The American Bresse w/Mandelyn Royal Part 2

The rest of the story…..Mandelyn Royal, one of the founding breeders of the Bresse in the USA, finishes her interview.

• Transcript

  Mandy: 0:00

  Part of that is because if you have one hen who's going to lay 150, eggs, whatever her rate of lay is, that is her potential offspring for an entire season. And in contrast, if you have one cow, one horse, how many offspring are you getting a year from that one? Female animal you're getting. And so you don't want to take any chances whatsoever. You want to do it right because you don't get many chances with poultry. You also want to do it right, but you also have some grace there to find the best offspring from a pair or the trio that you're breeding from, because when you do breed tightly, you want to keep those groups real small and that way you can better document the results you're seeing and the percentages of what traits you're seeing. And you can really. Hone it in and clean things up while finding what your problems are and eliminating them just from the sheer quantity of offspring that they're capable of having.

  Rip Stalvey: 0:58

  Hi there, fellow poultry enthusiasts. I'm Rip Stalvey from the Poultry Keepers podcast. Please pardon me for interrupting. I promise I won't take long, but there's something I need to tell you. I hope you're enjoying this Poultry Nerds podcast as much as I am. I think my friends Carey Blackmon and Jennifer Bryant are doing a great job here, and I know they have even more fantastic shows in the works. You better subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. Ha! I know I sure will. Now let's get back to Carey and Jennifer.

