This episode is a must-listen for anyone keen to better understand dual-purpose poultry breeds and their benefits. Get ready to expand your insights into the world of egg and meat production, as we explore the differences and nuances between heritage, standard, and show-quality breeds. We reveal the importance of selecting strong layers and share our top tips for transitioning between breeding generations.
We embark on a discussion about heritage poultry breeds and standards, shedding light on the complexities and intricacies of this fascinating topic. Navigate the often-confusing world of terminologies such as 'heritage poultry' and 'antique tag,' learning the implications and issues that surround them. Uncover the vital importance of maintaining balance and proportion in your poultry breeding endeavors and explore the potential consequences of breeding for size alone.
Finally, we delve into the ethical considerations of hatching eggs, particularly the challenge of handling the surplus males that result. Be prepared for surprising insight into the staggering number of extra males that result from urban flock keeping. This episode will leave you enriched with poultry breeding insights and equipped to make informed decisions in your poultry pursuits. Enjoy!
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Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
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This episode is a must-listen for anyone keen to better understand dual-purpose poultry breeds and their benefits. Get ready to expand your insights into the world of egg and meat production, as we explore the differences and nuances between heritage, standard, and show-quality breeds. We reveal the importance of selecting strong layers and share our top tips for transitioning between breeding generations.
We embark on a discussion about heritage poultry breeds and standards, shedding light on the complexities and intricacies of this fascinating topic. Navigate the often-confusing world of terminologies such as 'heritage poultry' and 'antique tag,' learning the implications and issues that surround them. Uncover the vital importance of maintaining balance and proportion in your poultry breeding endeavors and explore the potential consequences of breeding for size alone.
Finally, we delve into the ethical considerations of hatching eggs, particularly the challenge of handling the surplus males that result. Be prepared for surprising insight into the staggering number of extra males that result from urban flock keeping. This episode will leave you enriched with poultry breeding insights and equipped to make informed decisions in your poultry pursuits. Enjoy!
You can email us at - poultrykeeperspodcast@gmail.com
Join our Facebook Groups:
Poultry Keepers Podcast -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/907679597724837
Poultry Keepers 360 - - https://www.facebook.com/groups/354973752688125
Poultry Breeders Nutrition - https://www.facebook.com/groups/4908798409211973
Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
https://www.youtube.com/@PoultryKeepersPodcast/featured
Hi, welcome to the poultry keepers podcast. I'm john gunterman and, together with mandolin royal and rips talby, where your co-hosts for the show and is our mission to help you have a happy, healthy and productive flock.
Speaker 2:We're gonna be talking about dual purpose poultry today. What does dual purpose poultry truly mean? Well, coming up, we're going to explore that concept of dual purpose poultry breeds and if you think about it, it can have more than one meaning. So let's get started with. John will pick on you first. What's your definition of a dual purpose poultry breed?
Speaker 1:One that is going to be useful for both Eggs and meat. It's about as simple as I can make it. Okay, mandolin, what's yours?
Speaker 3:Well for our flock. I'm a big fan of the eggs and the meat, but there can be more than just those two purposes and some of the other options that there are. You can have ornamental birds that lay really well. You can have Birds that you can breed forward yourself, which will be the pure breads rather than hybrids, and that in itself is its own purpose. So it's not just the meat nags, but at least two purposes would make them dual purpose, at least to me.
Speaker 1:And you're all about the show well, not really.
Speaker 2:I will confess that I used to be a show guy, but in the last fifteen or so years I began to see what was happening to a lot of our standard bread breeds. They were being bred for showroom only. There was no consideration given To me, qualities or a quality, and I, you know, I thought this is really sad. We need to do something about this. But I'm on the bandwagon of this whole dual purpose concept, like mandolin and like you, john it's. If we're going to have birds, they need to not only look good but they need to produce good. Now, whether that's meat or whether that's eggs, so be it. But yeah, bird dual purpose breeds can serve more than one purpose, like mandolin says.
Speaker 1:Something I noticed in the standard of perfection getting ready for this episode. I wanted to pull it out cuz I never recalled seeing an egg count In the breed standards. I looked up shanticle and I've got a cockerel and a hen. Wait, and you know all that data, but it doesn't tell me that you know my bird should be a two fifty to two seventy five year layer.
