Joel Salatin talks about heritage breed chickens

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I found this an interesting read. I don't necessarily agree with all of his views 100% but I was glad to see this blog anyway. He makes some good points.

I had the good fortune to listen to Salatin at a conference a couple of years ago, and also have one of his books. He is a gifted speaker and writer and has a way of really engaging the audience and inspiring people to change the way they think about food production. I left that conference feeling hopeful and encouraged by the comments and feedback from the audience. Lots of local farmers are on board and making more ethical choices when it comes to their land, animals and farming practices.

I guess my point here is that Joel is very well known and is in a position to sway opinions and influence people. The fact that he is talking about some of the old pure-breeds and recognizing their fine points, IMO can only be a good thing. We talk about this on the forums and many of us already know the advantages of keeping the old breeds. But we are most often preaching to the choir! It looks to me like he's entered into a business agreement with Murray McMurray hatchery to do some promotion. He is a very successful business man afterall! so why not?

The general thinking these days is that if you want to sell eggs there is no alternative to layer hybrids...maybe its time to get the message out there that are other options! Especially for those that want to offer free range/pastured eggs to customers. In this situation the advantages of superior health, longevity, survival and self-sufficiency may win out over the slightly lower egg production.

Very interesting.  Perhaps I am misreading but along with the great information also are accompanied contradictions.

He says his ideal bird is a purebred but later on he says:

This spring, we purchased six different dual-purpose heavy bird varieties from Murray McMurray Hatchery, 100 each.  We also purchased an incubator.  We’re keeping the cockerels and hope to breed these birds to each other after 2 years–the survivors.  If we keep breeding the old survivors back to each other, I’m hoping that in 20 years we’ll create a Polyface-centric, dark-yolked, grazing, smart, docile, long-lived chicken.  

Now, is he aligned, business wise, with McMurray?  Does he realize that their birds, in many cases do not conform to the SOP in appearance, conformation, production or health?

Oh, and do you breed for yolk color, or feed for yolk color?

I attended one of his 3 day workshops in the spring and had a chance to ask to ask him about heritage breeds. From what I gathered he is all for the preservation of heritage breeds, but has no distinct desire to do it himself as it is not an important part of his system or marketing.

He approaches everything from a business viewpoint. The reason that most people on this forum keep the breeds they do for the reason of keeping pure breeds. If rare breeds were more productive than crossbreeds and hybrids in his system, he would use them, or at least thats my interpretation.

That said he has always kept "pure bred" layers, be them hatchery strains. He said he is going to try breeding his own as he had noticed the hatchery birds were not working as well in his system as before.

SO, if he's all about the business, then he cannot be all about the land/animal. Because the two DO NOT go together, as far as I'm concerned. If they did everyone with an acre, a cow and a few chickens would be wealthy.

You will note where animals produce the most profit is where they live the worst lives, from an ethical animalcentric viewpoint.

Some local dairy herds NEVER SET FOOT ON OPEN SOIL, instead live under massive roofs all their life. ANd while the barns are new and nice, clean, landscaped, with a swimming pool out front, I will never be convinced that this is the way animals want to live. Nor the way they should live. These set ups see massive financial turnover...and in my humble opinion, the animals pay the price. Always.

Mr. Salatin has left me lukewarm and slightly off put.

I'll have to give Mr Salatin's blog a read later.

I agree with Uno on the point that business and being about animal welfare seldom mixes. If you are raising livestock for money, then you likely are not concerned much about whether their lives are led good before being processed. Thus I raise a scpetic brow to his commitment to heritage breeds.

As for the SOP...It doesn't apply to commerical hatcheries. McMurray, though offering heritage breeds is still a commerical hatchery. No offence meant to companies like McMurray as it's where many of us, myself included, likely got our first heritage breeds from. However, they are still about quantity vs quality. They wouldn't be able to operate as they do if they worried about breeding to the SOP. That's why for every Houdan I got from a hatchery, maybe 1 in 10 were with a defect of some sort. That is if I was lucky!

Yeah, not a big fan of him. He's a little over-exposed at this point. Like Miley Cyrus.

Also, most of his techniques won't work for those of us who are under snow for half the year.

I read that blog post a few months -- I am not sure why a lot seem obsessed with Salatin... Not sure why.

Salatin wrote:To my knowledge, nobody in the world is selecting genetics based on yolk color.

Wait how can you select for yolk egg colour? You would have to break the egg to see the colour it's doable but you would have to have fancy smanchy bags to incubate them in... Also egg colour can change with the season, diet. His comment about "lazy" hens is intresting and rather (IMO) ignorrent. I have never seen a hen hang around a feeder have you? Not saying it does not happen. Again yolk colour can depend if a hen has all the required nutrients.

