 Like I say I like to come to the farm show. It's always fun and you meet some people and you see some old friends Have a gentleman. I've seen him here So many years in a row the first time I came in He said Kelly he said I want to show you a picture Well, he showed me a picture of a rooster. He said this rooster saved our lives He said believe it or not Some people have broke into the house and he said that rooster was out pecking on the door and crowing and woke us up From the upstairs bedroom And I thought that's a pretty good rooster and I looked down to picture and the rooster had a wing gone And I thought well, I won't say anything Second year he came and he looked me up and he said how you doing and he said You know what that old rooster did and I said no he said the barn caught fire And he started crowing at two o'clock in the morning woke us up and we all went and he said we saved the barn And he said it took another picture of him Well now a wing was gone and a leg was gone I thought this is a hard farm to live on if you're a rooster Third year I came back And he walked up to me and I said how's that rooster? He said you won't believe it He said we had a weasel get into the chicken house He said he fought off a weasel and protected all these hens And I said no doubt you've got a picture And he showed me the picture and the other wing was gone I said oh buddy, I said you mind if I ask I said what gives with this rooster losing all these limbs and wings He said all this rooster has done for me. He said Kelly. You just can't eat a chicken like that all at one time I heard that boo Just for that there will be essay questions at the end of this And I don't grade on the curb There was a misprint in your brochure And for once a misprint worked out Because if you read I'm supposed to be talking about lying hens And you know what I'm going to talk about lying chickens Because I'm going to tell you how to Cut your feed bills how to get management how to produce more eggs And you do that simply by getting rid of those lying hens out of the laying flock You know things don't always come out as you plan but the lord does look after fools, especially when they're a long way from home Getting into the egg business right now Looks pretty simple You go through the catalog You pick out what you want you write a check 26 weeks later You've got pullets laying eggs Well, it's supposed to work that way But it doesn't And back when Chickens were a true business on the family farms. It did not work that way at all Right now most of you are making a start simply by buying pullet chicks And going into the egg business And you're probably selecting brown egg layers Now I'm going to warn you folks. I'm going to get a little hot here in this one Maybe even step on some toes But if you're buying sex laying birds If you're buying performance bread road island reds production bread road island reds cherry eggers Cinnamon queens You're not producing heirloom brown eggs Those are crossbreds hybrids And by definition and the only standing definition we have right now an heirloom egg comes from a pure bread hen That was recognized and sanctioned by the american poultry association No later than 1950 Sex-linked red birds are generally produced by breeding a road island red rooster to a road island white hen And that's not even the road island white hen that's sanctioned by the american poultry association. It's the single combed hen and I'm going to say this I'd say 90 percent of you in here that are under the age of 50 have never seen a road island red chicken They're not these little light red things that come bopping out of the hatchery boxes A good road island red is so dark red. She's almost black When you see this lighted and faded colors, it's because they've been crossbred Production red or performance red probably within three generations back there stands are a white legged rooster Sex linkage is done for one reason and one reason only When the baby chicks hatch you can tell the little roosters from the little females and Those little males get pitched at the hatchery It's the antithesis of sustainability and the cornish cross broiler That cross cannot be repeated on the farm You say Kelly that's white rock and white cornish Let's make two points. Anyone tried to buy any purebred white cornish in the last 30 years I know of exactly two independent white cornish breeders in the united states And either one of them has birds to sell and has it for the last five years These birds are locked up on farms owned by the companies And they're produced to the point where you go on to a farm that's producing broiler's breed stock You've got one house marked breasts One house marked legs and another house marked growth And then they start pulling breeding birds out of that to put it together for the purpose to produce What's you all come to call a cornish cross Or what I think of is a beach ball with legs and the tendency to die young from heart trouble Here again, we're going to go back to the only legal definition we have to work with right now An heirloom broiler Cannot be harvested any younger than 16 weeks of age These fast broilers these five-week cornish. They're not heirloom It takes the bird that long To develop for the meat to have the quality the texture the flavor And you need to start thinking about this aspect of taste and flavor both in eggs and in poultry meat More and more we're seeing a tendency to sell into the ethnic communities Especially you broiler produce it and they don't want these birds The cornish cross broiler is produced to do one thing chicken strips popcorn chicken and chicken nuggets It's all breast tissue and those breasts are so large and so pendulous that they are no longer Equally supplied by nerves and blood flow So in essence what i'm telling you folks is all of the shortcuts that you're being handled by Handed by the poultry industry right now are roads to nowhere They lock you into off-farm sources of supply You