Speaker 2:No, and it's always been that way in the standard john, from the time it was first written, back in the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1:Well, I think a lot of this points to the first Section of the sop where talks about production qualities. That that's always been kind of. A gap in my knowledge is what should I be shooting for for eggs per year out of? My shanta claire tells me very clearly my size ranges and what the body should look like and what the fleshing should be like and All that. But you know, other than conversing with other shanta claire breeders and saying, hey, what are your egg sizes and what it's your weekly and yearly production? That's pretty much all I have to go by.
Speaker 2:I agree with you. There's some historical references for some breeds, like rood island reds. For example, back in the twenties and thirties there were some rood island reds that were hitting Three hundred eggs. They were record breakers, but they were also kind of pretty much the exception to the rule. But it shows the potential for what some of these breeds can do.
Speaker 3:Well, that potential is what you can breed for. So if you've got a flock of twenty five females and you monitor their rate of lay and then you monitor that for their first season of laying, then you can select out the ones who are your strongest layers and those are the ones that you hatch from. If you're hatching from your poor layers, you're just gonna get more poor layers, unless the mail brought some improvement in that regard. But each generation you still have to go through those girls and figure out who your strongest layers are. If you are looking to improve that and I don't worry too much about what other flocks are doing or what the breed is supposed to do, but I'm only looking at Our own flock and what they're doing and selecting off of that, because some flocks aren't gonna have that laying trade in there strongly. But you can certainly improve it.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, you know an old poultry breeder who had One of the largest commercial white legged and hatcheries in the country, monroe Babcock, and he told me one time. He said, if you really want to improve your birds rate of lay with out Trap nesting, he said just don't send any eggs. They're laid after 10 o'clock in the morning. He said your better layers Are gonna be laid before 10. They come off that roost, they eat a bite and they get right down to business. They lay an egg and then they're off and out and ranging around doing chickening things as Mandolin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was a big topic, a conversation in the last podcast episodes. They do, so let's touch briefly on the difference. I hear the terms heritage and and Standard and dual purpose thrown around, but I believe there is a distinct difference between some of these terms.
Speaker 2:There is, for example, mandolin. I've got a question for you and John Does the term heritage poultry mean to you guys?
Speaker 3:to me, it means that it's a older, well-established, purebred bird. It doesn't imply anything about what they're for or what they look like. It's just age of the breed and how long it's been running. That's what heritage to me means.
Speaker 2:John.
Speaker 1:I would go with that with the caveat that heritage has also come to mean a certain level of care and handling and Transition between the generations, so to speak, where a breeders you know been breeding for a while and getting ready to retire and will help start somebody else up and they're continuing the heritage of that line or breed.
Speaker 1:We get a little esoteric there, but I think that I think that's a huge part of it, because you can't expect to take, you know, a bunch of chicks from some random person and have them instantly work for you in your environment. So having that connection Really helps, and that's usually a regional thing. I mean, you'll notice that certain birds just seem to be grown in certain areas. There's breeds named after states, so you know, there's a, there's a lot of credence there, I believe.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of implication about the term heritage and it's used like it's been around Since almost day one. Okay, when do you think the term heritage poultry wasn't was coined?
Speaker 1:I think I want to blame Joel salad. Erg, thank Joel Salatin. I think he was part of, I think he was part of that resurgence, but it I don't know.
Speaker 2:Madeline, you want to take a shot at it. There's a specific year when it came into being.
Speaker 3:Oh gosh, I don't know. But if I had to guess maybe I don't even know what to guess Just tell me I said 1952.
Speaker 1:I believe 1952 for everything.
Speaker 2:The year 2000 that recent.
Speaker 3:I was born between the early 1900s and maybe Around the 50s or 60s, after the commercial stuff hit the scene.
Speaker 2:I didn't know it was that recent very recent, when the reason that it came about and and the livestock conservancy Was the people that brought it about as a way to market old poultry breeds. There was a back about. Then, you know, there was this huge influx of heirloom seeds Pass along, seeds, heritage, this heritage that well, they just jumped on the bandwagon and coined heritage all fits great.
Speaker 1:So Thanks for that because it's really it's helped. You know they, they the timing and the naming and everything I think was so perfect when the livestock conservancy started with the, the buckeye restoration project. I mean, I think it was a perfect confluence and you know that the community was ready for this restoration, hungry for that knowledge.
