As folks have suggested, you could get a Sussex, a Faverolle, a Buttercup and a Delaware, all from breeders [not hatcheries] who are selecting for utility fowl, and make sure your NHR roo also comes from a utility strain. Then you keep selecting the healthiest and best birds for your needs: disease and conditions can vary from place to place.
I teach gardening/horticulture and the same tomato, pepper & zucchini seedlings raised by myself perform differently at the three different places I teach: diseases, yield, taste. I make the students save seeds from each site, so they are developing strains that hopefully will tolerate better the stresses, especially the races of disease organisms, that haunt that particular site.
In some of my earlier posts, I quoted from a book on Poultry Breeding & Genetics by Roy P. Crawford where he writes of pure breeds like Light Brahmas, Brown Leghorns, Wyandottes etc. [i.e. breeds of various conformation] all having breeder flocks that surpassed the best known modern hybrids in egg-laying records!! (pp.1035-36) Unfortunately, these flocks, he says, were left to decline for lack of interest or other causes. This was in the era between WWI & II. What a great loss.
I belong to a game fowl association, simply because I am very keen on the O-shamo and Asil as meat parents. They have known qualities:
1. inheritance of meat quality
e highly-prized Hinai-Jidori of Japan has O-shamo as papa
2. inheritance of vigor: take look at the forum Naked Heels!! 33 inches tall!
3. Appropriately aggressive for outdoor culture: when bred into a relatively quiet breed like a Faverolle, and socialized thoughtfully from birth, an O-shamo rooster is an asset. In any case, he is not going to be running loose, his strong-heeled progeny are.
4. Strong heels, good scratching behavior, good flight responses- fly up into trees to avoid large predators.
5. Unlike Asils, relatively good layer:so mating with another good layer breed will not harm egg production goals.
6. Good mothering instinct: so that trait remains intact/reinforced throughout the breeding effort. These moms will murder anything like snakes, mice, possums. Asils will murder much bigger beings!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you just gotta see one in action!! I just hate the idea of chickens fighting chicken or any blood sport for human pleasure or profit, but the sheer courage and strength of these birds against a natural enemy attacking their babies is something else.
These are just thoughts--- nice discussing them with fellow enthusiasts. This IS for the long haul: my dream would focus on 3 breeds, meat quality being my goal, as I said earlier.
Fav x NHR = ZZ + Males
ZZ x O-shamo = QQ
backcross once, just for to see? or cross to layer breed lik RIR, Production Browns??
Fav x QQ = ?
BTW, I read that Japanese quail return 8% of their weight as eggs, compared to 3% for chicken. They also need approx. 25% protein in their diet, compared to approx. 17% for chicken.