cannot reproduce them in any way shape or form And if you're my age you remembered about 10 or 11 years ago when the animal rights people got to the postal service And they stopped handling baby chicks through the mail For almost six weeks And that ended the broiler trade It just stopped There are only two sources of supply to my knowledge right now in the entire united states that are selling broiler eggs to independent hatcheries And they have a minimum purchase order of 300 dozen at a time So think about that if the mail goes away, which it can very easily Already you you've got a group in here called the bird shippers that they've done a good job But the western airports will not ship birds now The northern airports have temperature restrictions and the southern airports have temperature restrictions And right now today if you're buying baby chicks I'll almost guarantee they're coming out of only one of three hatcheries in the united states and I don't care where you sent your chat They're coming out of southern hatcheries. You've got three left in the united states that truly ship and hatch the year around But the point I want to make is We're coming into this chicken thing In a way that's surprised everybody No one thought it would ever come back at this level There are only three universities right now with major functioning poultry training programs Kentucky, Georgia And I believe Maryland The university of Missouri does not have a single poultry specialist in the field You're on your own out here. No one thought this was ever gonna happen again And it's starting us with a lot of problems Including the fact that the genetics that are available to you primarily have been on the shelf for the last 60 to 70 years Most of the big hatcheries no longer hatch have their own breeding birds. They buy eggs You might have a single flock selling to six seven or eight different hatcheries in different parts of the united states A few years ago, I bought a nice set of white wine dot chicks out of a southwestern Missouri hatchery That hatchery has been gone But to compound it I like the bird so well I told my wife. I said we're going to add some more. I'm going to go from a different source So I ordered from a large hatchery in minnesota That's enough of a hint to you And here come my box of baby chicks in september Well, my first batch came from a hatchery and was sent through the clinton Missouri post office My minnesota chicks came through with a clinton missouri postmark I kind of got a notion that they were brother and sister And that's the point here folks I did a lot of work with breed preservation And we used an old phrase you just got to start with what you have That has actually now been attributed back to an old purebred barred Plymouth rock breeder named mr Ralph Sturgeon But what that says is at this stage of the game whatever genetics you can access That's where you're going to have to make your start And a lot of them are pretty common There has been no true production testing carried on in my lifetime The only way you can get exact honest figures on a hen to produce a backer with numbers is trapped Nesting Trap nesting takes time That bird is identified individually. She goes into a nest lays an egg a door drops And she does not come back out of that nest until you lift that door pick up her egg Write her band number down the bird. She was bred to and log it in Kelly that's a lot of work 1930 There was a leg on hen that came out of the west coast at late 345 eggs a year It was a lot of work that paid off And you're seeing a lot of birds offered now in the catalogs 260 270 Egg performance on these hens call them up and ask them if that's on those birds What they're going to tell you is that's historical performance data on a breed It probably isn't even the line they're breeding out of If you're into the brown egg business and you're buying barred rocks buff orpington's Figure on Going in 160 eggs per hen per year if you're going with some of the more Unique ones, especially the birds that are heavy bred for meat 90 110 And that's the point I want to make to you right off folks There are egg laying chickens and there are meat chickens and then there's this great lie called the dual-purpose chicken And I'm not kidding that is the great lie the dual-purpose chicken Nothing lays like a leger yields like a Cornish Or lies like the man that tells you they are There's two distinct types egg laying type And that's why I want you to go back. We've got some pictures But an egg laying bird Her predominant body development is behind her legs That's the overduck The egg track the whole nine yards The meat bird it's in the front of the legs the breast tissue The pure bred meat birds that we have For the most part are descended out of fighting stock That broad breast was initially a trait for fighting chickens It was muscle. It's what they took to stay in the pit And it's what they needed to take a hit stay in the pit A little bit of a side right here A few years ago. Well, you heard all the panic over the bird flu And they're starting to talk bird flu again this fall It's traced to asia for one big reason Those folks handle chickens entirely different than we do And I'm not here to criticize them But most of those people are cock fighters The birds are actually kept under their beds and their houses to protect them And there's an old old cock fighters trick and you need to learn this to know why the risk is so great in asia A bird that is spurred in the pit in the breast The head or the neck the blood will clot If you jerk him up and you suck those clots out and put him back down he'll keep fighting And those people are regularly sucking fresh raw chicken blood into their mouths And that's not meat. That's national geographic folks So let's not panic and let's get our story ready when the people come out and want to ask the questions But layer type meat type we're going to show you birds of each category and you need to know that