Speaker 3:And I'm not convinced that using the term standard bread poultry really highlights on the heritage, because some of these breeds are they're hundreds of years old.
Speaker 1:And some of them are just well. What's the newest breed in the standard?
Speaker 3:I hope rip knows.
Speaker 2:I was just going to share an example with you and where the term heritage has not helped. Okay, the the way that the term heritage is defined is that it's a breed that was in the existence prior to 1950. Okay, or not in existence. It was a breed that was recognized by the american poultry association prior to 1950. That covered, at that point, pretty much all the breeds in the apa standard of perfection. But we've had other breeds come along, morons, for example. That breed has been in existence well before 1950, but it's not been recognized by the apa until just about 15 years ago. So it doesn't qualify to use the term heritage poultry, which I think is an absolute, crying shame.
Speaker 3:I think so too, because it goes way back into france hundreds of years hundreds of years.
Speaker 2:And there's other breeds too that have come over. You know leg bars, and, and you know we could go on and on and on, but they could legally never use the term heritage poultry.
Speaker 3:No, it's controlled like that, like trademark or.
Speaker 2:USDA. Geez thanks.
Speaker 3:I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 1:Now that's kind of like going to get an antique tag for your car. You know it used to be. If your car was 25 years old, they gave you an antique tag and you can only drive it on Sundays or for parades or for mechanical purposes. But you know there was some. You got some special privileges, like a reduced rate of registration.
Speaker 3:We're gonna start going into a completely different conversation. I know, I know, but what?
Speaker 1:is an antique, so that that's our frame of reference at least.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk a bit about how the standard, the written breed standard, bills the bird and there's some common terms like widths, depths, links, fleshing that aren't tightly defined. Okay, and so the best advice I can give to folks is it's relative to the breed you're working on. Don't compare your breed to another breed. For example, madeleine breeds breast. Okay, madeleine, what does the standard car for in the breast back the width?
Speaker 3:They want broad and broad is going to be subjective and they want a long back.
Speaker 3:And that length is going to be subjective because when they start throwing around those terms, to me it means that you're comparing the birds to each other and looking for who's meeting that definition. And it's not so much about getting the absolute longest and the absolute widest and broadest birds, because you still have to maintain balance, because if you see one that's got a long back, but then you take a couple steps back and really look at that bird, if that length shows Like as the strongest feature, then it's too long, like you have to maintain balance and perspective when you're looking at what those terms could mean for the bird that's in front of you.
Speaker 2:All the other parts of a bird have got to work in harmony.
Speaker 1:Well, we're always talking about balance.
Speaker 3:So, you're still drawing the line straight up from the legs, and are we balanced?
Speaker 1:And then, if that works, all the other pieces just seem to fit. Yeah, so when you've got that, when something's off something's wonky and you go something's off here.
Speaker 2:You know, if we were to, and using breast as an example, if we were to compare back width on breast to the back width on legger.
Speaker 3:That'd be so different, oh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but they're basically described the same way, but they don't look the same way other amongst their flock exactly can't compare one breed Standard to another breed.
Speaker 1:Even if the words cross over the, the basic mechanics are going to be different.
Speaker 2:It's a different Exactly right, and here's another touchy subject for some people the importance of the breeds standard weight. And my mentor told me something years ago. He said, son, weight and size are two very different things.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah and I was. I was a little confused at that, but I have come to know that that is a gospel truth and and, mandolin, I know you talked about it in some of your videos and some of your writings that we can get a breed too large, we can get them too heavy and then they lose that purpose for which the breed was created, am I not right?
Speaker 3:No, you're absolutely right, because if you focus too hard on one thing about them, it doesn't take too terribly long to have them outperforming on the one thing and underperforming elsewhere and with your breed.
Speaker 1:It specifies the very fine bone structure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's gonna be easy.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be pretty easy to grow the bird too big for it to support itself if you're not careful and you just Breed for size only. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yes, and they can start to lose their proportions and they can start to get lazier, and then the growth rate can change too, because I noticed that there can be about three different Ways that they will grow and those three ways that they grow have an impact on what they're gonna look like and how they're gonna do so. Some of the birds that shoot up in growth for heights, once you get your hands on them you feel heavier, thicker bone, not much meat. They look wonky and gangly for a long time and it changes your harvest window Because they need so much more time to flesh back in after that growth spurt of heightened bone and it changes from like a 16 week processing to like 20, 22 weeks if they have that Tall giraffe growth rate. I call it like a turkey growth rate because heritage turkeys grow that way.
