The episode discusses starting a poultry flock with a small group of birds, emphasizing the importance of high-quality birds, strict culling, and continuous learning. We highlight the need for patience, mentorship, and thorough management skills to overcome setbacks and challenges. In addition, we also cover breeding methods, predator protection, and the importance of selecting only the best birds for breeding.
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The episode discusses starting a poultry flock with a small group of birds, emphasizing the importance of high-quality birds, strict culling, and continuous learning. We highlight the need for patience, mentorship, and thorough management skills to overcome setbacks and challenges. In addition, we also cover breeding methods, predator protection, and the importance of selecting only the best birds for breeding.
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, I'm Mandelyn Royal and I would like to welcome you to another episode of the Poultry Keepers podcast. Joining me in the studio are John Gunterman and Rip Stalvey, the rest of our podcast team and we're looking forward to visiting with you and talking poultry from feathers to function. Can you get big results from a small start? Can great results be obtained with only a small flock of foundation birds? Is it possible to build a quality flock without raising a hundred or more birds each year? Coming up, we're gonna dive into this topic and we're gonna share our thoughts And we also have quite the little list of questions to ask you guys, too.
Rip Stalvey:That's right, Mandelyn. This episode was actually prompted by one of our listeners who was asking us that very question. Do you have to start with large numbers of birds, or can you do it with a small start? The short answer is yes, you can, but, we've always got these annoying little buts that come into a conversation. Yeah let me start off by telling you a little story of somebody who did it, and did it very well. And that's Leroy Jones. He was president of the Rhode Island Red Club when I joined, and I quickly learned that Leroy Jones didn't have to hatch a lot of birds each year. He would let two, how many wasn't hatching. He would let two hens set, that's it, that's all the chicks he wanted, and he was extremely difficult to beat in a show. How was he able to do that? He started with extremely high quality birds. He had a real good knowledge of understanding Rhode Island reds and how to breed them. Now he, these were bantams, but he started many years prior to that raising large fowl. He had extremely high standards for his birds and for his flock and for his goals actually. They were very high. And the other thing that he did was he adhered to a really strict culling and selection process. Now he may hatch 20 chicks a year, but out of that, he may keep One or two or three, and that was it.
John Gunterman:And statistically, that falls in line with the rule of ten.
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, it does. Again, the short answer, we think it's possible, but let's get to some of the buts. I think the first thing you need to do if you're going to try this is ask yourself and do some hard evaluation, okay? Before you even get started, ask yourself, is it your first experience raising poultry or breeding poultry? If it is, it's going to take you longer to accomplish getting a good group of birds.
Mandelyn Royal:That, and there's some basic knowledge you have to acquire before You get into a big project too, like you got to figure out your infrastructure, your husbandry methods, dial in your feeding, even just figuring out incubation and the learning curve there. There's a lot to learn just to get started, let alone taking up a serious venture of breeding.
John Gunterman:And that's not a bad place for some of those hatchery stock, get started in them for your first year or two without a heavy investment into your birds and get your husbandry skills worked out. So when you do have those high dollar birds on the ground, you've smoothed over those bumps and worked through it and figured out what's going to work for you in your particular scenario.
Mandelyn Royal:So another question is, do you know how many birds you can successfully maintain each year? And that is something where it's another thing to learn about as you go through. Because some breeds need more space than other breeds.
John Gunterman:Sure. I would start with the hard infrastructure. What are your limits? What do you have for acreage or do you have a tenth of an acre or an allotment or, a 10 by 10 chain link dog run? And then we're going to size your flock appropriate to what's available to them. And, with that, your food and water and everything is going to be sized appropriately and hopefully it's financially sustainable as well because we joke about the$3,000 egg.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, that first egg after you've built everything is the most expensive egg.
John Gunterman:Oh my goodness. But, you've gotten so deep into it by this point and if you decide you love it Great, time to start doing some research, find out what breeds do really well in your area, what breeders are in your area that you can tuck up under their wing and glom as much knowledge and hopefully some genetics off of, and start your journey.