I've talked about trap nesting what we're going to demonstrate back there Is called the walter hogan evaluation system Mr. Hogan went into the chicken business in 1865 Which was the beginning of the glory years for chicken production And he went on to see what some people call the petaluma miracle But what launched the modern livestock industry was the white leagrin And the electric incubator and that traces back to the petaluma in the california imperial valley Where those folks got real serious about good chickens real early on So it came together And the principle is that type tells And there are traits you can look for To evaluate your chickens And this is the part I want to really make imperative to you Folks you can look at the catalog pictures and you can open the boxes But you need to start taking those chickens in hand and knowing what they are And you should start culling your chickens on the day they come out of the incubator Or you lift them out of that shipping box In the early going you look for the obvious Curl toes Split beaks navel ill Curl toes and split beaks Are indicative I'm only going on one cup of coffee Are indicative of excessive inbreeding The wrong kind of inbreeding And the curl toes come generally because the chicks are weak and they have trouble coming out of the shells when they're hatching And we'll show you some curl toeed birds back there But that's your first step your first indication And you need to be evaluating these birds roughly at every two week interval And now i'm going to get a little bit on the economics end of it. Those of you who are in the egg laying business Let me do a little math with you Let's say that Come february you decide i'm going to need a hundred bullets next fall to go into the egg laying business Okay By a hundred and thirty Because you're going to cull through that many before they go into the laying house And you're going to cull them roughly at every two week interval now i'm old And some will say a bit lazy But at every two weeks and we're breeding our own We bring our chicks out and we set them up on cages at line of sight Small numbers at a time and we give each one of them a serious hard look as well as holding them in our hands We're feeling for weight in development and growth And if i give you only one thing to take out of here When you're evaluating these bullets Keep only the largest The fastest growing Because what you're doing is you are naturally selecting for health on your farm We can keep alive the weak and the poor doing Those that fail to thrive But they get in our pocket And the trouble is now we're even getting to the point where we can allow them to breed on One Like i said, i was into some preservation work Paid some terrible dollars kept some older chickens And we tolerated a little bit of Problem because there just weren't that much genes in the business But if you're going to succeed in this as a business, you've got to get ruthless with them And don't hesitate A little secret a good successful chicken person likes chicken salad And i'll follow that with another point You can tell a lot of the chicken by just looking I was given a set of Buff Plymouth rock hens They were in their first year of lay kind of laid in it and Just as you'd never look a gift to horse in the mouth You don't want to look too hard at a gift chicken But I was given six first year pullets in a rooster Well five of them Were beat up and faded And worn down And there was one and she was a big old girl and boy She was pretty and she was shiny and red calm and bright yellow legs And she should have been eating when she was about four months old Because she wasn't laying eggs Every bit of food that she ate went to keep her big bright and shiny A chicken in production takes from her own body to produce eggs That's why the good lord put this molt cycle in here You buy that hundred and thirty you take that hundred You take them through on your farm You're going to go from roughly nine to 11 to maybe 13 months of production and then they're going to go into a molt They have to shut down Now that molt will last anywhere from five to 12 weeks A culling factor the faster they drop those feathers the better The earlier they drop those feathers the worse I've got a couple of hints right now at home that if there was a playboy magazine for chickens I've got the cup girl But they're going to stay there because they drop those feathers all at once And they're going to put them all back on all at once And they're going to get back to laying quicker Those early molters they're saying I quit I've laid all the eggs I'm going to Now there's something you all are some of you're here probably encountering right now We went from extreme heat to we had a pretty nasty little cold spell the end of september Then it got warm again Some of you have come in coming up and asked me said kelly. Why did my birds quit laying? Well, you've got one of two possibilities They're going into what's called a premature or a neck molt If you look at them, they're losing a few feathers generally in the neck area Okay, they'll overcome this but they've had a pretty good hit of weather stress Take them in hand Make sure that those abdomens are soft that those pelvic bones are in good shape Then boost your protein a little bit and you'll bring them back out of that Some of you are you're hearing your birds are sounding like me this morning Little sniffly sound you may even have some eye swelling. You've got some respiratory trouble And that's part and parcel of the season Now some of that can be management induced and some of it is just a part of the game Don't when the weather starts getting cold close those chicken houses up that tight Man you go nailing up the plastic and bringing in the wooden doors And you've got them in there and you think boy, they're going to be warm And in about the third day you start smelling ammonia in the chicken house They need fresh air and they need an exchange of air on a regular