Have A Good Flock From A Small Start-Part 2

This episode is a detailed discussion on breeding poultry, focusing on selecting high-quality stock and breeding to a written standard. We cover line breeding, finding good breeders, selecting traits, and the time and patience required for successful breeding. We emphasize the need for patience, dedication, and the importance of defining goals before breeding poultry.

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Transcript

John Gunterman 0:00

Hi, I'm John Gunterman, and I want to welcome you to another episode of the Poultry Keepers podcast. Joining me in the studio are Mandelyn Royal 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.

Mandelyn Royal 0:26

Does this tie in with you having written out goals of what exactly you want to accomplish with them?

John Gunterman 0:32

Yes, this ties into the American Poultry Association's standard of perfection.

Mandelyn Royal 0:38

Ah, aiming for perfection.

John Gunterman 0:39

Well aiming for Shoot for the moon. You're never gonna make it, but you'll reach higher than if you never reached at all. This is the bird that's got the best confirmation, and she is a rockstar layer. She does not take a pause. I've never had a bird that did not take a day off in her weekly lay cycle.

Mandelyn Royal 0:57

That's amazing.

John Gunterman 0:58

I literally can set my watch by her. The fact that we started recording a couple of minutes late meant that I got her egg at 98. 2 degrees as she was walking off

Mandelyn Royal 1:10

Of those female birds that you could build an entire program around.

John Gunterman 1:14

Yes, I want to, if she if her and the two roosters throw great chicks, she is one of my foundational birds. I've got plenty of more birds coming from my breeder. He's setting 24, so when I go down, I'm going to pick up 24 chicks and Hopefully 24 eggs to bring home in April. And maybe I might find another rock star female or male in that batch. And I'm fine with being very selective and only keeping the best of the best, rather than the one that sucked the least.

Rip Stalvey 1:46

John, you bring us to another point here, and that's the need To source high quality stock from

John Gunterman 1:54

the same stock

Rip Stalvey 1:56

that will move your birds further faster than just getting any old bird and mating them together.

John Gunterman 2:05

And I don't consider that an outcross at all. It's a year later. I'm getting eggs from the same hens and same roosters that I got last year, just a year later from the same breeder. That's not an outcross in my mind at

2:18

all.

Rip Stalvey 2:19

We're going to get into this. How do you select stock? Coming up in just a few minutes, but I just wanted to point that out because that is probably one of the most important decisions you will ever make is getting the best possible stock you can find and you can afford.

John Gunterman 2:36

And even if you can't afford it, if you find the best possible stock and talk to the breeder and set up a plan look, I realistically can afford, this many chicks and eggs my first year. Maybe they'll work with you.

Mandelyn Royal 2:48

Especially if you're going about things in a steady approach and The really good breeders, they're going to be willing to help you the year after that, and the year after that, for as long as they're doing it because they're not always in a position to be advertising because they don't need to.

John Gunterman 3:06

And I'm always in the case where I go, wow, I wish I had a really good place to stash this hen that was not here, but safe.

Mandelyn Royal 3:16

Stays in the breed community.

John Gunterman 3:18

Stays in the community, stays local, I can always reach out and get some eggs back or take her back if I need to. And I consider it little genetic caches or safe deposit boxes around the neighborhood. With the heavy predation that we have, I think it's important.

Rip Stalvey 3:33

One of the things that I think we need to be really dead serious that we ask ourselves before embarking on this kind of journey is Are you willing to sacrifice quality just to save money?

Mandelyn Royal 3:49

I've tried it, it never works out that well.

Rip Stalvey 3:51

It never does, so if you're one of those people that like to do that, this is not the program for you, trust

John Gunterman 4:00

me. The irony on the food side of it is Up until I got really into animal nutrition, I didn't start saving money until I stopped trying to save money on food. Until I started feeding grit at the moment of hatch with the freshest possible ingredients and a full nutritional profile, that is when, my feed bill dropped by 20%. Between the grit and the excellent nutrition, that's what saved me the money.

Mandelyn Royal 4:30

And the more you condense the feed is, the less of it they're going to feel compelled to eat.

John Gunterman 4:37

So the less manure we have to dispose of, the less waste, the less the pancreas and kidneys, and just the less the bird has to work inappropriately to extract that nutrition, the better. The gizzard is there for a reason. Gizzard function requires grit. If you have grit in the gizzard, the bird's natural physiology can do what it's supposed to do. And they're going to get all the nutrition they need out of what they've ingested with no waste and no extra work on the whole rest of the renal system. So you're not going to have very stinky, ammonia smelling manure.