  Mandy: 1:38

  Just my thoughts though. Now, the American Bresse is not currently recognized by the APA for its standards. But it's my understanding that there are standards that some breeders are out there looking for or looking towards. Is that, anything about that? There's a standard in France and the proposed US standard is based off of the French Standard, but the main difference there is an extra pound added to the weight because the French standard is calling for birds for the mature males to be six and a half pounds. And when you're trying to market a table bird, if you say adults at six and a half pounds, then that means you're probably going to see a dress weight from a cockerel that's significantly less than that. Because as the mature weights are for one year old birds. So if it takes that chicken a full year to reach six and a half pounds, that's really not that meaningful for the freezer. And the genetics are capable of adding much more weight, so we added a little bit more weight to it, but still kept the description of the body there, because the terminology, like when the standard mentions the breadth, the width of the Bresse how wide is too wide versus narrow and relatively useless for the shrink bag presentation. So the verbiage of the standard works with the size increase and we were able to keep everything else accurate in the proposed standard, but we're going to need a lot of time before we even have hope of APA recognition because we have to have breed consistency first, if we're going to go into that. Yeah. And breed consistency. That is to me, that would be important for not only the show aspects or getting accepted into the standard. But breed consistency is also important for table presentation too, right? Oh, absolutely. You have to have a consistent product if you want to be able to compete in a retail market. So what one grower is finishing out in Alabama needs to be the same spectrum of harvest time, yield, meat to bone ratio. That all needs to be consistent in all of the regional markets. For the market side, for the table sides, you even have a shot at being meaningful. Gotcha. Because without it, it's just sloppy and that's not marketable. Jennifer, do you have any questions? No, not really. No, I'm just trying to envision a six and a half pound bird. I just can't imagine that. Sounds small, doesn't it? It does. When you compare it to your dinosaurs. Yeah, the one I'm hauling to the show on Saturday, I haven't weighed him recently, but if I had to guess, I'd say 13 ish pounds. So the most meaningful male that I had grow up last season, he was eight pounds before he was six months old. I put him on the scale and he was eight pounds, three ounces at about 18 weeks. And I was like, wow, where did you even come from? And he's on that extreme side to where I questioned even using him for breeding because you're not supposed to breed your extremes, but I was like, I think he could actually do me some favors on growth rate and fleshing if I pulled him with the right girls. So I went ahead and did that. And a lot of those offspring were actually exactly what I was looking for. And then I ate the rest of them that weren't. You still got the 20 weeks on his offspring? Yeah, I still have him and I still have three really viable sons from him and I'm working on offspring from those sons to see what they do. Interesting. They have to prove longevity too, because it's all fine and dandy to have a really fast growing large bird, but did he make it till he was two? Did he make it till he was three? What's the longevity like? Because I know the best offspring are going to come from those two year old females after they've done, survived everything that nature can throw at a chicken to take it out. I want those girls who never had a problem a day in their lives. And to give them that time to prove it and then put them with the right mail. Okay, that makes sense. I bet you keep a lot of notes, don't you? It's in my head. I am so bad at notes. I have notes. I have them. But they're not what I would call complete. Hey, at least you have some. I have painter's tape notes. I have a scattering of notebooks and a scattering of note taking pads, and I have some spreadsheets that don't relate to each other. And I am armed with 1, 000 wing bands that I haven't used yet, but I'm going to start soon, like next hatch. And I haven't done it with my most recent hatches because they were so small, I didn't think it was worth it. And I haven't reorganized my pens the way I want to. Whiteboards. So I breed with my hands and my eyes. I put more stock in the bird in front of me. And I don't really care how they're related. I care about what they do, what's their health, what's their vigor and who's their best mate. Outside of that, just details. That does keep it simple. That definitely keeps it simple. It's a good chicken or it's not. And if it's not, get it out of the flock and move on and focus on your better ones. For the sake of people listening that are kinda new to more than just your pet chicken. When we start as breeders, we start culling at the egg. So let's recap there for a second. We re, we don't. except any eggs that aren't the right size, the right shape or the right even shell hardness. If it's a soft shell, we don't try to hatch it. Or if it has a lot of strange markings on it, we don't try to hatch it. And then in the brooder I'll cull out of the brooder too if they're weak. Or if they're small, or if their heads aren't wide enough. What are some things that you cull for out of the brooder? So I do that same thing, but the one exception is I won't cull any pathetic ones that very moment. I'll put them in their own brooder, or I'll tag their leg with a zip band, or some other indicator that lets me know not to even consider that bird later in case it comes out. Marginally better later on, I don't want to keep them mixed in unknowingly, just in case they do sprout off as something neat later on because they'll never be as good as the other birds are. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt to reach freezer age at about 14, 16 weeks, because I do have meat buyers. And I do have market going on there. Plus we recently went keto and now we eat more chicken than ever. So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt to at least reach calling age. Okay. So you're quasi hospital brooder type birds. You would never put them in your breeder program. Oh no, absolutely not. Okay so for those people that are new and want to be a little choosier this year first of all, we encourage you never to medicate or not to feed medicated feed. I think all three of us agree on that. I have never bought a bottle of Corid in my life. I used to and now I don't. Just let them go. You can do the milk and the yogurt and get that good gut bacteria going in order to prevent coccidia, but in all honesty, that just starts with the person's cleanliness more so than anything else, I think. That's my opinion. So after we've culled out of the brooder, when is the next age that you do a cull? As they go through their growth milestones, I'm looking. So when they come out of the hatcher, I make notes of any that were a straggler. Like I don't help them hatch either to go all the way back to the beginning of culling if they need assistance, then I already know I don't need them for breeding. Agreed. And then when I weigh at two weeks old, I look for the underperformers and the bottom of that group. I tag as known culls for not being able to keep up with the rest of them. And I do that with every single way in so that I can better tighten and narrow who grew how and when for those notes in later breeding selection. And I track a lot of it by pen performance and I'll weigh the whole batch and get my average and then just pull out the bottom performers. Okay. So let me ask you this. Can you sex these Bresse at hatch? No, I give it till three, four weeks. Really obvious with their, the males grow exponentially faster than the females, but every once in a while I'll find a big girl in the boy pen. Yeah. So when you are culling out the smallest one, are you by chance culling out just females at that point? They've been male, but that's why I gave them the benefit of further growth to. To see that, was it a closet male that was a late bloomer? Was it a really undersized pullet? Was it this or that by retaining them? If they're able to keep growing. And to let me know more about themselves, then I go ahead and I do that just for the sake of my poor notes. I'm laughing because we call them faoux roosters. F A O U X, faoux roosters. Yeah, were they tricky into thinking they were female until about 12 weeks old or so? Yep, yep. When we were getting ready to move We decided to cull out all of the Orpington males, put them in the freezer. So we'd have less birds to move. And we called them all and the next morning, in the morning, four o'clock in the morning, we hear a rooster and we're like, what in the world? And we go out there and he's just standing there proud as can be. And I'm like, where were you yesterday? So we called him FDR, foe to rooster. You got to watch. First to get in there and start sneaking around their genetics too. But you know what? He turned out to be an awesome rooster because he didn't I, I guess he didn't get all those hormones and he put more energy into growing. He was giant. We just thought he was a giant hen, but yeah, he came in overnight with his comb and waddles and everything. It was funny. Did you hang on to him long enough to see what his fertility was going to be like? Cause I've had, Hit or miss fertility with those later blooming later blooming males that actually did turn out decent They didn't end up always having the good pen coverage for fertility because they were so chill. This was back when I still had a mixed flock and I had Orpingtons and he was a lemon cuckoo. And I know he had good genetics because last year out of my layer flock, I still had cuckoo coming out. And we're talking about 2018 here. Oh, goodness. So yeah, he's still hanging around a little bit and to go into the more complex topics of when to select for what traits and. Which ones you really want to be picking from? We almost need a whole other episode for that stuff. There's a lot of variables to consider and we can't cover it all in one session. Yeah. It's time to think about getting started. It's scaring me because of how many people are jumping in and selling pullet and even some of the better known producers are selling complete garbage, junk birds. Tiny filthy pullet eggs, and they're not helping. They're hindering potential. I'm not selling eggs. I don't even sell eggs anymore. My, but now I have the fluffiest butts in the universe, and I can't get my fertility up, so I don't even sell eggs. I just sell chicks. I don't sell chicks, but I started doing eggs just to help people. put a gate in your driveway. I was real firm on started stock only. Let me get my growth data such as it is. Let me get my hands on them. And only the better 40% is leaving. I'm gonna eat the rest or breed the rest and I'm only gonna breed from 10%.

  Carey: 14:45

  Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it eggciting. This is Kerry signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.