basis And the other thing is and this is true of any livestock species on your farm When you or I walk into a livestock building we experience that environment At head and shoulder height Well, there's nothing short of giraffes that I know of that kind of get into that same range with us Your chickens are at floor level or they're on the roost Get out on your hands and knees where they live And start looking for knot holes And splits and cracks And then you get it roost tight And you start looking for knot holes and splits and cracks Because if you're getting a breeze across them at night while they're on the roost, they're chilling And they're not comfortable So remember that you have to evaluate them at their environment and not yours And Yet well This time of year I'm forced to have it is I'd be at home with a bucket of lime whitewash Whiten up the insides of the chicken house put the lime whitewash into the roost and all And It's natural preventative Now I'm trying to do two things here today I'm doing a little problem solving as I go and I'm talking to general manager If you have a question put your hand up. I'd rather try to ask it while you're fresh But folks Don't get those roosts great high up in the air Especially if you've got these bigger brown egg laying birds A buff orpington a wine dot her roost shouldn't be any more than 18 inches in the air The further she has to jump down the more prone they are to injure their feet and legs Especially the bottoms of their feet and they will develop a problem called bumblefoot Which is essentially infection small wound They walk into the dirt and the manure and it'll pack in There are cures for that But don't get caught with it Do not get your nests higher than your roost Because they'll go to the highest point to roost Keep them off the tops of those nests Now another question I've been fielding right here a lot today is in yesterday in the day before his egg eating Well, we all see these neat little pictures of these wall nests You know, they're about 12 by 12 and a little pot pole and then you go in there and they You think that's neat and I'll save my money and I'll order one of those out from nasco The best way to stop egg eating Is to use the old colony nest concept You make your chicken nest Two feet deep two feet high five feet long You make your nest four feet wide four feet deep 18 inches high one hole into the nest The chicken goes in she'll go to either corner And all is on her mind is laying that egg and getting out through that hole again No chance to come back and picket eggs that are laying right there at beaks reach Those concepts go back to the 20s and 30s. They were hard-earned ways to build nests, but they work If you've got an egg eating problem at home or you believe you do go out there They'll give themselves away an egg eater will have egg stains on her beak and face and down her breast Now there are a few things you can do There's some natural cures my grandmother would blow eggs fill them full of red pepper Or she'd paint eggs real hard with a red pepper paint And that works sometimes It doesn't work you can take an egg eater and you can clip that top of that beak until it'll get soaring She'll quick pecking Or you can take that egg eater and roaster and you'll know she'll never do it again Remember that chicken salad thing That's a theme today stay with me Yes, sir The two that I see most commonly are four feet by four feet by about 18 inches high you can make that out of plywood Two sheets of plywood will get you calling and a nest that size should be big enough for up to 35 hens The old timers that were using hanging nest made them two feet high two feet deep five feet long They look like a tube or a tunnel and they put a 12 inch pop hole right in the middle And here again keep them low And put a stiff enough top on them so they won't have any inclination to set up there and roost But Let's uh talk a little bit about what we need to be putting into those houses right now And i'm going to talk some chicken economics How many of you are selling brown eggs? Don't be ashamed i'm i just said i'm gonna growl a little bit i I haven't shot anyone the whole week and i've even sat down and talked nice to an extension agent But the point is folks The brown egg birds with a handful of exceptions Were not bred for egg production Quite simply For the last three generations of american consumers the traditional the heritage egg has a white shell You go home and i've got dark brown legrins And i have got buff orpingtons Side by side in the pens come spring i will guarantee that i will sell more buff orpingtons than i will dark brown legrins but For every two of these buff orpingtons that i have to house and feed I can house three or four of the brown legrins And on an individual basis those brown legrins will outlay those buff orpington hens Without any performance breeding by 35 to 58 per year They were bred to lay they have a higher metabolism And a lot of people are saying well aren't those old legrins flighty Well folks at one time The ancestors of herford cattle would kill you if you came close enough to the chaos It was bred out of the aggressiveness and we need to get busy breeding some of that flightiness out of our legrins And our menorcas and our anconas Those are birds that are called the Mediterranean class They were bred for egg production They lay a large white egg. They lay an arch egg in relationship to the body Now what has happened in the commercial egg sector Is they quit breeding for performance Somewhere i suspect in arkansas in the 1950s they had a secret meeting and people named tyson and purdue Said well we're going to come up with this little hen that will fit into the cage She will lay a large egg in relationship to her body She will lay pretty hard for a year And then We're going to put her in a big truck We're going to take her to kansas We're going to euthanize her and we're going to bury her in a landfill Because we've got all we can wring out of her. We don't want to pay to take her through a molt And Campbell's really doesn't buy old hens to put chicken in her chicken noodle soup They bought a pretty good wine dot back in the 1920s and they're still using the meat from that bird And But the point is they're bred to be thrown away A lot of chickens are thrown away Six out of every 10 eggs that hatch are little roosters Your 100 red sex length bullets Are leaving 160 brothers back on the loading dock at the hatchery And they live for maybe 12 hours and then they're euthanized Now someday someone from pita is going to decide to raise holy blue cane with that little fact And believe me they will And that may be the thing that causes us to lose the us males for baby chick shipping But like they're content with a type They're happy with what they get and they don't care if we lose the males because they don't mail their chicks They've got tractor trailers and big fleets and the big outfits will move theirs The ticens and the produce own own the genetics that produce the broilers They actually buy and sell breeding lines It's as if you or I could go out tomorrow put enough money on the table and say I own the black angus cattle breed They own the cornish cross broil And they'll do whatever they please with it And folks that bird they're never in it was an intention for that bird to go into chicken tractors Or that bird to range or that bird to ever be a natural product They were bred to produce as many strips and nuggets as they could as fast as they could as cheaply as they could And they do not breed on Time after time up at our bird market in silks people come and say well We bought these cornish cross and we're going to raise some of our own next year And then we put a little hat in the back and everybody throws in a quarter And well when is their breeding stock going to die 11 weeks of age 12 weeks of age 13 weeks of age? I'll say this every one of you that's working with them invariably 90 of the cornish cross birds You find dead on your farm are dead face forward or straight on their back with their feet in you And the combs in the heads are dirty blue because they have died of strokes and heart attacks They don't have brains enough to come through the Missouri hot spell and walk 100 yards to drink water Those breast blisters come because they're too big and cumbersome Good broiler men now they're trying this until the birds are gone from the farm They're bedding them in four to five inches of peat moss Okay, I'm going to preach a little bit I got wound up Those of you who have got a 10 by 10 or a 10 by 12 chicken tractor and have got 80 or 100 broilers in it shame on you If you just might as well build a big building and put 10 000 in there you're packing them as tight and you're treating them as hard packed in crammed in Well Kelly I can get more birds I ain't gonna eat your chickens pakistan east and the guatemalan And the bosnians that come to silence they aren't going to eat your chickens because they've had a good chicken They know what it tastes like it's not supposed to feel spongy and look absorbent They talk about taste And texture and chewing ability If you're where you're supplying caribbean people they want a tough chicken It's not the way you or I think of tough They want a bird that has been conditioned and exercised Can go into a cooking process that takes a long period of time Uses a lot of spices and will come out of it still tasting like chicken That's their definition of it and that chicken takes every bit of those 16 weeks to get there And more importantly they realized a hard lesson they'll pay 10 or 12 dollars to get that chicken or more Because you don't find them You don't see a lot of What chicken used to be I pulled a book down off the shelf the other day it was the old meatweeds book and They started running down The category point of fact the usda at one time didn't have anything called a broiler They had a spring chicken. They had a fryer and then they had a roaster Well wall street and its wisdom got together and said we will put them all together and call it a broiler You know, they put together the nuclear industry and call that three mile island And the thinking behind this is a little bit shaky folks You can't do all things out of this Try to buy a roasting chicken lately We had a neighbor back home Found the niche market Jillman passed away. He was an older man 15th day of august every year he would order out 50 Buff orpington cockerel checks Will you buy 50 of those at the end of august? Sometimes they'll send you a check and pay the post reach to get them gone But the point was Come november and december He had the heirloom traditional heritage alternative to the honeysuckle white turkey And when he started 25 years ago He got seven dollars apiece for them Right now such a bird in the right place will bring 20 to 25 dollars We have smaller families. We have lots of people that don't like turkey Remember folks one definition of eternity is two people in a turkey My wife and I We enjoyed our christmas turkey And we enjoyed it on super bowl sunday's turkey sandwiches And it very nearly made it to the Easter dinner This is the alternative I think we forget that the pork people made a lot out of it, but the other white meat always has been always will be chicken We just need to do the job of marketing The next step in all of this and I mean this sincerely Is there's a real quality issue with what's coming out of these hatcheries A lot of the hatcheries don't own breeding birds anymore. They farm them out. They buy eggs You folks that are on the internet there's a concept called pop-up hatcheries And I'll tell you what I can be in the hatchery business tomorrow and I can show every one of you how to do it You put up your little web page You rip off somebody else's advertising pictures And you put it up there and you say i'm going to sell you this this this breed of chickens I want this price for them And you send me the