Breeding setup for mixed egg colors?

[TheWannabeFarmer]

Hello everyone,

I have recently moved and had to sell all of my chickens. This brings me to a new start and I am definitely wanting more!!

I loved breeding before, and at my old place (rental) I was able to have multiple flocks for breeding.

At this house I only really have the setup for 1 or maybe 2 coops. Our predator load is higher here, and the landscape setup is not ideal for multiple coops. Plus, we dont have much land.

I am trying to decide what my main goal will be for breeding, and I keep coming back to my favorite thing, which is a mix of unique colored eggs!

I want to be able to produce beautiful, unique colors with 1 or 2 groups. Ideally only 1 group that can have the majority of the space, and then 1 area for grow outs.

Do you think this is possible? I imagine it would be difficult to maintain the really dark eggs when mixing breeds.

I would love any thoughts and feedback!

PS. I'm in Canada, and if anyone has any mixed breed hatching eggs with unique colors, let me know!

I'm hoping to have a sustainable flock with nice colors, so I can keep producing replacements.

 

[GCrumb]

I have been thinking the same -- I think the perfect (but probably impossssible) chicken breed would be uniform in size, temperament, and egg-size, but you'd not know what colour egg and they'd run the whole spectrum.

My guess is that you could get close with two runs. One would have a rooster from a white egg breed and a mix of hens from white, blue and light brown. Next generation would give white, blue and tinted/cream. The other would have a rooster from a very-dark egg bloodline, and a mix of hens of very-dark and blue egg breeds. Next generation would give you dark brown and olive. If you put some of the resulting olive-eggers from the dark run in the light run you'd get sagey-coloured next generation, put a dark-brown and get medium-brown. If are careful about it and good at telling who lays what egg it might be sustainable forever but you could probably be pretty casual and just get a few new purebreds in however many generations it takes for everybody to be laying medium green or brown.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

If you have a green layer male, you can keep brown, white and blue laying females and get brown, green, blue ( and probably light brown and light blue) eggs from the daughters

 

[FearlessFeather]

I too have my project of egg color, have seen some success but no where near consistent. Also doing this very limited with just reproducing in the range of 6-15 chicks a year. But the breeds I have decided to work with is Ameraucana, Welsummer and white leghorns. The goal is a blue egg with green speckles.

 

[dheltzel]

2 pens setup like this:
Pen1 (largest pen) - Silver Welbar cockerels that are heterozygous for gold, with silver or gold Welbar pullets and some Cream Legbar pullets.
Pen 2 - Cream Legbars and/or Opal Legbars.

Brown eggs from pen 1 will hatch into autosexing Welbar chicks, about half gold and half silver.
Blue eggs from pen 1 will hatch into autosexing Olive Egger chicks, about half gold and half silver. I write "O" on these as they are collected.
Blue eggs from pen 2 will hatch into autosexing Cream Legbars. If you setup a mix of Opals and Creams, you could end up producing both colors from this one pen.

The goal is to have sexable chicks in multiple colors than lay lots of colored eggs that are predictable. You can sell a *lot* of these chicks every spring, they are extremely desirable layers. Most of my customers get 1 or 2 of each color:
Silver Welbar - brown eggs
Gold Welbar - brown eggs
Silver Olive Egger - green eggs, birds have small crests
Gold Olive Egger - green eggs, birds have small crests
Cream Legbar - bright blue eggs, nice crests
Opal Legbar - bright blue eggs, gorgeous Isabel/lavender color birds

All these are top producers of egg, you give up nothing to get colored eggs and mild-mannered beautiful birds. I get a lot of repeat customers and referrals, I hardly advertise anymore until late in the season. Customers "flock" to me to get their chicks!