Mandelyn Royal 5:13

That's always a benefit because it improves the air quality.

John Gunterman 5:16

And it's better for the birds. If you can smell the manure, it's already way too late.

Rip Stalvey 5:20

I think the last question I'm going to throw out there. And to me it's really an important one, all of them are important, but do you think that breeding to a written standard is the right thing to do? If you don't, please don't try, because you're just going to mess up some otherwise good birds. I'm just being honest here. You can start with the best birds that you can possibly find, but if you don't breed them to their written standard. You're wasting your time and your money.

John Gunterman 5:52

You need to select properly.

Mandelyn Royal 5:54

And I'll do that. as they were when they first came to you, because they were already bred to a standard. And if you go down your own path with that, they're going to change and they're not going to be the same bird anymore. And the quality, when we talk about quality poultry, it is because they reflect their standard. So if you go off and do your own thing, they're not the same. And now their value is much different.

John Gunterman 6:19

I say as soon as you change any one aspect about their nutrition, husbandry, housing, anything, they are no longer the birds that you bought. And they're not going to produce the same.

Rip Stalvey 6:33

I strongly feel that if you're not breeding according to a written standard, You're just wasting your time.

John Gunterman 6:41

And it doesn't have to be something out of the American Poultry Association standard of perfection. It could be, there's a German standard, there's a British standard there's a French standard. Have a standard. Have something that you could fall back on and say, what do I do if it comes down to a binary decision, keep or cull? What are you basing that decision on? That's going to build your flock consistency though. If you select to the standard, eventually your birds are going to look more and more the same. It's going to become more and more heterogeneous, or heterogeneous, or however you pronounce that. The center of the bell curve. I'm always selecting for the statistical center of the bell curve. I've explained this before, but that's the way I want my flock to look. I want it to be very generic in the middle and no outliers. I don't want small birds. I don't want large birds. I want birds that represent the standard.

Mandelyn Royal 7:37

When I come around to believing that and looking at, when I set goals, I want this many birds for the freezer. I want this many eggs per year. I want them to Be able to look this way, perform this way. And that comes from breeding to a standard. And before I even really put a lot of thought into it, I was one of those people who was hybridizing my little hardout with some wild looking birds. And yeah, they were neat. But, there was no uniformity, there was no consistency, I could not put any expectations on those birds whatsoever. They were just eye candy.

John Gunterman 8:15

That brings up the whole concept and the term of family. They start to look the same, they start to act the same, they start to be the same. It's when you drive by your neighbor's family reunion, and you look at them all, and you go, yeah, they all they all have this cheekbone or this chin. You could tell that all 50 of these people, even though they're closely or loosely related, they all look generally the same, and your flock should too.

Mandelyn Royal 8:43

It's the only way you can start to have expectations.

John Gunterman 8:47

But unlike humans, crossbreeding is good, linebreeding is bad, inbreeding is very bad. With Everything else, the genetic pool, is so broad and so wide that as long as you do the job correctly, you're going to be able to reduce any incidence of loss of vigor. And that's something that a lot of people get concerned about, is this, they've been taught that inbreeding depression is a thing, and it's very bad to inbreed.

Rip Stalvey 9:17

Why don't we get into the nuts and bolts now of how to go about doing it. We've laid the groundwork, now let's start building the house. How about that? Sounds good. You've heard us talk, I don't know how many times, about setting goals. Your goals will help drive you to where you want your birds to be in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years. If you don't have any goals, you're just it's a hit and miss proposition. And one of those goals should be, I think, how are you going to find good quality stock? How are you going to get them? I think one of the best things that has worked for me, and I've had people approach me from the same attitude and it really helps, is first define what you want in your birds. Do you want a more production oriented flock? Do you want a more exhibition oriented flock? Do you want That'll help drive where you're going to look for birds. Once you've established that, find out, and it's gonna take some time, it's gonna take some research, and this is important. Do your research, because dig into it. And then, once you've identified the top two or three people you want to approach, start by building a relationship with them. This makes a huge difference. I've had people that wanted my birds, but they took the time to build a relationship with me. And I, frankly, wound up giving them better birds than I would have otherwise.

John Gunterman 10:53

There's just trust and rapport. Yeah. And the genetic safe deposit box that I explained earlier.