money Then i'm going to get on the phone to ideal hatchery in texas And i'm going to buy the same chick you want for less money And it's going to come to your house in a plain chick box I don't have no more knowledge of what's in that box than the man in the moon It's being done Do this little tip wherever you see poultry advertising Look hard at the pictures and if you're seeing duplications of pictures You better start thinking about they're all coming from the same place Point two don't fall for the pictures in the catalogs Those are paintings are they're idealized they've been reworked pictures Those beautiful pictures that are the american standard of perfection Which i think everybody should have on Are artist concepts there's never been a chicken on earth that looks like any of those pictures That's what a perfect chicken is supposed to be I expect to see them someday But not on this side of the jordan river I'll tell you a little story Three old farm boys Found themselves standing before the pearly gates And they started through and an angel grabbed me and said wait a minute And he said boys He said you've got to know that st. Peter in here is a chicken man And there are chickens all over the place and he's very very particular Said if you hurt one of these chickens you will pay for it Well, they hadn't been there 20 minutes And an old boy stepped on one of st. Peter's chickens squaw He looked up and here comes st. Peter In one hand he had a black iron chain and in the other hand he had the ugliest woman that man had ever seen He grabbed him and he wrapped that chain around his arm and he wrapped it around that woman He said you shall be together forever Well, the other two were scared to death Their friend went wandering away through the clouds A millennium went by And one of them got cocky again Stepped on another chicken Here comes st. Peter With a silver chain And believe it or not an uglier woman Drug him out wrapped the chain You shall be bound together forever And the third guy said no, I'm country enough. I'm not ever gonna step on a chicken Thousands of years went by An angel came up to him. He said st. Peter wants to talk to you And they took him before st. Peter and there stood the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life and a golden chain And he wrapped him together with the golden chain and he said and you shall be together forever The old boy was walking away and he's admiring this beautiful woman And he said dear How do you think we ever came to deserve this? She said I don't know about you, but I stepped on a chicken over here about 20 minutes I redeemed myself, did I? Took you down the long road to get there, but we got there Folks what what I'm wanting to say to you now is we've talked about the 20s and the 30s never an important year Because everyone with chickens was a chicken breeder And they were doing their own work And they had a brisk market. There was a wonderful trade I've got magazines from the 1880s with chicken breeders in yonkers new york and brooklyn I always like to tell the story about a young man Came to new york city in the 1930s Yes, they had chicken shows at madison square garden in the 1930s And the height of the pressure young man's name was john thomford came off the farm up in new hampshire Had a row dial in red rooster Won the whole thing Big chicago hobby farmer businessman came up to him and said son Give you 300 dollars for the rooster He said no No the show went on he came to me said son. I'll give you 600 dollars and he said no John thomford at the height of the depression turned down a three thousand dollar cash offer for a single rooster And he walked out the door But what he didn't tell the man from chicago was that in his hip pocket was a notebook with orders for 30 birds at $250 a piece sired by that rooster One rooster bought an old country boy a tharn Folks were not quite there But last fall on the internet The first trio of chocolate orpington's was offered in the united states Chocolate is the hot color in poultry The birds were imported from england at a great deal of expense. There were two bullets in a rooster and the starting bid was $5,000 And go home if you've got the stromburg's hatchery catalog Turn through the industrial birds get back to that little page about the middle of the catalog and it's this stromburg select 100 as hatched baby chicks as hatched 60 percent of them are probably going to be cockroaches And they only want $990 for 100 baby chicks But they will pay the shipping $990 And that's not that unusual now I've got a friend that's an individual breeder in Indiana and he's selling baby chicks for seven dollars a piece 175 dollars plus shipping sends you 25 of his baby chicks He's old school. He's down there in southern india And he's making the birds work. He's starting his own little hatchery And the thing is this is available to all of us Because the other secret they don't want to tell you about chickens from the hatcheries And I'll almost guarantee this When you open that box, they're either full brothers and sisters or they're half brothers and sisters And they're coming out of pretty small flocks Especially if they're a rare breed Had a friend a while back That bought white fava rolls And he was just thrilled to death Come to find out He had one of only three flocks of white fava rolls in the united states Point two was no one else wanted white fava rolls You can get too far afield you can come from too narrow a point in time But make that assumption Let's say you're getting more serious now You've got your egg laying flock And you're saying I can do better And that's you you have to start doing better You have to become a chicken breeder And that means Starting your own program identifying your own birds and following your own breeding pattern Now let's say your heart was set on something kind of unusual and you had to go the hatchery route So you've got 25 as hatched Let's just say for the sake of argument right now