Speaker 3:Versus birds are gonna be shorter legged, more compact, with a finer, more delicate bone. They have a much easier time of retaining their flushing for the duration of growth which opens up when you're able to harvest them. And you can even start harvesting earlier if you need to so far the earliest I've done it is 14 weeks, and that was a very respectable result. It was what like three pounds and some change, and it was reflected in more flushing than bone.
Speaker 1:Well, you're very familiar with Bantams. Do you think a Bantam could be a dual purpose bird?
Speaker 3:I haven't tried it but I'm fascinated. I love Bantams. There's little chatty little boys and they have so much to say and they're perky. Bantams are fun, fun little birds and I've seen instances of some very nice dual purpose looking ones in the Bantam, shanta clear and Bantam, new Hampshire. I've seen people using silks for that, for the medicinal soup that comes from the black skin, black meat type of birds. Silks can be dual purpose.
Speaker 2:You know I had. Of course I've raised a lot of different breeds over the years, but I had Primus rock Bantams and line dot Bantams and Rhode Island red Bantams that laid an astonishing amount of eggs and they were very, very meaty carcasses as well.
Speaker 1:Kid, can you explain what a Bantam is inherently? Is it just a small, somebody selected for a smaller, progressively smaller, or did they breed out to something to get that smaller size and then select?
Speaker 2:back to it. Some naturally Bantam size breeds, seabratch for example. That was a naturally occurring Bantam and While most breeds have a large fowl and a Bantam component, not all you know Seabratch. There is no large fowl. Seabratch, there is no large fowl. Nankins, it's Bantam only. And Basically, one way to look at it is that a Bantam bird is a. If there's both, as there's large fowl and Bantam, a Bantam bird should be a Duplicate of its large fowl counterpart. Okay, there shouldn't. They should not look different.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the proportions should look the same Sort of like with miniature horses. When you look at a picture of a miniature horse, it should not look small, it should look just like the big one.
Speaker 1:Right, if there wasn't a tall person in the picture, you wouldn't know it was a miniature.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's proportions that do that.
Speaker 2:But as a rule of thumb, you know, bantams should be one-fifths the size, roughly, of their large fowl counterpart.
Speaker 1:Okay, but how did they get there, did I?
Speaker 2:guess my question. There there was various routes. Okay, Sometimes they would cross a large fowl into a Bantam bird. For example, I talked with Kenny Bowles one time. Kenny was a longtime breeder of New Hampshire large fowl but he is originator of New Hampshire Bantams and I asked him one time how he did that and he told me that he started out by crossing a New Hampshire large fowl with the Rhode Island red Bantam.
Speaker 3:That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Keep the color and then just just Continual selection. Okay, sure, for the smaller side bird that looked like New Hampshire's and not Rhode Island red, but that that happens on a fairly regular basis.
Speaker 1:Okay they're working on Bantam Marans and I've seen one of the the regular posters on the poultry keepers 360 Facebook page. I don't know if I can throw him under the bus, but Timothy Juergens, his shanticleer Bantams are gorgeous. I know him from the shanticleer fanciers as well.
Speaker 3:Oh, they're very tidy little birds. And then when I saw he posted for the dressing out, oh, that was beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, those were really neat pictures, for sure.
Speaker 3:It makes me want some again.
Speaker 1:It makes me, you know, load that I have such small capacity here. I can hatch, I can hatch large, but I carry over small well, that's, that's one of the advantage of bannum.
Speaker 2:They don't require the amount of infrastructure To maintain a good size flock of them as it does their large-fell counterparts.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, I'm being dragged down the quail road right now, so give me, give me about December 16th, and then I might be ready for a new project.
Speaker 2:You heard it here, folks. You heard it here first. What about good egg production numbers? Madeline, you probably have more experience of this than anybody working to get their numbers, egg numbers, up. What are you thought? What would be an ideal tough in number of eggs per hen per year and breast?
