Which poultry hatchery has the best quality birds?

[springvalley123]

Hoover's supplies the local TCS.
They get purebred chicks until September then it is just chicks and ducklings. No breeds. If that is the case it means they just turn all chickens / ducks together and collect the eggs . The produce will not be pure.

They do not just let all the chickens and ducks run together and collect the eggs. Generally when any hatchery just sells an assortment direct to customers, it means they don't have enough of each breed hatching to guarantee large numbers of a specific breed. When they sell an assortment to a store, it means that the store wanted to offer an assortment. The hatcheries generally can't band each bird as they box them, when selling assortments. It's not that they don't know which breeds they are, up until the time they box them.

 

[dusta]

Sorry, I was writing about the local store and report of the manager. If you saw the poultry you would know they were not pure but mixed. The ducks I bought from them were definitely crossed. Nothing pure about them.
I have ordered from Cackle many times. They have a barnyard special and they are crossbred hens.

 

[NatJ]

I have ordered from Cackle many times. They have a barnyard special and they are crossbred hens.

Do you mean these?
https://www.cacklehatchery.com/product/heavy-barnyard-special/
https://www.cacklehatchery.com/product/backward-barnyard-special/

Both of those say, "No choice of breed or assortment and is Hatchery Choice"

Quite a few hatcheries offer assortments similar to that.

It means that you get multiple kinds of chicks in the same box, and you do not get to choose what breed of chicks they are. Each chick is a pure breed, or one of the specific hybrids or mixes that the hatchery sells.

So no, they are not letting the chicken breeds mix at random. It just means that after they fill all the orders for specific breeds, they take the extra chcks of each breed and pack them up for the assortments.

It's like if someone filled a box of mixed fruit: they put in apples and oranges and bananas, but you never find something that is an apple-banana cross.

Hoover's supplies the local TCS.
They get purebred chicks until September then it is just chicks and ducklings. No breeds. If that is the case it means they just turn all chickens / ducks together and collect the eggs . The produce will not be pure.

No, that is not what it usually means. It usually means that every chick is a pure breed, or a specific kind of hybrid, but then many different chicks get put in a box together and sent to the store. They collect the eggs from the same breed-specific pens they use at any other time of the year. If you get chicks from such an assortment, you can come on here and post photos and people can help identify which breeds they are.

Hoovers has this duck assortment:
https://hoovershatchery.com/mixedducklings.html
They give a list of what breeds might be in the assortment. Each individual duckling is a purebred, but the box contains a mix.

And they have several assortments of chickens.

Yes, each of those hatcheries sells some chickens that could be considered mixed breeds: the Easter Eggers and various specific Egger types, and the Sexlink production hybrids. But each of those is a mix created for a specific purpose, not a random mix from turning all the breeds into a big pen together.

Sorry, I was writing about the local store and report of the manager. If you saw the poultry you would know they were not pure but mixed. The ducks I bought from them were definitely crossed. Nothing pure about them.

Your ducks: do you mean that each one is a different breed from the others? That is normal. Or do you mean that each specific duck is from a mating of two different breeds? That is not normal when buying from a hatchery.

If you cannot tell what breed of ducks yours are, you could try posting a picture in the "what breed or gender" forum and see if someone there can identify it. Having a duck that is an actual mix of breeds, that came from Hoovers or Cackle or any other hatchery, would be quite unusual. (Yes, it could happen. But it would mean a mistake on their part, to let the wrong birds get together, and is not what they try to do.)

 

[3KillerBs]

It's like if someone filled a box of mixed fruit: they put in apples and oranges and bananas, but you never find something that is an apple-banana cross.

An excellent analogy.