Have you ever wondered what it takes to amplify your poultry flock to the pinnacle of health and productivity? Let Mandolin Royal, Rips Talvi, and I, John Gunterman, guide you on a journey through the world of advanced poultry keeping. Mandolin, with her leap to managing 400 birds annually, spills the secrets on how she selects for the finest traits and the fascinating enigma of late bloomers among the roosters. We'll navigate the hurdles that come with a burgeoning flock, from stretching resources thin to the unexpected expenses, while also shining a spotlight on the nuggets of wisdom from breeders who have honed the art of a smaller, yet impeccably cultivated brood. Our episode promises a roadmap to achieving a robust and efficient flock with insights that only seasoned hands like us can offer.
Join our coop talk as we hatch strategies on breeding for genetic superiority and striking that delicate balance between the number of adult breeders versus the growing chicks. I'll unveil the art of selecting the right breed for your climate—hello, shanticleers for the cold—and share techniques that can tailor traits to your specific needs, like tweaking brooder temperatures for optimal comb size. We'll scrutinize the story of a Chanticleer rooster's struggle with a crooked toe and how it informs our breeding decisions, emphasizing the importance of staying true to breed standards and setting definitive goals for your flock. So, feather your nest with knowledge from our latest episode where we reveal that sometimes, the best things come in smaller, quality-packed batches.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to amplify your poultry flock to the pinnacle of health and productivity? Let Mandolin Royal, Rips Talvi, and I, John Gunterman, guide you on a journey through the world of advanced poultry keeping. Mandolin, with her leap to managing 400 birds annually, spills the secrets on how she selects for the finest traits and the fascinating enigma of late bloomers among the roosters. We'll navigate the hurdles that come with a burgeoning flock, from stretching resources thin to the unexpected expenses, while also shining a spotlight on the nuggets of wisdom from breeders who have honed the art of a smaller, yet impeccably cultivated brood. Our episode promises a roadmap to achieving a robust and efficient flock with insights that only seasoned hands like us can offer.
Join our coop talk as we hatch strategies on breeding for genetic superiority and striking that delicate balance between the number of adult breeders versus the growing chicks. I'll unveil the art of selecting the right breed for your climate—hello, shanticleers for the cold—and share techniques that can tailor traits to your specific needs, like tweaking brooder temperatures for optimal comb size. We'll scrutinize the story of a Chanticleer rooster's struggle with a crooked toe and how it informs our breeding decisions, emphasizing the importance of staying true to breed standards and setting definitive goals for your flock. So, feather your nest with knowledge from our latest episode where we reveal that sometimes, the best things come in smaller, quality-packed batches.
Hi, welcome to the poultry keepers podcast. I'm john gunterman and, together with mandolin royal and rips talvi, where your co-hosts for the show, and is our mission to help you have a happy, healthy and productive flock. Developing a stronger flock takes time and effort. It requires us to improve our flock management skills and practices. Coming up will share how to do that successfully. Growing out more birds can improve your selection options and, mandolin, you've done this with your flock and you've grown out a lot of birds and a lot of selection to get to where you're at.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that was a long time coming to. I hadn't originally given that any thought, but as I started working the flock on more of a mission and coming up with our flock goals and really dive into what it meant to do the breeding, it quickly became apparent that I was going to need some more selection options to really find the desired traits that I was looking for. And the last couple years now I feel pretty comfortable at about four hundred a year and I'm not growing all four hundred of them all the way to a year old, but I'm treating it kind of like a filter and I can start making decisions as early as eight weeks.
Speaker 2:
If they were a slow grower compared to some of their peers or maybe they were a little too fast and they got a little clunky, looking for what I'm looking for and one of the late developing males in the hand those are the worst, those slow developing boys that want to trick you for over twelve, fourteen weeks and they'll look every bit like a female that all of a sudden they're walking around with some saddle feathers and sickle feathers in their tail and comb starts jumping up, and then they learn to grow. My god, you're a stew pot candidate.
Speaker 1:
Where'd you come from. You're going away.
Speaker 2:
Thankfully it doesn't happen that often, maybe like one or two out of a hundred. But when you get numbers like that, when you're talking a couple hundred, it really does a better job of showing your percentages of your hatch results to see you can kind of Get a more accurate idea of what they're actually throwing forward. The smaller the batch, the more unreliable the data is. Like if you only hatch off 10. You're not going to get that good of a window of what's actually going on in your percentages of what's possible.
Speaker 1:
I mean I'd really only be looking for one bird out of 10. I just know that the rule of 10 here applies, so much or less. If you're starting with, you know Rod genetics that have not been worked by somebody that has similar plans and skills.