Rip Stalvey 10:59

Yeah, exactly. And, like I said, it's going to take some time. Don't rush this process. Don't rush this process. Let it take time. Because the more time you take up front, the less time you're going to be putting into it on the back end.

John Gunterman 11:18

Sure. I went through some incredible expense and trouble to obtain some Chanticleers legally across the border from Canada to have them legally imported. Even as eggs was very expensive and required the employment of two veterinarians and an attorney on the Canadian side to get 36 eggs back into Vermont, across the Canadian border. And unfortunately I went through all of that just to find out right now in the Eastern townships of Canada, they've got a problem with blue shanks Chanticleers from somebody did an outcross at some point and it's there. And. I got them, and all those birds were delicious.

Rip Stalvey 12:04

It goes back to being prepared for setbacks, when you're faced with things like that. But, don't, and I see this all the time, and it makes me absolutely nuts, don't be in a hurry to get birds. I have seen people settle for really poor quality birds because they couldn't find what they really wanted. Don't settle for, get the best you can get your hands on.

Mandelyn Royal 12:30

And one way to look at that, too, do you want to have birds right now that need five years of additional breeding work, or do you want to wait? Two years to get birds that don't need much breeding work at all, and they have you going somewhere within three years. Because if you go for the lesser quality, because you can get it right now, what type of time commitment does that turn into?

Rip Stalvey 12:56

Those lesser quality birds are real uphill battle.

John Gunterman 12:59

I'm so glad I started over. I had some good quality Chanticleers and I eventually got a hold of what are generally regarded as the best quality Chanticleer in our region. And growing them out side by side, they were half the age and already the same size and the vigor and the temperament. I called up the local college that I am affiliated with and I'm like, Hey, do you guys want my old Chanticleers? I've got some new genetics that I want to grow out. And they were tripping over themselves to get a hold of them. And then their livestock manager came over on a field trip and she went. Wow, now I understand why we have your old birds. Yes, and you guys are getting eggs next spring from these. Again, little genetic safe deposit boxes, but I'm also, I want these students at the college to be working with the best genetics possible. It's just going to increase their overall enjoyment of the process.

Rip Stalvey 13:58

I think one of the really side benefits, a great side benefit. It is that it is a tremendous way to find yourself a mentor.

John Gunterman 14:07

And you may not agree with everything that they tell you, and that's okay. It's what got them to where they are, and you're going to have your own thing. But it's important to understand that's where your birds came from.

Rip Stalvey 14:19

When you're building this relationship, it's also an opportunity for you to learn. Because you can invest time in finding out how the breeder breeds his birds, how does he manage his birds. What does he do? He's obviously successful, or you wouldn't be going to it. So try to emulate as much of what they do in your program.

John Gunterman 14:43

But something as simple as your daily life schedule could be different enough to affect the way that those birds respond. Are you up at 4 a. m. feeding, or are you letting them out at 7. 30 in the morning to feed? Are they going straight out to pasture, or are they going straight out onto fresh Rations.

Mandelyn Royal 15:02

Does the light come on automatically or does it have to wait until your finger hits the switch?

John Gunterman 15:08

Does the neighbor who drives by at 5. 30 in the morning have their high beams or low beams on when they come by? It actually makes a difference. My rooster will start crowing when my neighbor leaves with the high beams on versus the low beams.'cause they drive by and just enough light gets through somehow to the rooster goes, oh hey, it's morning. And they're like, no, it's really not but all these externalities that I never would've thought of until I lived with chickens this closely for this long.

Mandelyn Royal 15:37

Yeah, that's true. What I've learned in the last eight years. Even just our small flock expansion, it's been exponential because I went from having, five or six birds to having a hundred at any given time. And just the difference in management, husbandry, the chore load, keeping everybody the way they need to be kept, keeping the waters refreshed and clean. It was a big transition that carried its own learning curve.

John Gunterman 16:06

Okay, Rip. So now that you've got us all primed and chomping at the bit, so to speak, between the earlier discussion and the PK360 live stream that was recently on. How do you do it? It's not a great secret, but, it is a little scary, and I'm afraid to mess up my birds.

Rip Stalvey 16:24

I think we all are when we first started out. We're all concerned about that. And it is, my method, okay, is a form of line breeding, and we talked about line breeding in our PK 360 live stream last night, but there's a lot more we didn't have time to get into in an hour show. There really is. Let's I'll tell you what, just let me start out by explaining

John Gunterman 16:51

I got my notebook and my pen. You talk, I'll write and draw pictures.