Speaker 3:I like to see at least 250 and I've been monitoring my fall hatch birds from last season and they are now at the 150 mark, with another five months to go to track that full year of when they started laying. So I've got to get through winter and see how they perform there before I have the numbers, which I'm excited to see, because they've been troopers all the way until it hit 95 degrees or more than they Took a week off for that, but I still had to that trucked right through it. So those two became my favorites because when they lay during weather changes and daylight changes, if they keep going, those are the best girls. But I I think of it usually more as a weekly number and I am looking for a minimum of five eggs a week from each female.
Speaker 2:Now here's another question for you. What were your production numbers like when you first started?
Speaker 3:They were good enough to sell me on the breed. I was getting that five to six eggs a week and then I had some. Like there was one. She never did lay an egg and that threw me off because she was great otherwise. So we went ahead and paired her with dumplings. But you have to watch out for those birds that aren't productive, so that you can well, naturally they're gonna self select themselves out of the gene pool. There's that, but how long do you want her sitting in the coop taking up roost space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, not only that, eating, yeah, well, yeah it costs a lot to maintain freeloaders.
Speaker 1:So you have but you're starting to pedigree mate now and you're gonna have a tighter track on who's laying how many eggs. Yeah, I've hit that wall where I'm excited to start pair hatching.
Speaker 3:I haven't worked out the kinks yet, but I'm excited to see the data that comes from that, because it's just gonna help me make better Block decisions and get a little more detailed.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I think it will help you move further faster in the future.
Speaker 1:I think if you have a pan of four or five of your best laying females and put your best rooster in there, once you figure all that out and then either trap, nest or not, that gets into a whole nother nightmare. Or Individual pen mating, that's a whole nother. It's a lot of logistics concerns to pedigree mating.
Speaker 3:Well, while I go through that process, what I would do different in my next poultry building, since we are thinking about moving to a larger spread and expanding out on some of what we do. What I learned over this next season is going to let me know how I need to build out things differently on the second go. That'll be exciting.
Speaker 2:The experience in that area is very valuable. Teacher.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, what I've looked for a couple times is just a good blueprint for a poultry breeding house. It seems silly that everybody is constantly reinventing this. A lot of it is what works for you in your space, but kind of a template to work off of would be nice.
Speaker 3:Well, I recently had someone reach out and ask for if this was my barn, what would I do with it? Because he's building a brand new 20 by 30 barn and I said you know what? Let me get some graph paper and I'm going to doodle out a couple options because it fascinates me on the possible efficiency of a setup and I'm not able to go out and build it right now, but he can, so I'm going to go ahead and do a couple of doodles and then he can let me know how it goes.
Speaker 1:Well, if you want to do it in miniature, you've seen what I've been building out in one bay of our two car garage. You know, I've got the quail cubby hatchers and all that.
Speaker 2:You know it can get to be at your lugging water from pin to pin, even dragging a water hose tote and feed. One of the most efficient looking setups I have ever seen. Didn't see it in person because this was back in the late 1920s, but it was designed like a wagon wheel.
Speaker 3:Oh, I've seen that one in the center.
Speaker 2:And the center of all this was his feed storage, his egg collection area, and he had I don't remember now how many pins it was like 12 or 14 pins that radiated out into shape, almost like a pie shape. Ok, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I've seen a lot of barns designed by the shakers round barns because it's very efficient for feed and animals and husbandry.
Speaker 2:But all the maintenance part of it was handled in that center hub. The coop that the birds slept and laid in was in the back end of it, near the center of the hub, and you know it was just a short walk to get cover all those pins.
Speaker 3:I saw a similar design where in the very center of the wheel type of design, that's where they had their stacked brooders right there in the middle. And then they had a feed room inside of that. I think it was more octagon shaped than a circle circle, but it was very efficient.
Speaker 2:What about production abilities? Now, I think we all agree that production really matters, but you know, we've talked about egg numbers. What about egg size? What egg size do you shoot for?
Speaker 3:I won't have anything less than 60 grams.
Speaker 1:John, sorry I stepped on Mandy there. Probably 60 to 65 grams is my hatching window, can you?
Speaker 2:get eggs too big.
Speaker 1:Oh sure.
Speaker 3:I had one other day and I got 103 grams.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good hint to pass that without prolapsing.
Speaker 3:Well, you know bum spacing, she passed it like a champ, but it was definitely a double.
Speaker 1:Double yoke, oh yeah. If they can come over 90 grams.
Speaker 3:It's always always a double or triple yoke.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you've had triples.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't care for that.
