choosing breeds?

What would they be and why?
Are there breeds out there that need assistance, or that people are not doing much of?
I am trying to decide what breed to pay attention to the SOP and perhaps sell offspring/hatchling eggs but do not want to have a breed that others are already doing in spades.
I love the BCM (they are beautiful) and the ameraucana..but it seems that both of these breeds are pretty common, and I would like to be able to sell pairs etc...also have great interest in the "old" RIR
Is it too early for me as a "chickener" to be even considering doing this?

so lots of advice...stern admonishment...whatever would be good..and thanks

I'm going to share what I wished was shared with me when I got started.

First, all the breeds need assistance, some more than others. The main reason they need assistance is because most fanciers are not practicing sound selection. The general rule of thumb is that only the best 10-20% of a population should be used as breeders. If you are only selling pairs, it is to be expected that the purpose of the pair will be used for breeding. If your pairs are coming from the top 20% of each hatch, then you are helping the breed. If they are coming from the lesser quality 80% of the hatch, then you are watering down the genepool and contributing to it's decline.

For this reason, selling pairs is not a sustainable goal if there is a desire to contribute to the improvement of a breed. If one wants to hatch, one needs to consider responsible uses for the lesser 80% of the hatch. Many of the pullets can be sold as utility layers (with no rooster), but that still leaves us with the excess cockerels (40% of hatch) which still need a use. Many of us eat them and I also sell them processed, but this is not an easy market. Best to start with a plan to eat the majority of the roosters hatched. Others that want to protect the integrity of their breeds simply toss the extra roosters into the compost/garbage.

As for choice of breed, look for a quality line that is close by that will cover your personal needs. Getting a breed already well adapted to your region is an incredible advantage. Furthermore, having nearby access to quality backup genetics and knowledge can be a tremendous asset while learning the ropes.

In the end, you will do far more for helping improve our heritage breeds by working with others in your region on a single quality breed, than you will by bringing in a new one to compete against the local efforts that preceded you.

Food for thought. Rare breeds are really not that rare, they are a dime a dozen. There is never a shortage of hatcheries willing to exploit the marketability of the word "rare". What is truly rare are the quality lines of the quality breeds. Lines that actually perform as they did a hundred years ago. Too many people focus on a bird's label rather than it's qualities. The problem is, labels are really not that rewarding. They don't lay eggs, they don't put meat on the table, they don't even snuggle in our laps, or eat out of our hands. However, birds with great personalities that lay well can be most rewarding. Living for a long time without medication is rewarding. Unthrifty birds or those that need special attention are not.

I've tried a few breeds over the last decade, and now that I've downsized to my main 3, 2 are the same two I started with. Muscovy duck and Ameraucana. They stood the test of time because they come close to performing as intended. Most heritage lines fail in this regard. I developed both lines from scratch from locally sourced birds. The lone newcomer comes as a surprise, it's a Khaki Campbell line from Dave Holderread. A boring little brown duck. This line is hands down the best heritage breed I have ever worked with. They perform as advertised. They are the least rare of all the duck breeds I've tried, but they are, without a doubt, the most rewarding.

Good Luck

That's really helpful Omega, answers many of my questions.

I agree about excess roosters - which is why I am trying to improve the meat qualities of the two breeds I am working with: I'd rather eat than toss them on the compost heap.

The other thing I like to do is have a pool of friends who want barnyard chickens and are happy to pay a reasonable amount for my cull hens. If they have a rooster at all it is a barnyard mix.

Can you briefly describe your plan for a breed - how do you breed to improve? What is your set up?

Hmmm, got my own thread, must have clicked wrong button, sorry...


Sue, there really isn't a one size fits all plan, I really never have a plan until I've had a chance to get to know a line for at least a hatching season. And then the plan can change from season to season as the line evolves. I would need to write a book if I was to discuss the whens and where's of the various plans I've followed. However, the principles that have guided the plans are much easier to pin down.