Rip Stalvey 16:55

I spent about a year and a half researching what birds I wanted and from who I wanted to get those birds. And I also spent a lot of time studying different reading methods and different ways to go about it. And, the gentleman I wound up getting my Rhode Island Reds from, E. W. Reese, was very kind enough to share his breeding methods with me, even before I approached him about getting birds from him. Here's what he told me. He maintained his birds by breeding what he called family lines. Now, some folks would know that by some other names, maybe the clan concept. But, basically, he maintained multiple Breeding pens. I think he had eight different breeding pens. And all those females in each one of those pens were related to each other. They were like mother, daughter, grandmothers, aunts, nieces. They were all related. And only females from that pen would go back into that pen. So that gets into the concept of how I told you about I maintained my birds through the female side of the mating. Because I If I was doing it today, I would go to somebody and say, okay, look, here's what I want. I want six full sisters. And I would get adults because with adults, what is what you got. Okay. That puts you about a year to year and a half ahead of if you start with eggs or chicks. I'd get six full sisters. If they don't have full sisters, then I would settle for pen sisters, all from the same breeding pen. And then I would get three males from the same breeder. But the males are not related to the females I'm getting. And starting with those pen sisters, divide those into three different pens. And by starting with full sisters, you're going to really increase your odds of building the uniformity in your birds really quickly. Okay, but they've got to be really good quality birds. Here again, don't settle for it. Go for it. Go for the best that you can find. Now, for the males that I make from them, I get three males not related to those. They could be from three entirely different breeding pens, that's okay. But, I would use one male over each pen of two females. And I would try to get the male if I had a female or two in one pen that was weak in undercolor, then I wanted to make sure that I had a male that was Pretty standard requirements for undercolor. The same thing for type flaws or anything like that. You want your males to offset where your females are lacking. And then I would hatch however many chicks I needed or I thought I could raise effectively and efficiently and then sort through those after they mature and pick out one or two females from each pen to keep. For breeders, put them back into their original pen. If they came out of pen 1, they go back into pen 1. If they came out of pen 2, they go back into pen 2. And so on. And I would breed again the following year, still keeping the original male in those three pens. And then I would repeat the process, where I would go through, sort out birds, and pick the best one or two females from each pen, and put them back in that breeding pen. Then, I would get a male from another pen. If I had a male from like pen three that I thought would really help the females in pen one, I would move him. And it could be a cockerel, it could be an old cock bird. Doesn't really make any difference as long as you got good fertility. And, I could cross males from pen to pen, but I'd never ever cross females from pen to pen. When you start crossing females from pen to pen, you're shooting yourself in the foot right there. It sounds reasonably simple, it sounds reasonably complicated, and until you actually work with it, and you've got birds, It can be a little bit difficult to wrap your head around, I understand that, but what you're trying to do is to build consistency in your flock, you want to be, the best compliment I ever got was, your birds are always so uniform looking, they look like peas in a pod. That's the best compliment I think a breeder can ever get. There's more than just line breeding and we did spend a good bit of time on that last night. There's flock mating. There's individual pen mating,

John Gunterman 21:48

So the way I understand it, line breeding would be the individual pens. Just breeding the mothers and the daughters back to the same cockbird.

Rip Stalvey 22:00

Usually I didn't go from one to two years

John Gunterman 22:02

When you start moving the cockbird across to another pen, to me that brings up images of the spiral Clan mating system as it's defined that I've seen where the birds, but people tend to move that bird over every year, which is not entirely necessary. In fact, it could become detrimental when you're establishing is when you really want to concentrate all the attributes and amplify them both for the good and the bad.

Rip Stalvey 22:31

Another way to look at it, John, is when you're moving those males every year, it's hard to build consistency that way.

John Gunterman 22:38

There's a lot of genetic re sequencing happening there.

Rip Stalvey 22:41

Yeah, and the longer you breed birds this way, the more consistent and the more refined your birds become. And somebody asked me one time how long before I need to bring in a new male? You don't. If you have three breeding pens bred this way. You don't even have to go for outside blood. My line of Rhode Island Reds were bred this way from Ms. Donaldson, from Mr. Reese, and through me. For about 85 years, never ever brought any outside blood in and never lost vigor. You got to keep, just like any other mating, you've got to keep your eye on vigor and you've got to keep your eye on health. That's

John Gunterman 23:24

a selection criteria.

Mandelyn Royal 23:26

Yeah. Top of the list.

