Great topic and an interesting hearing everyone's experience and opinions. I don't have a breeding program of any kind at the moment but when this does happen I will be taking a few points from people's comments. Ideally I would like just healthy easy to manage birds that can free range well but...
I struggled to understand it all as I came from horse and dog breeding. If both parents are pure bred then the offspring are pure bred. Everything registered was pedigreed. Trying to pedigree chickens would be hard unless they were in pairs.
We currently have 9 hens and 1 cockeral. 3 older hens and 6 younger with 5 out of the 6 just started laying. We're not meant to have a cockeral but we bought it as a pullet from a breeder. I do plan on going larger later when I retire and buy a bigger block of land. Will keep a small pen of...
That's what I don't get with show chooks, surely a lot of the decision would be down to judges personal opinion plus the SOP?
When I retire I'm going to hopefully start breeding a few. I was going to muck around with adding some Andalusian or Blue Leghorn into a Blue line of Barnies just for a...
I'm still learning what the perfect Barnie rooster looks like. Confusing for a newbie like me 🤣 It may be the same Aussie breeder with the new colours that I'm thinking of. If it is then his knowledge on chickens blows me away 😳 What was the cross-breed program you were thinking of?
Good looking boys 👍
Barnevelder are definitely my favourite breed at the moment. I have two Blue Double laced girls but their lacing is not very good. I plan on breeding some more later using a Blue Double Laced rooster over standard Double Laced hens.
My plan was to breed a few pure Barnevelder as layers (maybe show if they're good enough) possibly using them as a base for my other line.
Great tips thank you. That's the sort of thing I was wondering. I was looking closely at Indian game at an auction the other day wondering what it would...
Morning all. I have read a few breed standards and have looked at a heck of a lot of photos and videos of different breeds of chickens since catching the bug and there's plenty of shapes and sizes of bird out there. I noticed a lot of the dual purpose or land race breeds have similar body shape...
I've been reading a lot about Barnevelders and own 2 Blue Double Laced hens. Every breeder I've spoke to pretty much says the same when it comes to the Silver Double Laced, they're better bred to other SDL and that's it as the colour and pattern aren't great. I'll add the chart people shared...
What I mean by social media trend is seeing a tonne of carbon copy posts of people holding there red and white TSC boxes and then also memes being made about going there to get chicks. It pretty much flooded my feed so that's why I was confused thinking TSC had a monopoly on chicks. I hate big...
So TS would have contracts with hatcheries all over the country and just ship these chicks to whatever store orders them? The two hatcheries you've found local do they breed a few different breeds or just one or two?
We bought 6 ex cage hens that 18mths old and have lost 3 due to reproduction issues. That's why we gone with heritage breeds now.
I think I'll be buying week olds from a hatchery now as they're all vaccinated.
This is all definitely all making sense now. Great point about the disease/parasite potential too. I have a hatchery I was going to get our next batch from and they vaccinate for everything plus they offer a take back for roosters. They're a small family run business that are fairly local to me.
Thank you. Sounds like some pretty good laws there in regards to chicks. We have a mix of everything here. Backyard breeders, show breeders, markets and small hatcheries. You can also order hybrid commercial egg layers as well but usually as pullets. I wish I could import some Barnevelders from...
So would be more of a social media trend that everyone seems to post themselves buying from there? And there definitely is other smaller local places and people just aren't aware?
We wouldn't have the same amount of breeds as our animal import laws are extremely strict and being a big island it's hard to smuggle animals into the country, which I am happy about though as we're still dealing with morons importing destructive non-native species 200yrs ago.
We do have the...