Oh Speckled Sussex All right out of our 25 You're probably going to get one real good trio two females and a male And two so-so pair Save those extra roosters Because if you lose or if you say well, I'm going to save some money But going through the winter with one rooster I'll guarantee you almost positive He'll die in the spring and it'll be another year before you're back into the ball game But from your good trio With 80 production and 80 hatch ability You'd be surprised how many baby chicks you'll hatch in that first season You take the very best pullets that you raise And you breed them back to their father And you take the very best young cockerel that you breed that you've raised and you breed him back to those two older hens That's called a rolling mating Father daughter mother son are not nearly as close breeding as Brother sister That's the closest mating you can make They're getting the same shot of genes down both sides That's those folks that have the family tree that go straight up So you want to follow that the concept is called a rolling mating And what it does is once you've identified these better individuals You can start keying on them and keep coming forward down the line with them Now there are two alternatives to this The point is you can do it from this way And then you want to try to flare out a little bit So come from one or two more sources And I'm going to tie you up with a little bit of pen space Start going to sales and buying cheap rabbit hutches folks Because you're going to get multiple little breeding groups So the first year or two breed pure out of each one of these So that you've got two or three lines on the farm that you know what they're doing You're still keeping your commercial flock over here But you're starting to make some work on this And you're starting to produce some birds that you can put back in over here on this But then you're starting to get some identity established And then you can start putting together these genetics to create your own birds But let's say you buy from three sources And never buy less than 15 baby chicks Most places won't ship less than 15 And if you're buying as hatched you can order 15 as hatched chicks And I guarantee it'll skew badly for one direction or another as far as the sexes go It's a mathematical thing But say we've got three lines here then We're kind of happy Okay, so we've got pen a Pen b pen c All right The best young rooster out of pen a Bread to the best pullets out of pen b The best rooster in pen b is bred to the best pullets out of pen c The best cockerel from pen a goes back up and see goes back to the push from pen a That's a rotational breed And you don't have to have a wash tub full of chickens to do that Especially you meet bird people 10 good meat type white rock hens Will give you 40 to 50 Baby chicks every week hatching your own And they'll do that for 20 some weeks each year And you can work on king on quality With small numbers you can know what's going on I do this at home my biggest breeding pen has five females in a male And it's pretty easy you go by there and you say well, I'm only getting three eggs two of those old girls aren't carrying your weight That's when you get provoked and you start really getting serious about evaluating get your hands on them You kind of know and we're going to show you what to look for back there But you're going to have to get your hands on them And then you're going to come down in numbers for a while, but you're going to start working on quality And then you begin to identify and this is very important. You know where the good roosters are coming from Because your improvement in your breeding birds will come through your male line male male birds influence female genetics Females carry the male influence. That's why we have Problems with genetic disorders because if it was the male that carried the male problems you'd eliminate it You'd spot it that quickly So you're coming down in your breeding and you're working on this And we're going to show you how to get your hands on a young rooster and find out whether he's got what it takes or not So you're putting together this program gradually and like I said Line breeding is in breeding, but it's not incest with the consequences you think of Because above all else remember what I said early on what's the first two things you select for size and vigor size and vigor When Robert Blakewell established the concepts of modern purebred livestock breeding before any male Ram bull or stallion went into the herd book He was bred to 35 of his blood daughters to make sure there weren't any defects in there And we probably knew starting to getting that hard on our genetics again Remember my chicken salad story Starting to make a little more sense, isn't it? So you're going to work through them and you're going to make them better Your farm isn't my farm It isn't like any other farm in the world The genetics you come up with that will work for you and you keep improving are being bred specifically for your farm Your environment and your market And don't ever forget that you've got a different bug problem bugs I mean bacterial and diseases than I do every farm on earth has them If you've got a sterile farm, it's not a place to live and it's not a place that you'll ever raise healthy livestock So you're going to be working on that Breeding up your own line The poultry industry is where the idea of breeding lines with breeder names on them came into place thomford sturgeon On and on those old names still stand up and they still Earn respect where you can find birch bread that way So you're going forward you're building your own and you're making them better If you're doing your job This year's baby chicks are better than last year's and next year's are going to be better than this year's And that's crucial and you're going to have to be identifying these birds and selecting for traits And that means pedigreed matings Putting them together you're going