John Gunterman 23:27

Sick, weak birds that got no place for them. They're not profitable and they just. Invite problems in the rest of the flock. One bad apple spoils the bunch, the same thing goes for chickens.

Mandelyn Royal 23:40

There for a while, I was doing all the pampering and propping up, and doing twice yearly wormings, and I fell into that trap of preserving birds they were not gonna do me any breeding favors. And it took a little while for me to completely change my mindset over the entire thing.

John Gunterman 23:58

When I came to the realization that, you know what, I'm gonna go broke and I'm breeding poorer quality birds by treating my birds is when things started to really click into place as well.

Mandelyn Royal 24:11

Since I got away from that methodology and I started embracing more of the tried and true techniques. That's when everything got better, everything changed, and it's really done a lot to grow the flock in much more positive ways, even though I do have to be ruthless and I do have I need to really evaluate if a bird is going to add value to the program or not, and I can't force it. Those birds have to tell me that they have their own merit. I can't go into a season and say, I'm going to keep 50. No, the birds are going to tell me how many I get to keep.

John Gunterman 24:46

As long as you don't compromise your standards to attain some number that you made up anyways, you're fine.

Mandelyn Royal 24:55

Correct. And that's the difference between hatching for quantity and actually digging into the actual breeding of it. It's really easy to hatch eggs. Once you figure out your incubator and the egg fertility is there, that part is so easy, but the actual work of it, that's what sets breeders apart, because it changes what they're producing, why they're producing it, and what you can expect from those birds.

Rip Stalvey 25:22

One thing I probably should add here, I was breeding from eight breeding pens. Okay, that helped a little bit. But you can do it with three if you do it wisely. But if you ever, somehow something happens and you get stuck in a corner and you feel like, okay, I've gotta get new blood in here. How do I do it? Go back to the breeder. You got your birds from originally. If they're still around.

Mandelyn Royal 25:46

Yeah, and if you got out of it, go to someone who got those birds from them.

Rip Stalvey 25:51

Exactly. You want birds that are unrelated, you don't totally, you don't want them totally unrelated, but you want birds that are far enough separated that it will have the effect of totally unrelated birds.

John Gunterman 26:05

One of the biggest compliments I ever received from my mentor and the person that I get my stock from was. This past fall, they reached out to me and said, Hey, another person that got genetics from me is looking for a rooster. Do you still have that rooster that you were not going to carry forward because of the down color? They would like that rooster from you. And, I was very flattered that, they noticed enough about the rooster and, they were trying to facilitate that connection. Unfortunately, that rooster got transferred to another breeder down in Ohio. So I wasn't able to help him out. I think you may know that bird. But yeah, it was gratifying to to be recognized for that. Where the person that I got the genetics from was confident enough that I didn't screw it up badly enough yet that they could help out somebody else who got genetics from them. Because they didn't have anything at the time that they felt was good for them. But, they remembered this bird and you know what, let me see if that's available.

Rip Stalvey 27:06

That's all that I really had to add here, but I just want To end my part of this by saying, if you want to breed consistently great birds, you're going to have to make the hard choices, you're going to have to make some choices you don't want to make, honestly, and you're going to have to be patient, because if you do those, you will be rewarded beyond your wildest imagination with quality birds.

Mandelyn Royal 27:30

And those qualities can range based on. What your goals are, because I didn't go into this thinking about blue ribbons and fancy showbirds. I just wanted some daggone chicken in the freezer, and that's its own goal, and it changes some of the selection parameters to look for. And so you really need to dig in. What are you even doing this for?

John Gunterman 27:52

My slant is from sustainability. Perspective. Is it good for the birds? Is it good for us? Are we promoting the genetics forward? Is it providing food for us? A safe protein source? Are the birds themselves sustainable? Can, do they breed true? To me, that's huge. I know you could take maybe a year or two off of hard selection and maybe still recover from it breeding to a standard but, how well can these birds do on their own? If they had no input from you due to some catastrophe, could they survive out in the wild until you could, rustle them back up and bring them back under your care?

Rip Stalvey 28:33

One of the things that I find so unique about you and Mandy and myself is that we approach breeding from a very similar but not an exact point of view. We all do things a little bit differently. That doesn't make one of us right and the other two of us wrong. It just makes it different.

John Gunterman 28:59

And, we're still falling back on a standard for our breed, regardless of what we do.

Mandelyn Royal 29:06

The breeds we have are very different from each other. We're not even raising the same birds.