The SOP is a guide, not a policeman with handcuffs. What I mean is that I always put food production ahead of show traits. For example, good strong feet come before comb quality. We don't eat the combs, but good feet effect foraging and fertility. A good skeletal profile is more important than feather colour. The skeleton give us strength, the room to process food, and what is often overlooked, the skeleton gives us balance. Balance is a quality that I find difficult to explain, but it encompases combining back angles, stances, tail angles, body depth, etc, that all complement each other and function in a complimentary way. You can have two 36 pound Tom turkeys and the one with the best balance is likely to be the one with best fertility.

I approach line development and line maintenance quite differently. If I want to maintain a line, I tend to follow a classic braided breeding plan. The general idea is to maintain 3 lines. Each season, the female offspring go back into their mothers pen and the male offspring rotate to a new pen. I tend to follow the "select 20% best" guideline. This is what I've done for years with my Muscovy what I'm now starting with the Campbells. I have roughly 50 hens and 3 drakes in a pen. Still can't believe Holderreads has dropped the breed.    Until I heard the bad news, I was just running them as a single flock, assuming I could bring in new blood when I needed it. Now I don't have that safety net and need to adjust my approach.

However, I know an old school turkey breeder who has maintained a closed flock for several decades. They don't maintain and rotate multiple lines, they just keep one big open flock. However, they maintain healthy genetic diversity by selecting for it. They don't select for perfect peas in a pod. They select for the entire range of size and shape that is acceptable to the standard. I think this is a very important principle to learn, it instills resilience into our breeding efforts. If we want a resiliant genepool, we want diverse lines, not peas in a pod.

When developing a line, and especially when weeding out inbreeding depression, my selection can vary widely from season to season, but often averages out to a 50% selection rate. I never try for quick success because every trait has several dozen genes linked to it and I don't know what all I'm adding or substracting with each selection choice. I have found it much safer to be patient and nudge a genepool into a particular direction rather than force it. With my Black Ameraucanas, my first focus was reproductive vigour, then size/fleshing/overall body shape, then feather colour, and now after 10 years I'm starting to take some of the lesser impoortant traits seriously such as comb quality, eye colour, and my something new, toe nail colour.

Over 10 years of working the breed and toe nail colour was never on the radar until reading about it on this forum. I took an inventory of my flock and sure enough, there are alot of white toe nails down there. If the 14 roosters, 3 have black toes and 3 are black/dirty white striped. The rest are bright white. About 60% of the pullets are white. Now I could very easily toss all the birds with white toe nails and remove the flaw in one or two generations. But in doing so, I risk tossing out alot of positive genetic diversity linked to the white toe nails. I would rather be patient and adjust this year's breeding pens so that I avoid breeding white to white toe. From the black toe-nailed pullets, I will select the best and create an "elite" breeding pen (with black toed males) which will produce next year's show birds, but more importantly, the following year's breeding males. The rest of the selected pullets will make up the balance of the season's breeding pens and will be used to produce the following season's pullets. This has been my general pattern: I use the males to increase gene frequencies of show type traits while focusing more on production qualities on the female side.

Plans can be diverse, but if they are built on a strong foundation of selection, they will usually produce positive results. The trick is in knowing what to select for and what to select against. And to be patient in those selections, selections should protect and maintain important diversity. For me, reproductive vigour is of primary importance. Before I will take any line seriously, it must have reproductive vigour. In poultry, this is even more important because reproductive vigour and food production go hand in hand. Selecting FOR reproductive vigour is akin to selecting AGAINST inbreeding depression.

I agree with you Wayne. Too many breeds can't fulfill their purpose. I've gone through quite a few breeds looking for the perfect dual purpose chicken. I'd be happy to find a breed that even comes close.

thank you for all of that OBF...Great points and lots of things i knew nothing of; makes perfect sense that the pairs sold would be SOP quality, not just barnyard variations.
I will check out your website.

Thanks OBF - very helpful!

Fair practices! I think somewhat similar in how i approach my own interests. I'm not in it to burn out and fade away.