Mandelyn Royal:That's gonna lead you to a couple of decisions that you're gonna have to make like Our third question here, do you want to be a breeder or do you want to be a salesperson? Because the methodology and how you run your flock and what you're doing it for, there's little differences in there. So You want to be honest. Do you want to do this to make a difference with the breed that you've chosen? Or are you trying to make money? Because there's different things to consider within that.
Rip Stalvey:And Mandelyn, I think that's where so many people who are just starting out run afoul of this whole situation. They get birds, they pay a pretty good dollar amount for them, and then suddenly they think I'm going to sell eggs or I'm going to sell chicks to make my money back. But there's little thought going into, how am I going to make these birds better to make them more valuable?
Mandelyn Royal:Because if you don't have the reputation, you can't charge the same price you paid.
Rip Stalvey:No, and when people do that, the quality of their birds just takes a nosedive.
John Gunterman:And I sometimes see over and over is people buy two dozen hatching eggs and they think the very next year they're going to be able to sell pullet eggs for the same amount of money that they paid for their two dozen eggs. But what they don't realize is the decade or decades of breeding and selection that went into those eggs that they got and what they need to do to have a viable product or, hopefully have a viable flock.
Rip Stalvey:And that's true, John. People who produce high quality birds, those people that I refer to as foundational breeders, they're the ones that other people actively seek out. To get quality birds to start their flock. And they've got thousands of hours and thousands of dollars invested in getting their birds to the point they're at.
John Gunterman:Lifetimes. Lifetimes. And I think we need to respect that, and I think cherish it, because that's something that we can't afford to lose. Because these birds were bred to do different things than a lot of people are expecting of them now. Dual purpose, having eggs and meat selecting to a standard that there's not a whole bunch of people doing the whole thing now. And I think it's important to get people interested back into it and get our foundational flocks up and running and have a good genetic foundation. And if anything, it just helps insulate the species, the breed and us from. Futures, changes, and resiliency through whatever's coming over the next 50, 100, 200 years I think is important. This was, a cornerstone in our nutritional profile for so long. We couldn't have gotten here without these birds, and we can't afford to lose them, especially with a lot of the change and struggles that are looming.
Rip Stalvey:Another question, folks, need to be real honest. And asking themselves, is do you have the necessary poultry management skills to do this? And I'm not talking about just feeding and watering, it goes way beyond that, at what point do you start offering baby chicks grit? At what point do you switch chicks from starter to grower?
John Gunterman:All that information is available, at least from our outlet. So we have Jeff Maddox, an awesome poultry nutritionist doing the live feeds every other week with you and Karen. And the quality information is out there. You just need to stay away from the hyperbole in the process. Educate yourself as part of the process. That first 18 months that you're raising your hatchery stock. You should be learning all this. If you listen to the older folks who have been doing this a while, they have a decade or more of experience on the ground. The person that you get your birds from, seriously, ask them, How do these, what do these birds like? What, how do you see them respond well? What should I do? Leverage that knowledge, don't just use them as a supply for the base genetics, because they got them there, they're going to know how, at least they feel, you should bring them forward, and be proud to carry their heritage and their genetics forward.
Rip Stalvey:Just expanding on that just a little bit, John, study and ask that person you got your birds from, how do you breed your birds? What steps do you take? And emulate that as closely as you possibly can, because that'll get you down the road much faster than getting birds and basically starting over from scratch with your management and breeding.
John Gunterman:Well, if they're a quality breeder, they're going to be employing very strict, close bred, line bred, whatever you want to call it, genetics, and have done years and years of selection, and they're going to have the the proof right there. Otherwise, you wouldn't be trying to get their genetics. And the better breeders I've found, you really need to pursue sometimes and convince them that they want to sell you their genetics. I know I have a qualification process where, you know, somebody in Florida or Texas, they don't, it's not a great place for a Chanticleer. And I tell them that. These birds are not suited for your environment. They can't dissipate the heat, they will have, they will stay cold.