UGHHH

Salatin wrote:longevity and hardiness–took second place to egg production.

If he is so concerned about his bottom line why is he saying this? Egg production than longevity -- this what the industry is breeding for right now ISA is breeding for a hen that lays 500 eggs over ~100 weeks.

Also

Salatin wrote:6.  purebred (nonhybrid)

Hybrid birds are the best at what they do. Farmers use them for a reason and there is a reason why farms don't use heritage breeds. If heritage breeds were so good to begin with we would have never developed a the lines they did.

Nice that he's going to try to create his own chicken but I believe it will be futile in a commerical setting (in this case commerical = pastured poultry)

I will go back and hide in my hidey hole now...

Authentic - I agree with you....

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authenticfarm wrote:Yeah, not a big fan of him. He's a little over-exposed at this point. Like Miley Cyrus.

Also, most of his techniques won't work for those of us who are under snow for half the year.

While I in no way think we should hang on his every word, many of his techniques actually work very well in Alberta, all be it with a few slight changes, and I know of a number of producers who use them. And while they are profitable enterprises, I think it would be hard pressed to say that the animals have a bad life.

(quote)The heritage breeds WERE good to begin with.  Then we got all funky with the manipulation and such.  Give the factory farm layers only enough calcium to make eggs that make it to the consumer's grocery store counter...calcium is an expensive ingredient in layer rations.  When we made it so the bottom line rules the roost, the money of inputs has to be less than the revenue generated outputs to call it a business and make a profit in monetary sums...I figure we lost our humanity...our raising critters HUMANely...they became biological machines to fill a need WE want.

We humans have manipulated the chicken to give her entire self to making eggs and nothing is meant to be left of her in the end.  Then the terminal crosses for meat only need to live long enough to be harvested...their legacy ends up on our plates.  

I like heritage because there is something there more than a shell of a bird (figure this glazed eye stoopid bird that spits out eggs) that gives me nice eggs (meat) because I owe her/him a duty of care.  He/She's a friend who shares his/her benefits with me....hee hee.    

In the scheme of things, I am not after a machine to use, abuse and toss away like it has no soul.  I want something behind those chicken eyes looking back at me...a sense of self and for her/him to know it is not her eggs/his meat that I value so much as her/his happy existence to enrichen my world.  She/He completes my realm of what is proper, decent, and humanly wonderful about livestock, poultry and animal husbandry.(end quote)
 
(so much for quote boxes working on my first try)
I second Tara completely, even when that "sense of self(ishness)" takes a snap at the finger I just whacked between the frozen water bowl and piece of wood I was pounding to get the ice out, instead of the yummy cracked grain mixture I hand mixed minutes before that I am pouring into their food dish!  Ouch!

Yes, I agree that if he is buying chicks from a hatchery he is not going to get poultry that are consistent with SOP.  But he makes it clear that proper, true to type chickens isn't his goal.  Instead he is looking for chickens that are smarter and hardier than the average commercial layer hybrid.  And realistically, if you are looking to buy several hundred chicks to produce eggs on a commercial level, its probably not going to be affordable to buy them from small, serious breeders who are interested in breed conservation, showing etc.  I don't actually have a problem with that.  There are many different reasons why people choose to raise chickens.  I'm just happy to see people recognizing the value of conserving pure breeds so that those choices are there.

There is really one point to all this that I was impressed by:  that he understands the valuable traits and qualities of the old breeds and is in a position to educate the public about that.

Sue, you might be right in assuming that he is not planning to keep the breeds pure, but to allow them to interbreed and maybe create something that suits his goals.  I didn't really catch that the first time I read through.  This is something I would like to find out more about.  From my experience (most of the time) when people start crossing breeds and creating mongerels - unless it is done with a great deal of thought and planning - the end result is often less than satisfactory.  But sometimes you have to try things for yourself, right.

As far as the treatment of his animals, well this is the driving force behind what Joel Salatin is all about.  His mandate is to educate people that it IS possible to earn a good living as a farmer and feed the nation without sacrificing the well being of the animals and raping the land.  He raises pork, beef and chickens for eggs and meat.  He sells meat off the farm and supplies to many restaurants as well.  There are no intensive livestock facilities on his farm.  Every animal is on pasture with portable coops for the chickens.  They are moved from one area to the next every few days so they are always on clean ground.  
I realize everyone has different ideas of what constitutes ethically raised livestock.  I'm sure there are those who feel it is cruel to subject chickens to the dangers of hawks or other predators.  But compared to laying hens who live their lives in tiny cages, I think the Salatin method of pasture raised poultry is a huge improvement.

Kathy, by interbreeding perhaps he is planning to create his own landrace.

I am still rather dismayed that he seems to think yolk color is genetic. I know it is food based since my own chickens' yolks vary based on season and free ranging access.