"The SOP is a guide, not a policeman with handcuffs. What I mean is that I always put food production ahead of show traits. For example, good strong feet come before comb quality. We don't eat the combs, but good feet effect foraging and fertility. A good skeletal profile is more important than feather colour. The skeleton give us strength, the room to process food, and what is often overlooked, the skeleton gives us balance. Balance is a quality that I find difficult to explain, but it encompases combining back angles, stances, tail angles, body depth, etc, that all complement each other and function in a complimentary way. You can have two 36 pound Tom turkeys and the one with the best balance is likely to be the one with best fertility" - quote from OBF.

Yes! Yes! God bless you, yes! EXCELLENT post. Bravo! (the crowd goes wild, a cheer rises to the heavens)

I agree with Omega Blue and Uno on this point. From what I’ve learned over the past few years, being a successful breeder involves far more than following a printed guideline. It also involves some trial and error, good judgment, common sense and sometimes just going with your gut. But...we do also need to follow the SOP guidelines to know that the birds we are producing are correct and are doing justice to the breed. It's true, we don’t have to think of it as being handcuffed, but anyone wanting to call themselves a breeder needs to know what their goals are. And these goals are printed in the Standard. Anyone new to a breed needs to read and re-read the breed description, faults, nomenclature and DQs. Memorize the picture of what is considered the finest example of the breed. Its even better if you can get an old copy of the SOP with the much more realistic art work by Schilling.

The thing that really bugs me is when I hear complaints that those who breed according to SOP are ruining the breeds. It is breeders that cause the decline in breeds, not the SOP.

Where I think many people go wrong in ‘breeding to standard’ is when they don’t pay attention to ALL of the requirements for the breed as outlined in the SOP. Instead they pick and choose and put more emphasis on traits that are superficial than those that are related to health and function. This practice is in direct conflict with what the standard advises. The section on “General Scale of Points” makes it very clear that the traits related to production and function far outweigh superficial things like wattles, combs and colors. That’s not to say that purely aesthetic traits are not important. They help define the way the variety looks and makes them identifiable. Not to mention beautiful!
But the little details need to take a back seat to the far more important things. My Blue Cochins are a work in progress and when I’m choosing my breeders I barely glance at combs and wattles. As long as there are no side sprigs, to me the comb has no significance whatsoever. That is one of the fine points that I hope I can start to look at one day when I’ve got the weights, shapes and proper length of feathers worked out.
If we breed according to the standard plus keep our flocks genetically healthy, they will fulfill their purpose. Its a balancing act, but its possible.

.

Very excellent posts, Omega Blue. KathyS. you have hit the nail on the head about what it takes  to be a sucessful breeder. The Schilling pictures are the best you can get for showing breed type etc. I actually own 2 framed Shilling Black and White 1938 prints of the Light Brown Leghorns 1 is the cock and the other is the hen and they are absolutley beautiful.

Heather

KathyS wrote:
The thing that really bugs me is when I hear complaints that those who breed according to SOP are ruining the breeds. It is breeders that cause the decline in breeds, not the SOP.  

Ahh it is the breeders fault because we have lost the art of breeding. We have lost the art of poultry breeding the introduction of a SOP (and thus the introduction of breeds into chickens).

The art of breeding a chicken is not something that is written down nor can you fallow standard to achieve a great chicken. If function fallowed form why are farmers in almost every sector using hybrids instead of true breeding lines?

The art of poultry breeding is more hands on than reading - Successful poultry breeders are artisans because they took an image they had in there head and developed it. They carefully crafted each generation according to the image they had and the reasoning behind it. They were more concerned with function instead of form - They did not care how many points a chicken had on their comb that is merely superficial to care about.

These poultrymen and poultrywomen passed the knowledge on to anyone that wanted to learn - they knew that adding new genetics was a good thing they knew that using birds to genetically similar (IE. closely related) did not help anything. Unfortunately most poultry artisans are now gone or work for genetic companies - because they can envision something and craft it. Not fallowing a standard, they can select for traits that work and have function.