Mandelyn Royal:And I think that level of honesty that breeders can provide, if they have the best of intentions for their variety, their breeds, and what they're doing. They're going to tell you the real story of it. They're not trying to push the sale because if you look at supply and demand, if the supply is greater than the demand, they're not going to necessarily take that time, but if they've really honed in their flock and they're really making great strides with them and they really are quality birds, that demand that they have is going to be high enough that they do need to get picky. On who exactly is going to receive the very limited numbers that they have. So they're going to be looking for people who have the infrastructure, the know how, the drive, the will, the passion, whatever you want to call it. They're going to look for people who have a similar flock goal to what they've already established in their flock to put them in the right hands.
John Gunterman:Also I do want to protect, my reputation and my genetics to some aspect, but I want to enable them for success, and I don't want to set anybody up for failure knowingly, so if it's going into a bad environment, I'm going to tell them up front but, ironically, I did find one way that you could be profitable raising heritage poultry, and that is to sell every egg to every person that asks. The only way to do that is to be an unethical breeder, however. If you're going to take it seriously, you're, yeah, it's not gonna happen.
Rip Stalvey:All of the good breeders that I know to a person are very selective about who they release their birds to. And some people, I know this turns them off, but, if you don't approach these folks with the right attitude, with an open attitude, showing that you're willing to learn from them, chances are you getting a hold of their birds are really low.
John Gunterman:One of the very basic questions that I ask, I do have a little questionnaire. It's 10 questions. Super simple. Number one is, what is your current feed? And I can tell a whole lot based on that, the response is whatever the least expensive 16 percent layer on the shelf is versus, I'm mixing my own feed and I'm supplementing with all the essential amino acids that I know are missing from the 16 percent layer feed that's on the shelf. That's it.
Mandelyn Royal:Because that's going to have a direct correlation to the performance and the way that the birds perform on your farm with your nutrition. If they don't follow that same protocol, they're probably not going to see the same results, and they're probably going to come back to you and ask why?
John Gunterman:They cannot possibly achieve the same level of genetic expression because the building blocks, the amino acids, the building blocks for the proteins aren't available to the birds. There's no way they can achieve what I'm doing here, even next door. We change feed alone and it completely tips the scales.
Rip Stalvey:Nutrition is something that touches. Every aspect of raising poultry from hatching strong chicks to raising strong chicks right on through to breeders that have all the nutritional needs met at optimum levels so they can start the cycle all over again.
John Gunterman:I had a long car ride and I was musing in my head when breeding season starts and when I need to start my, nutritional plan for the eggs. And I, I was like, okay, so a month before breeding season, I may need to make sure everybody's laying, the rooster's got light, hen's got light. They've got access to all this, but really that's just a month after coming out of the molt. So it's really, I'm preparing for breeding season during post molt care. It really started during molt. Hens shed all the abdominal fat and reset their bodies to be able to produce quality eggs. So I just keep backing up as to when breeding season starts and I think I'm at the point now, it's the first molt.
Mandelyn Royal:It's all the time, really.
John Gunterman:It really is all the time. If you're a good breeder, you're always thinking about the next batch of eggs. And that's the point. You keep coming back and back, and all of a sudden you're back where you started from, around the other side of the wheel. We brought up the concept of the breeding cycle and the breeding wheel before.
Rip Stalvey:I think Mandelyn's exactly right. It never stops. It never stops. It's an ongoing process. It's not a seasonal process at all in the long run.
John Gunterman:And that's the mindset that a successful breeder has to have. They're the person who wants those optimal results, and they're a very detail oriented person, and they understand incremental gains and slow, steady progress, and this is not going to be an overnight thing. You're not going to buy a trio and be winning ribbons for the next ten years.
Rip Stalvey:No. If you don't want optimum results, if that's not important to you, then trying to start a good flock from a small start of birds. It's extremely difficult if darn nigh impossible.