to have to identify your birds Toe punches wing bands know where they are from the time they come out of the incubator Actually from the time they go into the hatchery A lot of your interest did I know in the blue egg layers The dark brown eggs the speckled eggs and You might laugh at this but you better be Doing the first job of selecting your roosters from the eggs that have those colors That's where the hens will be influenced. He's 50 percent of the flock Two of them in a row and that's 85 percent of your genetics If you're looking for dark brown and you can take these light brown shelled birds and you can breed them darker On the 18th day when it comes time to move them down out of the incubator You place those better colored eggs in boxes berry baskets little wire Hardware cloth little baskets with top and they'll hatch in there All right gentlemen put your hands over your ears because there's a cheaper way to do that Sneak a pair of your wife's pantyhose out of the house Put those good eggs in one end tie a knot in both ends put them in the back in the incubator and they won't get out of Those either yes, man well My wife says I better keep my mouth shut, but we're we're we're fundamentalist Christians of the Pentecostal faith and yes, my wife does I think it's that one that says D-O-L-L-A-R in front of the word store But you identify them Now when you've got those birds You have several options If you want to do it on the cheap get you a good permanent marker And before you put them all together in the brooder put a good dark mark in the top of the head of every one of them You're going to have to touch that up every three or four days You can get a tool It's going to cost you all the five dollars Called a toe punch Just as quick as your little chicks come out of the incubator In the little web of skin you punch a hole in them You can put 16 different numbers across the webbing on a baby chick With the different codes When you punch them make sure that little piece of flesh comes out because if it drops back in They're fast to heal and it'll close up At about the time they're a month old you can get a leg band on them or you can get a wing band on them You have to watch with leg bands to make sure they're expand Now i'm going to tell you how to save a little money on leg bands You go to your farm supply store On peanut days or something and you go over there and you buy that big jumbo jar of eight dollar pull tights And you get the red ones and the green ones and the yellow ones And you pull them just tight enough so the leg can continue to grow So let's say all your 2012 chickens They've got a green band on the right egg leg for the roosters and they've got a blue band on the left leg for the pullets And with the eight colors of the bands there you can be banding chickens until the next peanut day in the next millennium The little twist bands and the numbered bands Get to the point where they're 50 cents a piece The thing about the little pull tights is a pair of side cutters and they snapped off and you can change them on But you've got to keep track of them. You've got to know where they are from the time they come out of the nest And that's why we go with the smaller groups Carry that notebook do a lot of I keep a diary for my incubator I know where every egg is in a 480 egg incubator or I should know Got a little greedy a few years ago found a real good set of barred Plymouth rocks in western Illinois Bought the birds and on the way out. He said oh by the way Kelly All the roosters have been running with all the hens on the farm Well, I'd like to know that before you had those birds cooped up the night before I came to look at them So I went home Waited 11 days before I put eggs in the incubator Had the prettiest hatch of little barred Plymouth rocks you ever saw Except for the last one out of the hatching tray, which was a barred naked neck So the next third to farmers market. I sold a real nice set of Barred chicks. God only knows what they were Give me a dollar and a quarter of peace and take them home with you It takes 14 days for a hen's overduck to clean Before you can be sure that she's being bred to the right male 14 days And you're not going to make all this progress overnight But the wonderful thing about a chicken is they're fertile and they're productive Within five to six generations. You can make a sharp turn and jack up levels of production And if you're in a halfway temperate climate you can get six generations of chickens in under five years Roughly, you can go with an eight month generation And they will work out Now the old old timers will tell you you don't save Pull it eggs to hatch because you don't know how good a hen she's going to be And I can't argue with that But I will also tell you this That most of your commercial hatcheries The breeding flocks that supply them Come the 15th of june to the 20th of august Every one of those hens is sold to save money That's when they stop shipping and they're back next spring Selling you eggs that were hatched out of pullets that were produced the year before They do it to cut corners The old timer said wait two years Now a question I've been asked up here is how long can you keep a A hen on the farm and expect production She will lay more eggs in her pullet year than any other year Each year that passes her level of production will go down 10 to 15 percent In her second year the eggs may begin to get larger But they will be fewer by the third year With the fact that you've had lost so many to culling And your fertility is starting to decline and they're producing fewer remember our 130 100 when you're coming back for the second laying cycle You're probably going to have 80 From that 130 And it's going to wind down I worked for preservation. I had some hens on the farm that were 10 years old and we were still getting eggs But we weren't getting a great many but we were talking about the fact Rare breed very few on earth and the chicks had greater value