Speaker 2:
I forget the name of the breeder, but he was saying that he was trying to chase blue ribbons at the show and be really competitive and he got himself to where he was growing 5000 a year, looking for five birds. So he went from hundreds into thousands and I don't have the scale for that and I kind of don't want to put that much time into it either, because with every additional amount you add you're adding space, fee, time, resources, all of that. So you want to find what's comfortable for you.
Speaker 1:
And numbers like that can scare a lot of people off, but you could easily have a sustainable home flock as long as you focus on a breed and don't get squirreled into. This is pretty and that's pretty.
Speaker 2:
You got to do that initially to find what you like though.
Speaker 1:
Made that mistake. I ordered three of this and two of that and four of these, all from a hatchery, and had a man, and they all did about the same, Fairly mediocre. It wasn't until I started getting into you know some really decent line bread heritage breeds that I went oh OK, there's an actual difference here.
Speaker 2:
It's neat when you start noticing what's different though, like oh wow, same breed, night and day differences, and how they grow, how they look, how they behave, sometimes even I mean having birds that never ate snow.
Speaker 1:
They never saw another bird eat snow, but they figured it out on their own. And in the winter I go out and check their water every day and it's full of really nice water and they just don't drink. They somehow learn to and prefer to eat snow than drink water.
Speaker 2:
It's easy to get on the go.
Speaker 1:
It's always there.
Speaker 3:
It's always underfoot, that's right.
Speaker 1:
Pretty much, but I don't want them to do that, because it's always underfoot. We don't want to feed our birds on the ground. I don't want them picking up snow that they may have defecated in.
Speaker 3:
I agree with what we're talking about. I guess to a certain extent, the more you have, the more you can choose from. But for me, I think my breeding goals have been for a good while. Now that I want to refine my flock, I want to concentrate the good qualities, I want to eliminate those bad qualities, and the more I can refine the flock, I found that the fewer birds I had to raise to get the good ones.
Speaker 2:
You know you're on to something when you only have to hatch off 25 or 50 and that gives you everything you need the next season.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, there was an old red breeder in Kentucky, leroy Jones Leroy. He was hard to impossible to beat at a show and I asked him one time. I said, mr Jones, how many red bannums do you raise? He said I'll let two hens set a year. That's all he raised. It's all he needs. Well, if you've heard it, all that good.
Speaker 2:
it's all you need, that's right.
Speaker 3:
But you know, mandy, you were also talking about scale. It's easy to think, oh, there's an egg, I need to hatch it. You can get carried away big time and you're wind up against the wall of limiting factors. Infrastructure is one, but probably the biggest one is financial resources. The feed's not cheap, not the good feed.
Speaker 1:
And good feed isn't cheap and cheap feed isn't good, very true. So getting some really good genetic stock to start with and then make your selection from there. One of my goals is to have what I consider a homestead size, self-sustaining flock, and I think you should be able to do that with three roots, three roosters, nine hens and hatching, you know, setting 100 eggs a year, you should be able to hatch out replacements for that core group and have enough to sell off, have enough to fill the freezer. To me that's about a minimum, sustainable flock size.
Speaker 2:
That's about 50 birds into the freezer.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I think the first year we're starting out with a breeding program. There are some definite advantages to hatch and raise as many as you can efficiently, effectively and financially.
Speaker 1:
Yes, and keep only your very, very best. And that way you're not forced into keeping less than the absolute best, if you go into it with the mindset of you know 50 of these hundred eggs that I'm setting are going to be meat in the freezer or sold to layers to my neighbors. It's a good mindset.
Speaker 2:
And I try to have my space figured out to where 30% of the space is for maintaining the adults and 70% of the space is for growouts, and I look forward to that time of year coming into winter when 70% of the space is empty.
Speaker 3:
I think that's a good policy.
Speaker 2:
It reduces the winter chore load too, because if you try to do it from a profitability angle and all of your space is dedicated to birds in production, where are you going to grow your other ones out to?
Speaker 2:
replace those birds, how are you going to get your flock progress and your improvements? And then how are you going to learn the genetics you have through seeing the range of what they are breeding forward? So if you tilt it to have way more grow out space than keep your adult breeder space, you'll you'll learn a lot more about your genetics and what you have by doing it that way.
Speaker 3:
I think, when we fool ourselves into believing we've got to have a lot of breeders, we need to sit down and truly evaluate the quality of the birds that we have. It shouldn't take a lot of breeders to move your breed and your goals forward.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I'm coming to terms with that.