John Gunterman:But it can be done and that's why we're here. We don't want to set a false expectation, however so if all these checks in the boxes and you're like yep, that's exactly what I want to do. I'm down with that. This is the number of birds I can start with. Okay. Let's start. You got your list of written goals of what you want to accomplish. Do you have your plan?
Mandelyn Royal:Let's say that you get all of your ducks in a row, you've got your goals, you've got your plan, you've sourced your birds, you have checked off every single box on the whole beginning of the journey, but the next question How do you handle adversity and setbacks when a problem jumps up and surprises you? Because even the best, laid plans, mother nature, environment, anything like that can come out and ruin it and make you reconsider things. So how do you handle that if something unexpected arises? Because I've struggled with that personally. It's almost like if it's not one thing, it's another.
John Gunterman:This winter has been hugely challenging. We had three weeks in a row where we had heavy wet snow in late December, early January that took out power for between two and four days per week. So every time that happened, I lost a batch in the incubator. That set us back a lot. And we also had a lot of rain and warm weather. In late December and early January, which doesn't happen, which woke up the ermine. So we had some predation events very out of season, two months earlier than I would have expected them. Normally I go, oh, February's ending, it's time to put up ermine protection. But, no, it got hit in January. Luckily, I had a two week supply of fertilized eggs that I always keep in reserve as my, oh darn fail safe.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, insurance eggs.
John Gunterman:But on the heels of, three consecutive weeks of power outages and ermine attack, that two week backup just really wasn't a two week backup. It was more like five eggs that I found, between. The four that were there and the one in the next box, that was it. I don't put all my great hens in one place. That's another thing, if you can separate your breeders physically, it's not a bad idea. If a predator gets in one place, it's not likely they're going to get into the other place. They're probably going to stop there and feast for a little while and not work any harder to get any more food.
Mandelyn Royal:If they break into one spot, especially with weasels, mink, raccoon, Stuff like that will decimate everything in that pen and then nibble and waste the bulk of it. They're not gonna put the effort into breaking into a whole other pen.
John Gunterman:Yeah, they're not going to go further into a a chicken house. They're going to stop where they've got their kill. They're not going to put any more effort into breaking in further. That's it. And they're just going to sit and nibble.
Rip Stalvey:Very true. If you don't think that you're gonna have setbacks and adversity, you are so wrong because sooner or later it's gonna come up and really hit you hard, so you gotta be prepared for those as best you possibly can, or you will have major setbacks.
John Gunterman:I thought so hard that I thought of every contingency. My background, folks know I was in the military, I was an intelligence analyst in the Navy. I planned and I planned, and I view my chicken as like my junior enlisted. I take it personally, if a predator gets through. And between my Seven jule outer electric fence, my three and a half jule inner electric fence, chain link poultry wire, which is worthless for everything except very small weak things, like maybe mice and I am amazed at the holes that predators can get through. Like, how did you get through the size of a quarter? If you can stuff a quarter through it, something that can kill your chicken can get through there. I'm even reversing that to a nickel now. Getting to know weasels, they are incredibly adept at getting through very tight squeezes.
Mandelyn Royal:And if you start looking at even The skull structure of these predators, and the bulk of a mature raccoon, but the way that they can fold and contort their body, they actually only need a three inch gap to gain access.
John Gunterman:Yeah, they're so prepare for that. There is heartbreak and death in poultry keeping not at your hands. The end of every season there is, freezer camp, and folks need to be prepared for that, physically, mentally, emotionally as well. We say culling means removing from the genetic pool and not breeding forward, but culling can also mean, the unaliving process.
Mandelyn Royal:And it can be especially aggravating when you come up with your best laid plans, and you drop down to just your very best birds, but then perhaps in February, the just turning one year old male that you have, Didn't have that longevity and good vigor in, and he falls over dead right before breeding season. Yeah. He's health culled, and that can set you back an entire season or more if you need to scramble to try to find another one that was just as decent in the traits that the other guy
had.
John Gunterman:Rip, I don't want to. Get too far ahead of ourselves. You have a breeding method that is more reliant on the female side of all the lines than the male, so you're not as critically injured if you do lose a male.
Rip Stalvey:That's exactly right, and I'll explain that more as we go along.
John Gunterman:Great. Just want to get people's Whistles wetted.
Mandelyn Royal:Sometimes when you do have to have the setbacks and you have questions coming from that, it goes back to do you have a mentor or someone else that you can turn to for guidance when you hit those little roadblocks?
John Gunterman:And I didn't. I glommed on to Rip and Karen and Jeff and the whole PK360 years ago. I've been a fan forever. I've watched every episode multiple times. And that, that's what I loved is not having access to a mentor right down the road or just the virtual mentorship, if that's a word, if we can make that and, that's what I'm trying to enable to others. We want to be a place for reliable information that you can reach out to and it's there and it's not hidden behind a paywall and, how can we get you to build really high quality birds and flock consistency?
Mandelyn Royal:And to be supportive and to help people get to success too, because when I first started with poultry, we didn't have these online communities of support and education. It was library books and the advice of whoever you happen to meet. The internet was not around. So adapting to the changes and the entire wealth of information that's now pretty readily available, so long as you have that internet connection. That's changed a lot.
Rip Stalvey:It's changed a lot for the better, but folks need to be aware too, there is a lot, I think it's probably well meaning, but it's poor quality information out there. And it can be difficult to sort through all of that.
John Gunterman:It can. Just simple things like, my birds don't need grit because I feed pellet, or I feed crumble. There's a lot of fallacies out there when it comes to nutrition and husbandry and just everything about the bird. Good quality source for information, virtual mentors. I think that's important. Having a mentor Locally, somebody that at least can come by and look at your birds. If you don't have the experience, hands on, and Mandelyn does an outstanding job explaining how to manipulate the bird and evaluate it. Yes. It's very helpful to have somebody who's handled a couple hundred birds at least come out and show you how to pick up a bird. How do you catch a bird safely to both you and the bird? These are things that we can explain all day long, but unless somebody shows you and helps you figure out a way that is going to work for you and your birds on your property it can be frustrating. And it can be dangerous. I've slipped and fell chasing birds in a wet pen before, and at my age I shouldn't be slipping and falling. I don't heal as fast. It can get fun, sometimes I'll hear my wife giggling, and I'm like, what are you doing? She's oh, I just rewound the security camera footage of your little spill. But things like that, security systems are very inexpensive these days, and for under a hundred bucks, you could put cameras in your coop, infrared overnight, and on your run, so you could wake up at three o'clock in the morning, pick up your phone or tablet, and just push a button and go, Oh. Yep, there's everybody, I can see them all sleeping. Ooh, what's that moving in the background? I've heard a ruckus, and I've looked and saw the infrared camera. Oh, it's a fox. Yep, they're sniffing around the outside. Okay, they're moving on, I don't need to get up out of bed.
Mandelyn Royal:And I haven't gone so far as to put cameras inside of the barn, but if you do that, and you have a camera inside of a pen, that can answer some questions you might have, too. See that you're not really getting very many eggs, and every once in a while you'll see a little wet spot in the nest box where an egg used to be. It can help you get to the bottom of some issues, like if they are eating eggs, or if you put a visual identifying mark on a female, you can watch and see when each one is going into the nest box, who's laying when. Yes. There's a lot of data you can collect just through observation that you're doing remotely.
John Gunterman:Okay, I'll give you a little tip that I made up along the way and Being former military, I have a lot of uniforms that have what we called IFF tabs on them, little infrared markers that was like on our helmet bands and things like that, that I was maybe allegedly put on leg bands so at night I can see the chickens under infrared very brightly, and by changing the placement of the IR band or the orientation of it, you could individualize the chickens at night under infrared. That's this one, that's the up and down, this is the double up, this is the double down chicken, based on the level of their stripe. I had predation problems and that was one way of looking at what was happening. Eventually, I figured out that mice will come in and they will roll your eggs away. In the middle of the day, I had a mouse coming up the ramp and pushing eggs out and down the ramp after the chicken laid it. The chicken would come out making her egg song, and I'd be like, okay, I'll come out in about 10 minutes and collect it. And I'd get out there and there'd be no egg. Where'd it go?