We only have chicken breeds because people with lot's of money and nothing better to do with their time 150 years ago started breeding for phenotype. Even then Barred rocks were a popular production breed because barring (b) can cover almost every other colour up so other breeds were crossed in and in the end they still had a barred rock -- Or what they could sell as a barred rock.

JMHO

Thank you Heather.  I admire your knowledge of poultry and breeding practices so your confirmation means a lot.   

Unfortunately I don’t take the time to type out pages when I reply to topics, so I often don’t express myself fully.  I know that often times it would be best, really, not to comment at all rather than leave important things unsaid.  Anyway, there's a couple of things I should clarify.
First of all, what I should have said is that the Standard is MY main resource.  It is the guide that I need to reach MY goals in breeding.  My goals being exhibition, yes, but more importantly I want to make sure my favorite breeds are available to future generations, the same way they have been available to past generations.  
I regret saying that this should be the goal for everyone.  There are many kinds of breeding…breeding of hybrids, land race breeds etc that still requires skill and know-how, but the standard may not be your bible in that case.

I stand by my other statement that the combs of my Blue cochins have minimal bearing in my selection process.  I really do care less at this point in time whether they have 5 points or 8.  Yes Tara,  its true that I may not be choosing the rooster that the hens would prefer.  But its not their choice.  My white Chantecler hens may be oogling that big handsome Buff Orpington rooster with his big glorious crown, but I am the one making the selection, not them.  If a certain White chantecler is the one I feel needs to be in a certain mating, and he is the only male in the pen with them, they will lay fertile eggs for me.  Now I should say that combs rate a bit higher on the scale with some other breeds.  I keep a closer watch on the Chantecler combs, but was just using the Blue Cochins as an example.

What I also did not mention was the importance of the traits that are not stated in the SOP.  Health, fertility, production, hatchability, immunity...these things I hold near and dear to my heart.  More so than many other traits and characteristics.

Call ducks, if I understand you correctly you feel there is no need to identify "breeds" of chickens according to phenotype.  Instead people should choose matings that result in productive, useful chickens, such as the hybrid layers and meat chickens.  Am I correct, or am I misunderstanding your view?  I do agree totally that those master breeders of the past were true artists.  But defining chickens according to phenotype allows us to have consistency.  It gives farmers or poultry breeders more control if they know they can produce consistent offspring. At least that is my understanding of why the different poultry breeds came to be. As well, particular breeds were chosen for their unique characteristics when corporations created their hybrid crosses. I do believe the traditional breeds will again be valued on farms and acreages, and I feel its important to keep breeding to the standard to make sure they will be available.  

The SOP is a part of my puzzle when undertaking the breeding of a breed, but not the only part!

However, I would like to point out that the SOP has a very large and comprehensive section at the start of the book that describes not the breeds, but what make a good chicken in general. It describes in detail and pictures what makes an efficient, well structured, well put together bird with healthy and strong general conformation.

This beginning section is not to be missed! It is just as important as the written and illustrated standards of the breed when choosing your best stock and breeding.

KathyS wrote:
Call ducks, if I understand you correctly you feel there is no need to identify "breeds" of chickens according to phenotype.  Instead people should choose matings that result in productive, useful chickens, such as the hybrid layers and meat chickens.  Am I correct, or am I misunderstanding your view?  I do agree totally that those master breeders of the past were true artists.  But defining chickens according to phenotype allows us to have consistency.  It gives farmers or poultry breeders more control if they know they can produce consistent offspring.  At least that is my understanding of why the different poultry breeds came to be.  As well, particular breeds were chosen for their unique characteristics when corporations created their hybrid crosses.  I do believe the traditional breeds will again be valued on farms and acreages, and I feel its important to keep breeding to the standard to make sure they will be available.   

Well kinda.

