Small Flock Breeding

by Christine Willard
Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities
With gratitude to Craig Russell, SPPA President, and Dick Demansky

Breeding a small flock can be successful, avoiding inbreeding weaknesses and perpetuating the strengths that meet the small farmer’s goals. Choosing a breed that has historically succeeded in your geographic area may be the key to success.

Many historic breeds are also becoming rare. By establishing a small flock of a rare and historic breed, small flock owners can help restore rare breeds. Many find it rewarding to participate in helping rescue these valuable breeds, with their individual contributions in egg and meat production and unique appearance.

Small flock owners also benefit from swapping birds with other small flock owners, keeping their own lines genetically diverse and helping other small flock owners do the same.

Increasing the number of small flocks of each rare breed also protects the breed from being devastated by a single disaster.

‘Success’ may mean different things to different operations. Success can include excellence in utilitarian qualities such as meat and egg production as well as the aesthetics of the fancy and preservation of rare breeds.

Poultry is often divided along a line that separates utility from fancy. Ideally, these qualities should be combined. By referring to the Standard of Perfection and selecting for production qualities, both goals can bless your barnyard.

Beginners may want to concentrate on utilitarian qualities. They are a good base on which to build. Quality can be measured by the dozen and the pound, but is subject to the same genetic laws as style and type.

Traditional methods are generally the most effective for long-term small flock keeping. These include rolling matings, clan matings, breeding out-andout and grading.

Rolling Matings

Rolling matings are a good general purpose system. With this system, the breeder can maintain a viable population while honing breeding skills and refining artistic judgments.

Don’t be afraid of starting with imperfect stock. Get the best you can, but selective breeding is what any type of livestock preservation is about.

Small flock owners will be most successful with breeds they enjoy. The pleasure of surveying a handsome, uniform flock that has grown from a successful breeding program is hard to beat.

Rolling matings require at least two pens for each breed or variety and a minimum of record-keeping.

Rolling matings select the best cocks and pullets from each season and breed them back to the best breeders of the previous season. Cockerels are bred to hens, cocks are bred to pullets.

Rolling matings can improve the stock and maintain genetic diversity with a small flock, but larger flocks provide more opportunities to select the desired characteristics.

Long-time breeding expert Bruce Lentz, a well-known string man and breeder from the 1930s through the 1970s, felt that a breeding program should be founded on at least two trios, preferably two cocks and eight to ten hens. This gives you a deeper genetic base. With that caution in mind, a single trio can be the foundation of a small flock.

After each season, the old birds are combined and culled to the best cocks and hens. The best cockerels and best pullets are selected from the young birds. Putting the cocks with the pullets and the cockerels with the hens keeps the system rolling.

Manage the ratio of the sexes in the pens. For best levels of fertility, one male to 10 females is about right. For light breeds, 12 females may not be too many, while very heavy and feather-footed breeds often do better with only eight females per male. Vigorous males may be hard on their mates if too few females are kept. This usually isn’t a problem on free range and can be controlled in confinement by moving males from pen to pen or by only allowing them with the females every other day.

Bruce often maintained side matings with the intention of establishing highly desirable characteristics. Such birds or unrelated stock can be worked into the breedings on either the pullet or cockerel side.

The operational word is Best. That may mean the utility characteristics of egg and/or meat production, type, color, feather quality or comb, or some combination.

Rolling matings, like all breeding systems, depends on the ability to select breeders. This system will maintain a viable population while you develop your skills.

Grading

Grading is the process by which a population can be modified by breeding repeatedly to another strain, variety or breed.

With patience, an existing flock may be improved or changed completely. This is an old system long used by professionals in cattle, horses, swine, sheep, goats, dogs and other farm stock.

This table shows the progression to breed purity in fractions, decimals and percentages over breedings:

For all practical purposes, eight cycles yield pure stock. Most large livestock with open registries grant pure status after six generations. In cases where one variety is being graded to another or one strain of a variety or breed is being upgraded by addition of another strain, far fewer cycles are usually required before all of the offspring can be returned to the regular mating system.

Grading is sometimes criticized as changing the character of a breed. If done properly and carried to at least the sixth generation, the breed’s purity is preserved.

A combination of rolling matings and grading can also be used to develop new varieties by mating half- or three-quarter-bloods to brother and sister. Once birds start to show the desired traits, a combination of these techniques can fix the desirable traits and build up the population.