Speaker 1:It's like you're missing out on two other eggs there, Missy. Time to dial back on all the goodiness in the scene, don't?
Speaker 3:try so hard. That's not the kind of overachievement we're looking for.
Speaker 2:My mentor always told me, if it's not a large or an extra large, if it's anything besides, those two, don't say it Right, because you'll have problems.
Speaker 1:Well, I've got these old English pheasant fowl that actually somebody's coming to adopt next weekend, but I'm still collecting all the eggs that I can and I want to set them and hatch them regardless. So we'll take what we get and I don't have a frame of reference for egg size because there's just no information I can find on these. Guys Got you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's not much out there on them.
Speaker 2:I would expect, probably based on their size and their ancestry and their history I'm thinking mediums, probably, probably, what they're going to like.
Speaker 3:Back when I had bannums. I was accustomed to them doing an egg every other day. I didn't have any daily layers that were bannum.
Speaker 1:Well for efficiency. I am very astounded at quail their feed conversion ratio. You can't touch it. Chicken good, chicken's very good, especially compared to red meat.
Speaker 2:You know, folks, we've been talking about production numbers and how many eggs and how big of an egg. But getting back to this heritage concept, if you go shopping on online for heritage poultry, I think you need to be aware that most of the lines out there are not going to come close to those kind of numbers. If you're getting them from a local breeder, if you're getting them from a hatchery, you may get those egg numbers but you're not going to get the body size.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a lot of size lost once you get into the hatchery stock because they've been more selected towards that efficient laying. Nine times out of ten you'll get the good laying, but you're not going to get the table trades more often than not.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, I think you're inherently starting at a disadvantage by going with hatchery stock because they're not going to be providing their parent birds with the same level of selection to begin with, nor the same level of nutrition that a real backyard breeder who understands the physiology of the bird is going to do to produce the optimum egg to hatch out. And then we've got shipping on top of that and if you live 17 miles down a dirt road we're going to add a whole lot more trauma to that egg. And yeah, there's this just level of husbandry and care that goes into producing a good egg of the proper size that's going to produce a chick that can grow. Chick is small to start with. It's never going to grow into a big enough bird.
Speaker 3:It may carry the genetic potential, but the bird itself isn't going to show it off.
Speaker 1:Right. So you're going to have to get it. You're going to have to carry them forward enough to get them up to a proper size to start hatching your own and express the genetic potential that's there. So it's at least one season, if not two, before you're even coming close to a proper chick size, to start with, I think.
Speaker 2:I think you know when you're shopping for heritage poultry, if you're buying them from an individual, for most breeds OK, most standard bred breeds you're going to be looking at egg production somewhere around 100 to 150 eggs per hen per year OK, so factor that in. If you have a family afford average family you know how many eggs you're going to consume in a year. Any ideas? It's a family.
Speaker 3:I target a dozen a week.
Speaker 2:It's usually around 1,116 eggs, or 93 dozen eggs in a year. Yeah, that's about what I do For somebody who comes poultry.
Speaker 1:But the average consumer that's going to the grocery store and buying a dozen or two dozen eggs per week as part of their annual grocery is there eating that many. I see, I remember before I was a poultry keeper. I, you know it was like a dozen a week was good. Now I eat a lot more eggs, because we have a lot more eggs and I'm not going to the grocery store and you know, handing up money and buying them and bringing them home.
Speaker 3:Our household when we were buying eggs when my husband was in the military. That's like the only time that I have not had chickens Was when we were moving all the time. But we were doing either an 18 pack or two dozen a week just for the two of us.
Speaker 2:Well, like I said, those are average numbers. Some families will eat more, some families will eat less. It just kind of depends. But that that's a good reference point. So if you're planning for how many hands you're going to need, factor in those average production numbers and the average egg consumption and Then add two or three more hands on top of that right, but you know we take days off occasionally and then Half.
Speaker 1:I always heard you're lucky about everything you hatch is going to be a male, so what do you do with all of them?
Speaker 3:Oh, you mean the cockerel problem, hatch ten eggs and eight of them are boys.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:The smaller the hatch sometimes, the more skewed the average can be like. If you're looking at, 500 eggs hatched is gonna be roughly 50, 50 mil to female. But once you get away from that quantity and you get down to 10, 15, 20 eggs, All that, it seems to skew towards the male for some strange reason and I get asked all the time from locals hey, do you want these extra boys?
