Once you get serious about
making your chickens a working part of the homestead, you’ll be faced
with a thorny issue.  Buying chicks from a hatchery every year
puts you on a treadmill going nowhere — you’re stuck with whatever
genetics the hatchery selects for, which generally means appearance and
ability to reproduce quickly in a hatchery environment.  If you’re
more interested in chickens that forage well, taste particularly good,
or who are devoted mothers, you’ll have to learn to breed your own
flock.





What
should I select for?

The great thing about
breeding your own chickens is that you can decide what matters most to
you.  That said, it’s best to focus on the all-around bird, not on
a single trait.  Try to steer clear of inordinately fast-growing
birds — these may seem like a good choice for broilers, but they tend
to have immune weaknesses and won’t do well on the homestead.  On
the other hand, do select for large eggs since these tend to equate to
stronger chicks (but don’t expect large eggs until your pullets are
around 28 weeks old.)  Finally, don’t keep hens who continually
lay oddly shaped or textured eggs since these traits are heredible.





How
do I know which birds are showing the traits I want?

This
is where breeding can get tricky, and the answer depends on which
traits you’re selecting for.  You can build trap
nests to get an idea
of how many eggs each of your hens lays in an average week.  For
broilers, consider tracking rate of growth and mature size by weighing
each bird alive at 8, 12, and/or 16 weeks, then also keep track of
carcass size of birds you cull and eat.  Unless you’re extremely
observant, you’ll probably also need to label individual birds with leg
or wing rings or foot notches so you can tell them apart.



One trait most
homesteaders should select for is resiliency.  That means birds
who will forage as much wild food as possible and who can handle cold
winters and hot summers.  Don’t be afraid to utilize environmental
extremes to make favorable homesteading traits more evident.  If a
hot spell stunts some of your birds, delete them from the flock.





What
do I do with birds who don’t live up to my standards?

The trick to improving
your flock is to cull rigorously.  That means you may only keep
10% (or even fewer) of your best birds every year, turning the rest
into dinner.  Remember, your flock will never be better than your
worst birds — don’t keep that runt around for sentimental reasons.





How
do I prevent inbreeding?

This is a tricky
question since the average homestead flock is probably going to be too
small to be entirely self-sufficient.  However, you can take steps
to maintain genetic diversity by avoiding mating brothers to sisters at
all costs, and trying to minimize parent-offspring matings.  Two
methods can help

• Rolling matings —
  Separate your flock into two groups: the old roosters with young
  pullets and the old hens with young cockerels.  At the end of the
  season, cull the oldest birds.  Now your young pullets and
  cockerels have turned into your old hens and roosters, and can be mated
  to this year’s youngsters in two new groups.
• Spiral 
  matings — Divide the flock into three or more matrilinear
  families.  Each year, mate the sons to the next family down the
  line, eating the cockerels after they’ve been bred for one or two
  seasons.  The females always stay in their own family and can be
  kept as long as you want.

Dividing your flock into
two or three groups sounds daunting, but keep in mind that this complex
arrangement may only need to last for a month or so.  If you’ve
marked your birds so you know which group they belong to, you’ll just
need to separate the flocks for a couple of weeks in the spring to
flush excess sperm out of the hens’ systems, then collect eggs for
another week or two to hatch out into this year’s babies.





Where
can I read more about breeding my own chickens?

I’ve summarized the tips
above from Harvey Ussery’s The
Small-Scale
Poultry Flock. 
Keep in mind that his description of the process is
twenty pages long — I highly recommend that you read his book if
this teaser post makes you decide to try breeding chickens on your own
homestead.  Good luck!

Harvey Ussery’s The
Small-Scale Poultry Flock is the number
one homesteading related book to read this year.  I know, I
know — Joel Salatin put out his
first non-self-published book, The
Dirty Life promises to reach beyond the usual homesteading
readership, and Sepp Holzer has finally published a
book about his methods in English,
all in 2011.  But for the backyard homesteader itching to turn her
farm into a permaculture masterpiece, Harvey Ussery’s book has those
bestsellers beat hands-down.

Ussery keeps 24 layers and raises another 48 to 72 broilers
every year on an acre of pasture.  He also experiments with a
couple of
dozen waterfowl every year.  Although this sounds like a lot of
birds, it’s well within the average homesteader’s grasp and makes his
experiences much more relevant than any information you can find about
Joel Salatin’s commercial poultry operation.

I’ve been poring over Ussery’s articles for years in Backyard Poultry
Magazine and Mother Earth News.  In fact, his articles are often
the only ones worth reading since they always introduce new ideas
rather than rehashing the same old information you read in previous
issues.  I’ve posted about the way he raises
worms
and black
soldier flies for his chickens previously, and you can read many
of his original articles on his
website.

The Small-Scale Poultry
Flock takes those articles and expands them
into a reference guide that will suit anyone from the raw beginner to
the advanced chicken-keeper.  In addition to basic information on
chicken care, you can learn about backyard breeding, raising chicks
with a broody hen, innovative feeding techniques, and much more. 
I’m going to highlight some of his most interesting tips in later
posts, but if you have a spare weekend, I highly recommend you get the
book and read it from cover to cover.  I guarantee it’ll change
the way you integrate your flock into the homestead.