when to get new hens

[papeine]

Quote:
The production reds and sex links might need replaced, but the rest should keep going for another couple of years at least. You have 8 heritage breeds and get about 4 to 8 eggs out of 12, which sounds like the production hens have layed themselves out and the rest have slowed down a bit.

thanks sounds like the heritage breeds are better for egg layers... or lat least last longer..

 

[JodyJo]

4-8 is not a good number, I have 12 laying girls and get if not 12 a day, 10...they are young though, 26 weeks...its up to you, but I would replace a few like the other posters have said, depends on what you want your girls for...

 

[Ridgerunner]

Don't be too quick to make a blanket judgement. You need to look at the individual hens more than their breed or you could make a disappointing mistake.

I'm assuming you have hatchery birds.

With chickens, unless you reinforce good traits every generation, you can lose that trait in one or two generations. How the chickens lay depends on how their parents have been selected to lay. It is inherited. What breed they are has little to do with it. How their parents have been selected has a lot to do with it.

There are commercial laying chickens out there that have been bred to lay a lot of big eggs consistently. These are not bred to lay for a long time and can burn out after a couple of years. Some hatcheries may sell these as production reds or sex links, but usually they will advertise them as what they are and charge a bit more for them. You probably don't have any of these.

Not all hatcheries have the same business plan or method of operating, but what a lot of them do is replace their flocks that lay the hatching eggs every year. This process does not select hens for long productive lives no matter what the breed. It selects hens that lay well their first year. That does not mean they are going to burn out real quick like the commercial breeds, but it does not reinforce longevity.

Some hatcheries have special flocks to produce their production reds and sex links, especially the production reds. This is probably more for feather sexing the chicks than anything else, but you could get birds that are more highly specialized. Some hatcheries though, will just take some chickens from their regular breeding flocks to make sex links, say a Rhode Island Red rooster and a Barred Rock hen to make Black Sex Links. These are not going to lay any better than a hen from the parent RIR or BR flocks. Oh, you might get a bit of hybrid vigor, but you are not really going to get that super chicken like the commercial layers. No more hybrid vigor than you would get by crossing RIR's from unrelated flocks, but you can get a boost. Don't forget that the parents of these sex links are being bred for good egg laying, so their offspring will also be good egg layers.

There are breed tendencies. I'll not deny that. But how their parents have been selected is much more important than the breed. An example, not from egg laying but maybe it will help show my point. I recently saw an article with photos where a breeder took birds from one flock and separated them into two different flocks. With one, he selected his breeders for large size. With the other flock, he selected them for small size. It did not say how many generations it took, but the average weight in one flock was now 9 times as heavy as the average weight in the other flock. These flocks are both purebreeds from the same ancestors. This shows how important selecting the parents are as opposed to going by breed.

If you are making a selection of which ones to keep or replace, I suggest you try to deternine which ones are actually laying instead of relying on blanket judgments.