chris2018]

When the food is chicken scratch (low-density expensive feed), a heritage breed like minorca, australorp, sussex, plymouth rock, campine overlays by far a commercial brown layer.
When the food is layer feed (high-density expensive feed), the brown layer becomes the queen, but the others lay good too.
Why?
Genetical modification?

Fist where are the heritage breeds coming from? Most if not all "heritage" breeds from hatcheries are more a production fowl that resembles the heritage breeds. Also I don't know to many true heritage breeds that do well on pure scratch grain. They would have to have lots of pasture time in order to do so.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

My chicken farming family was into pastured chicken raising but this was before I was born. By the time I came on the scene we had abandoned pastured chicken farming. However there were large chicken farming enterprises at my current home up until about 1960. They went you know what? because pastured chicken is un-economical and a money losing preposition from the very get-go, unless you have a large population of agricultural ignoramuses with more money than they have brains. Pastured chicken in fact is the reason that an early 20th Century politician was elected President on the platform of "A car in every garage, and a chicken in every pot!" Chicken was the meat of the wealthy. Just like pork was once the meat of the poor or downtrodden.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

Fist where are the heritage breeds coming from? Most if not all "heritage" breeds from hatcheries are more a production fowl that resembles the heritage breeds. Also I don't know to many true heritage breeds that do well on pure scratch grain. They would have to have lots of pasture time in order to do so.

All the so called Heritage breeds are or once were production breeds of one flavor or the other that were made obsolete by the amazing advances in chicken husbandry of the last 100 years.

 

[snow5164]

When the food is chicken scratch (low-density expensive feed), a heritage breed like minorca, australorp, sussex, plymouth rock, campine overlays by far a commercial brown layer.
When the food is layer feed (high-density expensive feed), the brown layer becomes the queen, but the others lay good too.
Why?
Genetical modification?

I think the hybrid layer requires more protein to lay effectively, scratch is not enough for these once a day layers . They deplete their body weight to lay all those egg for you and if they don’t get built up again they will not produce and they will die ... hybrids are sad and cruel ( my opinion)

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

Fist where are the heritage breeds coming from? Most if not all "heritage" breeds from hatcheries are more a production fowl that resembles the heritage breeds. Also I don't know to many true heritage breeds that do well on pure scratch grain. They would have to have lots of pasture time in order to do so.

From a hatchery, a big trustworthy hatchery in Greece.
They have room for ranging.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

I think the hybrid layer requires more protein to lay effectively, scratch is not enough for these once a day layers . They deplete their body weight to lay all those egg for you and if they don’t get built up again they will not produce and they will die ... hybrids are sad and cruel ( my opinion)

They live an average of 7 yrs old on my coop and I had a commercial white leghorn roo (hy-line 98), which managed to live 14 years old.
The point is that they lay only when the food is high-density chicken feed, while the heritage breeds overlay them when the food is low-density chicken feed.
Keeping heritage breeds is more sustainable in hobby farming.

 

[Mitsos Lamprogiorgos]

I just had the official answer in my e-mail to the company.
Hybrids need much more calcium and vitamin D than the heritage layers because their bones are of a decreased size. They made them so small so their bones can't "sacrifice" calcium to create the egg shell.