Speaker 1:
But that also requires controlled breeding methods, which we're going to get to in just a little bit.
Speaker 3:
Oh sure it does, folks. Mediocre birds are a dime a dozen. You can find those anywhere, but quality is harder to find and it costs you more. But it pays real major dividends in the long run.
Speaker 1:
Shaves years off your hunt to get established, then going in blind.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you won't have to worry about having to grow out 5,000 of them looking for a showbird If you just start with something decent.
Speaker 1:
That involves doing your research on a breed that's appropriate for your area. Let's start with there first. I had to go with shanticleers, no combs and wattles. We're on the second highest peak in Vermont. It gets cold, windy here. My birds get wind frostbite badly. They wouldn't do so well in Arizona or Texas or high desert.
Speaker 2:
It does.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, the only other way they have to shed excess heat is through respiration, so it's not good for them, whereas a bird with really big combs and wattles would probably be more appropriate for that area. So I often see people fall in love with a breed that's not appropriate for where they live.
Speaker 2:
Well, there's some breeding work you can do for adaptability, but it's not going to be in that first generation. They'll have to get through a couple of winners to see the environmental changes that can also come into play.
Speaker 1:
But RIP turned me on to a fun little thing where we can shrink, combsize by dropping brooder temperature after the first week A few degrees more than we normally would, and I'm fine with that because it shaves a few degrees or a few pennies off my electric bill.
Speaker 2:
And I found that to be very true as well. You can see it in natural environment too, with your summer grown chicks versus winter grown chicks. It'll show then too. But you can definitely do that artificially by playing around with your settings and just watch their language and how they're behaving in the brooder to know if they're at a comfortable temperature or not. If you hear that distress call and they're all huddled up, then it's probably too cool for them. But if they're well spaced out and they're not complaining about it, don't give them any more heat than what they're getting.
Speaker 3:
I start out my day old chicks. Most of the brooder manufacturers recommend 95 degrees. I start mine at 90 and then drop it five degrees every week. But, like like Manny said, I do pay attention to what the chicks are telling me. You know, are they all huddled up like they're cold? Well, raise the temperature a little bit.
Speaker 2:
Nine times three, ten, the birds will tell you what they need.
Speaker 3:
Yes, they will.
Speaker 1:
I started at 95 and I can drop a degree a day over three weeks and it gets me right where, at three weeks, they're out into the real world regardless of temperature.
Speaker 2:
In the spring and summer, when we start getting to where the overnight lows aren't too terrible, like in the 50s, 60s or so, I have a bad habit of pulling their heat totally as soon as they have just enough feathers to cover themselves, at about like five weeks old or so.
Speaker 1:
They can self-regulate at three weeks. It costs you a little bit more in feed, but I believe you're going to have a healthier bird.
Speaker 2:
Well, when they start gathering their own heat at two weeks, they just don't have the feathers to hold that heat in.
Speaker 1:
You tease me about the fluff on my shanticleers, but that's something that I actually select for and bred for, because it's six degrees outside right now here.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it just makes them snuggly.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, fluffy, I'm not fat, I'm fluffy so. But how do you get there? That's always the thing. People, you know where do you start and how do you get there. We already could cover, you know, find the best stock you can. You know, looking trade publications, apa journals, ask Around Online and some of the more advanced groups.
Speaker 3:
John, one of the biggest mistakes I see folks make is they try to grow their flock too fast. It's going to take you time to learn specifics about your breed or your variety. To sort through all those birds that are Genuinely worth keeping are those birds that would be best not used in the breeding program, and for me, a Slow, steady growth will get you where you want to go, faster than a fast growth. Mandy's making faces.
Speaker 2:
I don't know whether she's Well, I like to accelerate it just a smidge. Get my free bird birds at 14, 15, 16, 18 weeks old, some she's been heard away, oh. Yeah, I love playing the genetic lottery that is so intriguing to me.
Speaker 1:
But your situation is, you had to pretty much because you had such a very Shallow gene pool to start with and select from. So you had to open up the doors box to find out what was hiding in there, then filter down.
Speaker 2:
Point where it was too much, too fast and I had to step it back. And that took Four generations to hit a wall of it just being too much. And it changed the birds to when they were getting clonkier and the bones were thickening up, and for their breed it's not desirable to have big, thick bones, and that was changing the growth rate too and I didn't want to go in a different direction. So I scaled it back and found the comfortable size that worked with the genetics, without getting into funky territory.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, well, you touched on one of our points that was coming up is Ultimately, your goal is to remove the undesirable characteristics from your flock. Yeah, overall, you strengthen the good qualities by doing that.