Rip Stalvey 29:11

Two of you are raising the same color birds, but y'all got those easy white chickens.

Mandelyn Royal 29:17

White's not as easy as it looks.

John Gunterman 29:19

No, it's not. You get some leakage in it. Yeah, I know, you build the barn and paint it later. But, I've got this opportunity when establishing my flock right now to only have silver down chicks. I'm gonna try to set that in stone.

Mandelyn Royal 29:34

And if you do it now, guess what you don't have to worry about later?

John Gunterman 29:38

Yes, if I can get homozygous silver on both the males and the females, at least that part's done and it's one less thing to worry about and I could really focus on conformation of type.

Mandelyn Royal 29:52

Yeah, that's true. If you can fix the color early, cause at some point it has to be addressed if you're doing purebred breeding. At some point, the little details are gonna Come to a head and need to be selected, bred for, improved upon, and you have to pick which things you're going to pursue and which phase of the journey, and I started with freezer traits because I absolutely needed to have well growing boys that could just shift right into the freezer, and we got pretty tired of eating two pound birds we're trying different traits, and sometimes I used combs that I absolutely hated. Some birds, I could barely stand to look at them from a beauty perspective, but they helped me figure out The table traits and the structure and the growth rate, and then later I was able to worry about making them prettier and cleaning them up.

John Gunterman 30:45

You've had years of hard work slogging through a genetic Pandora's box. They were a mess! Because I'm standing on the shoulders of 50 years of very controlled line breeding.

Mandelyn Royal 30:56

I didn't have that. I started with a nightmare and cleaned it up to a daydream.

Rip Stalvey 31:00

The bottom line is when you start, if you do it right the first time, you don't have to keep doing it over and over every year.

John Gunterman 31:10

Regardless of where you start, you can get there. It just took you a lot more patience and a lot more grow outs to get there.

Mandelyn Royal 31:17

I had to learn patience real quick.

John Gunterman 31:20

But your breed, it was a challenge. My challenge was getting access to the prime genetics that I knew were out there.

Mandelyn Royal 31:29

And that's the value of some of the older, more well established American lines, or Canadian. They have already had so much work put into them that you can just pick up where they are. And continue. You don't have to completely start over. You don't have to try to reinvent the wheel. You just pick them up where they are and keep going with it and have them blend into what your flock goals are.

John Gunterman 31:51

Sure. Just talking to locals about my particular breed, I bring up Chanticleer and they're like if you want the best Chanticleer, you really got to talk to Mark Dixon. And I start hearing this name two or three times and I'm like let me look up who this person is, and I found him online, and I'm like, wow, now I understand why everybody's saying, if you're serious, you need to find this breeder. So ask your questions, find the best breeder. If you can't get straight from them, find somebody that got from them and had followed their techniques.

Mandelyn Royal 32:21

How many different breeds do you think you went through before you found the it breed that you wanted to run with?

John Gunterman 32:27

Like everybody, I started with the two or three of this, so I started with 24 birds, three or four, two or three of every variety from the hatchery, and it was a nightmare. And then I fell in love with the buckeyes because I was working with them extensively at the college. We were pulling, 400 broilers at a time through the pastures and putting them in the freezer and feeding a college campus. So that's really where I cut my teeth. But they weren't genetically where I want it to be. I brought some home and I tried to breed them to the standard for several years, and I could not bring them back. And I had the Chanticleers in parallel for my heritage hybrid. So putting a Buckeye rooster over a Chanticleer female, you get a feather sexable chick. Which has got a nice little heterosis vigor bump in production, but I've never taken it past F1. And then I just got drawn more and more to the Chanticleer. They responded best to my environment and my husbandry. With the wind that we have up here at this elevation on an exposed hill, any comb or wattle is going to get frostbit. So the Chanticleer fit. And that's where I eventually landed.

Mandelyn Royal 33:36

You went through trial and error and found the absolute best fit for exactly your situation.

John Gunterman 33:41

Yes. And it only took five years to get to the breed that I wanted, and then another two or three years to get to the line that I wanted of that breed.

Mandelyn Royal 33:53

It took me 20 years to figure out what exactly I wanted, and I still don't have them exactly how I want them to be.

John Gunterman 34:00

So what's the big takeaway? This is not instant gratification. It's going to take a while.

34:06

This brings us to the close of another Poultry Keepers podcast. 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 your friends that keep poultry. We hope you'll join us again when we'll be talking poultry from feathers to function.