Speaker 3:I hatched number like no, I don't it, you don't have in PIP. It violates my NP IP and I know gosh dang well that they're gonna be scrawny and squirrely and take forever Before I can put them in the freezer.
Speaker 2:Somebody. Somebody asked me that a couple of months ago I've got all these males. Do you want them? I said no, I don't want them. For the same reason you don't want them. They're expensive to feed and don't give you much in return.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I tell people I will be happy to come over and help you Harvest them and teach you the process in exchange for some of the meat, but I'm not gonna carry those mouths to harvest Exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the growth rate needs to be worth it. And that's a rabbit hole that I've been down before, because I've always had this Hatching thing, ever since I was a kid. I'd hatch, hatch, hatch, hatch, hatch, and I would always end up buried in cockerels, and I dealt with that for a couple of decades before I dawned on me. Wouldn't they taste like chicken?
Speaker 1:So let's make sure that when we do hatch cockerels, that we're giving them the Every opportunity to reach their genetic potential and give us the best possible feed conversion ratio that they can.
Speaker 3:Well, it's really quite staggering too if you think of the numbers and I'm not gonna, you know, go into overwhelming math, but think of it this way all of the urban flock keepers, everyone with their couple of hens in the yard, they might have six, eight, twelve, but every single pellet hatched and born there's a male that hatched with her as a general rule of thumb, and there's many, many flocks out there that are female only. So that's just that many males that now have nowhere to be and nowhere to go, and the hatchery scramble to do different things and managing that because their number one seller is always gonna be a pellet. And the sex links. They're pretty useful because it can be foolproof.
Speaker 3:If you're one of the people who can't have males at all where you live, there's little safety nets and acquiring your pellets to make sure you only get pellets. But you can get fry pan bargain specials where you get males for Literal pennies. I think the last time I got a box of cockerels they were 25 cents apiece and it's like surely these birds have more value than that. I mean they they should, but more often than not the growth rates not there, the flushing isn't there and there's nothing else to do with them, which is if they came from a line that was bred to be Layers, and they're the cockerel Offshoot of it.
Speaker 3:They're not, because they're not Selecting for the dual purpose traits, I believe yeah, and that's why I started doing the breeding and Doing a breed that was really dual purpose, so that those cockerels have a job, they have a place to go and they're every bit as important as the females.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So another thing to consider is do you have the infrastructure and the financial resources to care for all these extra males or An ethical outlet for them?
Speaker 3:That's something anyone hatching eggs needs to be aware of and to think of. And If you're not in a position to raise those males, maybe Reconsider doing the whole hatching egg thing, unless you know someone who can take them. It can be because I've been in the position, when we were living more urban and it was, you know, a 45 minute drive to get anywhere near the country and no one within our area could have the males and I'd have, you know, 6, 7, 8, maybe 10 males that literally no one wanted, priced at free, 100% free, just kind of get it.
Speaker 3:No one did.
Speaker 1:When do you like to separate out your males from your females for your first?
Speaker 3:I like to have it done by weeks. By then it's really obvious. And then, although the hormones aren't quite there yet, but they're thinking about flaring up over the next four to five weeks, that that doesn't hold true for all breeds.
Speaker 2:I want to throw that caveat out there. Mandolin's working with a single comb breed but if you're working with a pecan breed or or something like that, it's very, very difficult to tell they they got to be considerably older than eight weeks before you can reliably Sex them. If you're going by the combs now events, once the males start developing those secondary sex sex feathers like the hackles and saddle feathers start getting pointed where the females stay round. That's far more reliable than the cones.
Speaker 1:Like those two bullets that I delivered to mandolin that later turned out to be Cockroach, but at the time they have a cushion, but they have no comb, they have a cushion which you can't even like with what is it pecan?
Speaker 2:Those are even worse than pecan's.
Speaker 3:On the males They'll have three rows of little miniature spikes and the females will carry just a single row for quite a while. And on a cushion comb there's no spikes at all, to even give you a little tease of a peak. They're smooth and flat and tell you nothing until what? 16 weeks.
Speaker 1:But they still taste like chicken.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, Well, folks, I think we we've probably covered and given you our thoughts on dual purpose poultry. I just want to thank you for joining us this week and, before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at poultry keepers podcast at gmailcom and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the poultry keepers podcast. We'll see you next week.