Farmers have not had constancy in poultry until hybrids. Farms never have utilized heritage poultry - rarely ever and those that did it was often a futile effort. Heritage poultry really will never end up on a farm of any size unless it's for coloured egg production. I don't think it should either. At the point it is at now there is no benefit to owing heritage poultry maybe other than different colours of feathers. Chicken has not been a large part of our diet for long (that is why it is a source of protein that is accepted by many religions and cultures). Farmers utilized crosses all the time for their production of poultry.

Schipperkesue wrote:

However, I would like to point out that the SOP has a very large and comprehensive section at the start of the book that describes not the breeds, but what make a good chicken in general.  It describes in detail and pictures what makes an efficient, well structured, well put together bird with healthy and strong general conformation.

This beginning section is not to be missed!  It is just as important as the written and illustrated standards of the breed when choosing your best stock and breeding.

But what does a written section do? Sure it can tell you what to look for. But knowing what to look for on paper, and knowing what to look for when breeding for traits that make a bird productive are two different things. The closer and tighter the scales are on the legs equities to a finer skin that allows for a hen to lay for a bigger egg (I can't quite remember how it goes but something along that nature) . It's those types of things that can't be picked up in a book.

Many times my grandfeather has said that he would not give five (current day value) cents for my flock of heritage chickens - This was a guy that grew up in the 30's (wartime era), was out on his own at the hardy age of 12. If a farmer says this about a strain that's been bred almost solely for productivity than clearly there is little value of heritage poultry to farmers in his eyes and he would have seen it all....

HigginsRAT wrote:
The next time you see someone discount the value of a comb on a chicken, realize they know very little about the real dynamics in true breeding chickendom.  Only an ignorant person out of touch with reality ignores the expression of combs, wattles, and feather patterns in chickens if they truly want to be successful breeding chickens and using their natural tendencies to do our wills.  

Well, all I have to do is observe my flocks and I'm happy to wear your assessment of me being an " ignorant person out of touch with reality" as a badge of honour.

Your observations of comb quality offering a selective advantage has some relevance in an environment of natural selection but really doesn't offer any relevance in the world of artificial selection. Poultry Breeding = Artificial selection.

For instance, if you raise 50 hens and 50 roosters in a pasture environment, the roosters with the biggest and baddest combs will tend to fertilize more eggs. Single combs will tend to dominate pea combs. However, take one of the lower ranking roosters and put him in a pen with 3-5 hens and his masculinity will develop to the point where he starts fertilizing eggs.

Yes, hens will expel sperm, but in an artificial selection environment, it seems to be more about replacing old with fresh than it is about mate selection.

The irony here is that I've given my "you don't eat the combs" advice to chanteclar breeders more than any other class of breeder. Being Canada's breed, I care about the breed even though I have never raised it. When I started, the Chanteclar was one of the breeds to beat, their development was much farther along than my ameraucana breeding. Despite me working alone with a pretty much closed flock, and the Chantecler enjoying a broad community of support, the Chantecler has lost ground. Several breeders all following various ineffectual approaches do not seem capable of producing sustainable positive results.

One of the breeds I'm playing around with is the Malay, one of the distant ancestors of the Chantecler. They share the same pea/rosecomb combination for comb genetics. When researching the breeding history of the breed, I learned that indiginous and historical populations tended to be a mixture of pea, strawberry, and cushion combs. Given the fertility concerns of the rosecomb gene, maintaining the trait in the heterozygous condition makes perfect sense. It offers a selective advantage.

Now, if one wanted to translate that selective advantage argument to a Chantecler flock, this would mean that one would want to give serious consideration to maintaining both pea and cushion combed birds in order to maximize fertility. Better fertility means better production and therefore better quality chickens. Remember, only 1 bird can place first, only one in a hatch needs to have the perfect comb. The rest need to be useful as well and the quality of their comb is of little significance to their usefulness as a chicken. Build the breed to where you have consistently superior body type, it doesn't matter which birds get the superior combs, they can be champions. However, great comb on poor quality bird is still a poor quality bird.

It doesn't matter how many want to label my perspective as ignorant, it doesn't change the fact that we don't eat the combs. It won't change the quality of the breeds I've restored.