Speaker 2:
Correct and I had a lot of stuff to Sort out, everything from slip wing and knock knees and keels that weren't shaped quite right before I even got into Body structure. First I had to go through Looking for defects and clean that up before I could get serious about anything else, so I was a okay with fast growth to get them in the freezer sooner you know, john, you talked about strengthening the good qualities and Working to eliminate the bad qualities, and there's some breeding procedures, breeding practices that work real good for that.
Speaker 3:
There's some that don't work, so good for that right.
Speaker 1:
And unfortunately, the ones that work best have picked up a somewhat bad reputation. Just oh, they have and that, unfortunately, it's quite the opposite it is the most powerful tool a breeder can use.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. You can say line breeding to people or in breeding to people and they just Come back at you with this shock, dumbfounded look on your face that you would even suggest such a thing. But Breeding mammals is a lot different than breeding chickens.
Speaker 3:
It's just totally flip-flopped around. You can do things with chickens that you can't do with hogs or cattle, but line breeding has really been the tool that most successful breeders have used to build a very strong flock, and line breeding is nothing more than breeding together loosely related individuals, where in breeding is breeding together Very closely related individuals like father to daughter or mother to son or brothers to sister. Even I've done that before.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's a powerful tool to figure out what's hiding in the genetics that you want to see and remove it's. Who said that? Kirby Jackson. He's been one of my mentors for a while and he really knows his genetic ABC's and all those little details. And he said if you really want to know what recessive Defects are hiding within a bloodline, go ahead and breed full siblings together and that'll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the work you need to do with them.
Speaker 1:
It's a magnifier for good and bad.
Speaker 2:
Well, it's a choice you have to make. So if you rely on Bloodline crosses to keep vigor and stuff up high, you're also creating a Higher rate of variables in a bigger range of genetic expression and you're not going to get consistency. But on the flip side, if you really want to get in there and dig deep and scrub the genetics and get consistent and get those cookie cutter results and you're gonna have to breed with a tight method. But the caveat to that is you can't use inferior birds to do it.
Speaker 1:
I Think a dozen Birds can do that for a home flock because you have the ability to line breed or in breed. You can go either direction with what you have. I think it's a. It's a good base number and you can easily grow from there. You know I surge up. You know I try to hatch out Well, last year was a light year, it was 200 and Sell them off. That was just a fulfill orders. I'm not doing that again.
Speaker 3:
You know, we talked about the good aspects of line breeding and inbreeding and what it can do for you. There is a method that doesn't really work all that well to help you improve your flock and that's what most folks do and what's been done forever, it seems like, and that's flock mating, where you use multiple females and multiple males all in the same pen, and the problem with that is you don't really know which male and female produced which chick.
Speaker 1:
And even if you saw a particular rooster with a particular hand and you collected her egg the next day, you can't be sure that that rooster sired an egg, because it could come from multiple donors in the same hand.
Speaker 3:
You know I'm sitting here thinking as we're talking and for me and you're not going to know this right away it's going to take some time to develop this knack, but if you're looking at your birds and you're studying your flock, they're going to tell you whether the flock is ready for line breeding or end breeding, or whether maybe just back up a little bit and go back to flock mating for a season or two. To me that's the mark of a good breeder is knowing when to use what techniques in the breeding pen.
Speaker 2:
Right, because the birds will tell you and I like to think of flock mating as almost maintenance and you can use those offspring to let you know if they're actually expressing with a general decent result or if you're seeing stuff you still need to work on. So, depending on what you're seeing that you need to call for, if you're having to call too many for the same thing, it's absolutely worth figuring out who's throwing that so you can pull them out and replace them with better offspring. But it's going to be pair mating that really tells you what each individual bird brings to the table.
Speaker 1:
I think Mandy, one of the Chanticleer rooster that I brought to you, he's got a crooked second left toe.
Speaker 2:
Both of his front toes are bent. Okay yeah, that was a. Thing.
Speaker 1:
That was a thing, though, and I know which rooster he came from, and he's not in the line anymore.
Speaker 2:
Well, and I didn't put him with my best girls, but I put him with five perfectly serviceable females. And rather than pair mate, I want to see the initial range of what that hybrid is going to do. So I am going to flock, breed those just to see. I want to see the range. I want to see the variables and options and what percentages I get for which traits, how many of them are meaty, and then from there figure out if it's worth pair mating based on those initial results.
Speaker 1:
But for now. I just want to see I'll get you better. He's a call. Keep an eye out for that crooked toe though.
Speaker 2:
Oh, for sure, because all the girls have great feet.
Speaker 1:
You know it's a common flaw, I think whether I got rid of now.
Speaker 2:
And I'll see the prevalence of how he throws that forward. I got a question for Mandy.
Speaker 3:
Let's play Punnett.
Speaker 1:
Square Bingo.
Speaker 3:
And I know you're experiencing this in breasts right now. It's just not limited to breast, Either folks. I've seen it in a lot of breeds where people want to change a breed to suit what they wanted a bird. You see any dangers in doing that, Mandy.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, because if you get too tunneled into that mindset, you might find yourself with birds that are so far outside of their breed standard that they don't look the part, they don't act the way they should. What you want to do when you're working with a particular variety hopefully you pick that variety because you like a description of what they should be and that's what you breed towards. To pick up some birds and start making them what they're not supposed to be, that can be problematic and it's going to absolutely affect your future potential. If you're trying to market those birds, do they reflect what they're supposed to be? Once you start changing them, you kind of got to start thinking about well, what am I going to call them now? Because they're not what they were.
Speaker 3:
They're not what they were. They're not what they were. And that's what I have seen, where people get so focused on one particular aspect of the breed they're working with Maybe it's size, maybe it's growth rate. Maybe, it's eggshell color. Pick whatever reason you want.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and the birds change dramatically If we lose the ability to focus on the overall bird we're not doing that breed any favors better than how you found them Without changing them away from what they were supposed to be. When you get on the internet and you read about a variety, they're supposed to get to this size, like this color egg, be broody or not. There's a little list of expectations and once you start deviating from that, you don't have the same bird anymore. I'm not convinced it should still be called that breed.
Speaker 3:
You're probably right.
Speaker 1:
It either conforms to the standard or it doesn't, and if you're not, then it doesn't really matter. Do whatever you want, I guess.
Speaker 2:
Well, you may as well go down the crazy rabbit hole of hybridizing and messing around that way. I learned so much by goofing off with yeah, but we've got the owner's manual.
Speaker 1:
We've got the tune-up manual. In the old auto days it used to be the Haynes or the Chilton manuals. You got at the Auto Part Store along with a socket set and you could fix anything in your car. And the APA does this standard of perfection, which is pretty much the same thing for us. Yeah, If you know how to read it and apply it.
Speaker 2:
That's our next episode. That's not this episode. I know I've got to throw the bait out there.
Speaker 3:
He's getting ahead of himself.
Speaker 2:
I know it's going to be exciting to talk about that one, because I've been I want to get ripped-repped up. I have a couple of questions about some of the terms in that breed standard That'll be interesting.
Speaker 1:
So having goals and birds that can fit those goals is a good place to start. Thank you, read selection and, okay, buy the best starter stock, eggs or trios. We've covered that a little bit earlier.
Speaker 3:
I think another thing that most folks don't do enough is I like to try to sit back and reflect on the birds that I have and compare them mentally to the birds that I started with. And if you can't see progress year after year after year now, folks, when I mean progress, you're not going to make giant leaps forward. It's going to be small steps at a time, so you should see slow and steady progress in your flock from year to year to year. If you do, it lets you know you're on the right track. If you don't, if you go okay, this year I got good birds and then it took me three more years to get a second improvement on it. I did not go back and evaluate my breeding techniques, my individual birds, my management practices and style everything.
Speaker 2:
I like to keep picture files so I can go back and look at where I've been that way and then go out to the barn and look at what I have and then, like you said, this time of year before the breeding season, I'm out there every day doing chores and I'll take a couple of minutes and stare at a pen and when I come back inside I might dig into my picture files and look at. There's this one bird I had probably six years ago. His tail was so crazy long and sticking straight out and thin and his angles were wonky. His comb was terrible but he was so meaty that I used him for breeding and I have gained distance from that bird and I haven't seen a tail like his since, which is great.
Speaker 1:
I'm trying to change tail angle too quickly. I lost some body capacity, a degree or two per year. Let's not jump from 45 to 40. Let's not try. I don't think.
Speaker 2:
What is it that Rip had said? Don't use two extremes to try to find a balance. Correctness.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. That's the whole key to corrective mating. I've seen so many times folks will. Let's talk about Use John's example of tail angles, and I'll pick on Reds. Males should have an angle on their tail of 20 degrees, and if somebody's got some that are taller than that, well then, their philosophy is to use females that have a perfectly flat back or even drop their tail a little bit. All that's going to do is give you extremes. 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 poultrykeeperspodcast at gmailcom and share your thoughts about the show. So thank you again for joining us for this episode of the poultrykeepers podcast. We'll see you next week.