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, that's definitely a case for cameras to figure out what's going on there.
Rip Stalvey:One thing I want to bring up, and this was something that was really hard for me to deal with personally, is are you a patient person? And I'll freely admit, I am not the most patient person in the world.
John Gunterman:It's going to take years to get
Rip Stalvey:there. Oh, it's going to take time. It's not a quick fix thing. It's not simply putting a rooster and a hen together and voila, you get dynamite chicks out of it. That's not gonna happen. Be prepared to go slow. Be prepared to have to be made patient.
Mandelyn Royal:Most of my poultry problems were my own fault from a lack of patience.
Rip Stalvey:Oh, yeah. Been there. Oh, gosh.
Mandelyn Royal:But I guess we get to the point where after thinking about all of this, are you the type of person to always strive to learn more so that you can do better? And as we figure out what to do, what not to do, just keeping that forward momentum of Always learning, because you're never going to know it all.
John Gunterman:No, and getting to the point where I can start concentrating on little annoying things like crooked toes. I'm only selecting for silver downed chicks this year. That's my goal. Because I really want the silver gene in my white birds. And I'm not homozygous on both sides for it yet. Once I am, we'll be good.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, you'll get there too.
John Gunterman:We're close. We're close. Just by paying attention. I've got a week to go. You're a gold down chick or you're a silver down chick. You get a gold band or a silver band on your wing. And silver band chicks stay and gold band wings are for sale this year.
Rip Stalvey:Another thing I think people need to be Really aware of that to pull this off, you have got to be absolutely ruthless at culling through and selecting only your better birds. And I know this is something that's very hard for new folks to do because they form this emotional attachment to their birds. And that's fine if you do that, but just know if you do that as a breeder. It's really going to hinder your progress.
John Gunterman:We're not saying put your lesser quality birds in the stew pot as soon as you identify them. And your females, absolutely, let them carry out their life until they've reached the end of their productivity. We're just saying, when they're two or three years old, don't breed from them. There's still great layers keep their eggs, sell their eggs, eat their eggs, just don't breed their eggs. Only breed the eggs from your best, and only keep your best male, the king of the air, the spare, maybe a backup or three or four stashed around the neighborhood. I'm very male centric, Rip, you're gonna try and help me break out of that mindset.
Mandelyn Royal:It took me a long time to realize I don't have to put all the eggs in the incubator. I don't have to hatch from every single female. I don't need to have a bird of every breed.
John Gunterman:Right now, I'm setting eggs from one. And one hen only from my flock, but she's got what I want.
Mandelyn Royal:I started organizing by hen into the trays and I set the tray when I have six rows filled from six individual females, and then I can hatch accordingly from there. And that way it's going to let me see what each female is producing with the particular male that she's been with. And it's going to show me if they're worth hatching from again or not. On the science side of things, if you're not sure how they're going to produce, go ahead and hatch and see. And those results are what tell you if it was a good idea and you should do it again, or if it wasn't that great and don't do it again.
John Gunterman:Right now I've got her. Isolated with the male that I'm really interested in, and then I'll dry her out for a month and put her on the other male, and see what each test hatch looks like, see what kind of chicks each male throws through her, and then decide what I really want. The end of the season are the eggs that I'm going to be hatching. Hopefully my keepers are in there. If some keepers come up on the first two test hatches, great. The first three months of her second year is about test hatching and figuring out which male I want to put her with at the end of that season before she molts.
Mandelyn Royal:This brings us to the close of another Poultry Keepers podcast, and we're very happy you chose to join us. Until next time, we'd appreciate it if you would drop us a note, letting us know your thoughts about our podcast. Please share our podcast with all of your friends that keep poultry, and we hope you'll join us again when we'll be talking poultry from feathers to function.