Clan Matings

Clan matings are another traditional breeding method for small flocks. Dick Demansky, a prominent SPPA breeder of Old English Games since 1966, has maintained a vigorous flock with virtually no unrelated stock.

The clan system separates a flock into distinct families. The clans are then maintained as separate stock and bred along either the hens’ or the cocks’ lines.

Mr. Demansky clan mates using a matriarchal system. When they hatch, all birds are toe-marked and wing-banded with their mother’s clan mark. He records their numbers when they are cooped.

Matriarchal clans are traced through their mothers, the hens. Patriarchal clans are identified by their lineage through the cock. Cocks and hens of the same clan are never bred to each other. Matriarchal systems are usually pairmated. Patriarchal systems may breed a male to large groups of, usually, related hens.

Birds should always be matched to others that can compensate for their weaknesses.

“They are all weak somewhere,” Mr. Demansky writes. “In all the shows that I have judged through the years, I never scored any bird perfect.”

With the matriarchal system, eggs must be marked to identify each individual hen. Incubating them together, by hen, is most convenient.

If a pair produces good results, they can be kept together indefinitely. Or pairs can be changed to check different combinations.

“This keeps any one bird from exerting too much influence on the complete flock,” said Mr. Demansky.

A rooster with outstanding characteristics can be bred to all hens not in his clan. Clans are defined by relationships, not by characteristics. If a bird develops plumage or other characteristics that resemble another clan, he or she still belongs to the clan identified by lineage.

Clan matings work best with a minimum of three clans. Typically, breeders keep an odd number of clans, although any number above three will work.

“It will not produce large numbers of birds, but for the person who wishes to maintain a flock of rare fowl or produce that Near-Perfect specimen, we feel this method can produce success,” he said.

Breeding Out-and-Out

In its most extreme form, new males are brought into the flock each year, to introduce particular characteristics.

Even when new males are brought in only every second or third year, this method maintains a high degree of genetic diversity in the flock. Although uniformity may suffer, this method keeps a high degree of vigor in the flock.

Keeping records

Different breeding methods require varying amounts of record-keeping. Clan matings keep track of every chick.

Mr. Demansky knows the exact identity of every bird raised. “It is a lot of work but we feel it is worth the effort,” he writes.

Rolling matings and out-and-out matings require minimal record keeping.

Each flock unique

Choose the method that suits your needs best. “There is a time to inbreed, a time to line breed and a time to out-cross,” Mr. Demansky writes. “Knowledgeable breeders do it all, when the need arises.”

Small flock poultry keepers can find methods that will suit them and their goals for their flocks. The ambitious or eager can arrange two breeding cycles a year. Others may find one adequate.

Craig Russell observes, in the 2003-2004 SPPA Breeders Directory: Selection of fowl with long, productive lives will develop strains with low mortality and vigorous constitutions, always the goals of old time breeders.

Modern methods of intensive production with extremely high rates of feed conversion, rapid weight gain, early maturity and high egg production have not favored longevity. Inherent health problems are often associated with today’s high profile strains. In most cases, modern methods have actually shortened the profitable life as well as the actual life of domestic fowl.

For non-factory production and for establishing a flock near the breed ideal, a long-lived population with prolonged utility is desirable. The goal of the poultry conservationist and the serious backyard farmer should be to breed a strain that lays plenty of eggs without loss of vigor and retains fertility year after year.

Older birds should be subjected to normal culling and selecting. Thus a tried and true breeder might be replaced by a younger bird with far superior type.

Some feather patterns tend to deteriorate with age. A bird with proper color during the first year of life is not a cull due to later color deterioration, but would not be selected over birds of equal age, type and vitality that still retained superior color. This is good advice for any backyard breed, but certainly should be followed by anyone working with historic types.

SPPA support

SPPA members have many years of experience with these and other breeding systems to maintain and invigorate common, rare and historic breeds. The quarterly Bulletin often includes articles from members about their experiences with systems that worked, or didn’t work, toward accomplishing their goal.

A year’s membership is $12.50 and includes the Breeders Directory, a listing of all SPPA members, what they raise and how to contact them. Send check to Glenn Drowns, 1878 230th Street, Calamus, IA 52729-9659.