All in all I am enjoying the discussion thoroughly. Thank you for inspiring it!

So for those of you that say heritage birds were good enough ( mind you they were not breeds back then.... Just saying there was a lot of crossing done between 'breeds' - rather individual lines and they were more like a landrace than anything else).

If they were so good why in the chicken of tomorrow contest did they not win? Clearly when looking at from my standpoint ( farmer/entrepreneur/Numbers driven east coast fella) they were not good - they costed more and yielded less -These are facts you can not dispute.

If the heritage birds were so good why aren't farmers using them? Clearly they were not commercially viable options. Trust me if they were commercially viable farmers would use them-industry would be using them.

Chickens why back when have not been 'purebreds' until ~120 years ago. Other than that ancient civilizations crossed not breeds, nor races, but what i like to call regional fowl -- This is how they got productive birds.

Also ever wonder why Barred Rocks are the most abundant colour of rock's? Simple the barring (B) gene will cover up just about any other colour you can throw at it, so farmers exploited this and crossed willy-nilly to get those very productive birds.

Anyway that's... That's all I got to say.

There are "farmers" and then there are "egg producers" - these two things are not the same in my mind.

I am a farmer. We grow crops, hay, and we raise beef cattle. I chose to raise heritage chickens, as have many of my farmer friends. Therefore, farmers ARE choosing heritage chickens. I chose heritage breeds because at the end of their egg laying lives, their carcasses have value as meat. Extra roosters are large enough to eat. This is something that I feel is important.

Egg producers are concerned only with egg production. They only want pullets, which means alllllll of those male chicks are killed shortly after they hatch, because their small finishing weight has little carcass value. I personally find that practice to be abhorrent. I also cannot agree with the commercial practice of getting rid of laying hens at the ripe age of one year old, to bring in a new set of fresh pullets to lay their hearts out before they, too, are discarded, their tiny frames holding no carcass value.

I am not a tree hugger, a vegetarian, a hippy, or a crusader. If anything, I am a redneck. However, I can tell right from wrong, and the way egg producers operate is not right.

call ducks wrote: Clearly when looking at from my standpoint ( farmer/entrepreneur/Numbers driven east coast fella) they were not good - they costed more and yielded less -These are facts you can not dispute.

If the heritage birds were so good why aren't farmers using them? Clearly they were not commercially viable options. Trust me if they were commercially viable farmers would use them-industry would be using them.  

Yes! This is exactly what I'm talking about.
The modern egg producer is looking at numbers and only numbers. Every aspect of the business is driven by scientifically proven inputs vs outputs which translates into dollars . They will buy only female chicks of the highest producing hybrids. It is of no consequence to the egg producer to know that an equal number of baby male chicks are tossed into a grinder while alive. That is just how things are done in the egg business. If the laying hens never see the light of day or feel grass under their feet, well they are only disposable laying machines anyway. After a few months they will be thrown away and replaced. Why would any of that matter as long as the facility is staying viable and making a profit?

Well, to many of us it DOES matter. So when someone like Salatin goes public and suggests that there are more ethical ways to produce eggs, I'm all ears. Not that I need convincing, or the other small farmers who understand the real cost of intensive livestock facilities. But there is a whole population of consumers in North America that do need to be educated.

I'll be watching his progress with this little project.

What if he finds that there is a profit to be made in raising dual purpose chickens? What if he can find a market for the roosters that would make it viable to raise the roosters? What if other farmers in North America see that there are better ways to produce eggs and meat? What if this one person is able to make a shift - even a minute shift - in the collective conscience of producers and consumers?

Love him or hate him, Joel Salatin recognizes the need for change in the way the meat and egg industry has evolved. He is putting his words into action and stepping outside of the commercial-farming mold. He's trying to make a difference. I for one salute this man and his values.

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Joel's approach is flawed for one simple reason, he is still looking at the dual purpose chicken as a commodity item. He is only focussing on the females in the population. I shared a similar perspective a little over a decade ago when I set out to build my own Ameraucana line in an effort to recreate the traditional dual purpose fowl. Many experts at the time believed the dual purpose chicken existed in name only and was actually extinct in reality.

What Joel is going to learn over the next 10-20 years is that any effort to restore the dual purpose fowl starts with improving the marketability of the rooster, not the hen. Without addressing this concern, the model is not sustainable and will remain burdened with the ethics of mass killing of day-old male chicks. Until Joel can address this, I see no reason to view Joel's efforts as nothing more than pandering to a specific market.


At our local farmer's market, I sell more eggs than all the other egg sellers combined. The majority of the eggs I sell are duck eggs and this is for one simple reason. I sell more duck meat than chicken meat. The following is a poster I display at my stand: