Month: December 2025

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Long term breed maintenance with 3 pens

There is a fear of inbreeding in chickens that I believe may be less common than you would expect, but given the bad outcome, it is worth thinking about how you can prevent or delay inbreeding when planning your breeding program. I am always short of pens, so I give a lot of thought to how I can create with fewer pens. This is an explanation of how one could maintain 2 colors of a breed for the long term with very limited inbreeding. It takes advantage of the sex linked silver/gold gene, but could be adapted to other colors or traits. The important part is that you are using the same breed and complimentary colors. I am using Wyandottes as an example, but this would also work great with Cochins, Polish, etc.

Pen layout

  • Pen 1 – Gold laced Wyandottes
  • Pen 2 – Silver laced Wyandottes
  • Pen 3 – Silver laced Wyandotte hens, Gold laced cock

Management

The first 2 pens produce pure colors of both sexes, the 3rd pen produces sexlinked Gold laced pullets (you can probably sell these easily), Silver chicks are males, but are heterozygous for gold. Cull or sell these for meat production.

After a few years (it usually takes several to many generations before you see any inbreeding depression in chickens), raise the chicks from pen 3 and replace their counterparts in pen 1 and 2. Pen 2 will produce some (50%) gold laced chicks. Raise those as replacement cockerels (and pullets if you need them) for pen 1. From now on, pen 2 may have “contaminated” cockerels that produce some gold chicks, but this is not a huge problem, as you will still get plenty of silver pullets to refresh pen 3 whenever you want.

This setup produces salable pullet chicks (sexed chicks bring several times more than straight run) from pen 3, a good way to help offset feed costs. Small breeders producing sexable chicks of heritage breeds is quite rare, so if you pick a popular heritage breed, like Wyandottes or Cochins, you should be able to easily sell all the pullet chicks you produce.

Genetics of the pens

Pen 1 (all gold) – Gold is a sexlinked recessive allele, so this pen is always 100% pure for gold. No silver genes ever exist in this pen, making breeding straight forward. You can raise replacement stock from the chicks from this pen, or take gold chicks from the other pens.

Pen 2 (all silver) – Silver is sexlinked dominant, so silver females are always pure, but males can carry a copy of the recessive gold gene. If the male is heterozygous for gold, then half of the pullet chicks will be gold, and they will be pure (no silver) and can be used as breeders in pen 1. The male chicks will all be silver (making any gold chicks from this pen 100% females – you cannot produce a gold male with silver females as the parent). If the father is heterozygous for gold, the half his sons will be also, but you will not be able to distinguish them from the homozygous males. When you start with all silvers, you could only use silver cocks from this pen to replace their father, ensuring the cocks always remain homozygous. This seems like a “cleaner” solution than to mix in cocks from pen 3 that are heterozygous, but unless producing extra gold chicks is a problem, the ability to get gold pullet chicks from this pen is an advantage.

Pen 3 (sexlinked producing) – This is the pen where you start mixing the 2 colors, and where you get all sexable chicks to sell. Logically, you might want this pen to have the largest breeder flock, to maximize the number of chicks you can sell.

Final thoughts

I picked gold and silver laced as the colors here because that color pattern is beautiful and in demand. Gold laced pullets should be in high demand. But you could do this same breeding strategy with other color combinations as well. The other sexlinked gene that is common in many breeds is barring/cuckoo. That can be used to make black sexlinks, and the process could be made to work the same way, but it is perhaps a bit easier to manage because sexlinked barring is partially dominant, meaning that heterozygous males look different than homozygous males.

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4 different pullet chicks from a single breeding pen?

Taking care of a multitude of pens can really add to your workload. But, if you are serious about selling chicks, having a variety available will really increase sales. To help with that, you can combine some pens to create more than 1 kind of chick. This takes advantage of colors that are distinguishable at hatch, and also creating desirable hybrids.

Hybrids have some advantages both to the buyer (better overall productivity and vigor) and the seller (buyers need to come back for more, they cannot generally breed their own to the same effect). They can add some complexity to breeding, but once understood, they can reduce the number of breeding pens needed.

I am going to describe a single pen of autosexing breeders that can produce 4 distinct types of pullet chicks. These constitute 4 of my 6 best selling chicks.

  • Cockerels – Silver Welbars that are known to be heterozygous for gold. It can be tricky to determine this unless you know that parentage.
  • Welbar pullets – these can be silver or gold, that will have no effect on the colors of their daughters.
  • Legbar pullets – these can be Cream or Opal (Lavender), but there is no advantage to using Opals over Creams as the resulting chicks look identical.

If you use Gold Welbars and no Silvers as the pullets in this pen, then every Silver cockerel chick (easily identified at hatch) will be heterozygous for gold. For this reason, I usually hold back only gold pullet chicks for next years breeders. If you like silver hens, you can certainly keep them as well, but if you use them in this breeding pen, the cockerels from those hens will all be silver, but only half will be the desired heterozygous for gold. If you use a silver cockerel that is homozygous for silver, every resulting chick will be silver. You can still sex them easily, but you will not have gold chicks to sell from this cockerel. There is a genetic test for the number of copies of the silver gene that a cockerel has. I have not tried that, but it is an option if you do get into this situation.

The Legbars in this pen will lay blue eggs of course, and it is essential that you mark them if you have other blue egg layers, and that you hatch them separately from the Welbar eggs. The blue eggs will hatch into autosexing olive eggers, both silver and gold (assuming the Silver Welbar cockerel is het for gold). You will not be able to tell the olive egger and welbar chicks apart! so hatch and brood them separately. You can use tiny rubber bands, but I find they often fall off. I sell almost all the Olive Egger chicks within a few days, so this is a very temporary problem for me.

These are 4 colors/types of chicks you can hatch from this pen, all autosexing:

  • Gold Welbars (from the dark brown eggs)
  • Silver Welbars (from the dark brown eggs)
  • Gold Olive Eggers (from the blue eggs)
  • Silver Olive Eggers (from the blue eggs)

In the next post, I will explain how a second pen can produce 2 colors of Legbars, to finish out the “big 6” of chick demand.

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Shipping day old poultry

I have always had much better results sending and receiving day old poultry than eggs. I now think of buying shipped eggs as mostly flushing money down the toilet. Shipped chicks sometimes fails, I have had a few boxes that were complete losses, and a few with poor survival after delays in shipping, but well over 90% are what I would call “very successful”.

Materials needed:

  • Shipping boxes – unlike eggs, you must have post office approved boxes for day old poultry (really, for any live poultry). These are available from a number of sources
  • Pads/Liners – usually wood excelsior glued to paper or in mats, cut to the proper size for a 25 chick box. Sometimes these come with the boxes, but often not, so check that and see if you need to buy some
  • Grogel – the green stuff that is sold to give chicks a probiotic boost. They readily eat it and it is a good source of water
  • Cups for the Grogel
  • Hole punch for punching holes in the cups (if using tie wraps)
  • Way to attach the cups to the boxes – small tie wraps or hot glue work
  • Packing tape

Boxes are sized by the number of chicks they hold, 25, 50 or 100. Do not buy 100 chick boxes, it is cheaper to ship 2 boxes of 50 chicks each than a single box of 100. Don’t ask me why, the USPS is run by the government, so probably no one has a cogent answer for that. I use both 25’s and 50’s. It is not much more to buy and ship a 50 chick box, so if you ship a lot of chicks, start with those or get both. Here are some sources for shipping boxes. These also have the excelsior pads to use as liners.

Grogel is manufactured by Dawes for commercial use with day old poultry. I use it for all my newly hatched chicks, as well as putting cups of it in the chick shipping boxes. It keeps well if kept in a dry place, and the larger packs are much cheaper per unit. Here are the sources I have used for Grogel:

Cups for the Grogel can be found at Walmart. Tie wraps or hot glue, and packing tape, are commonly available.

Packing

Get the boxes you need folded before the morning you plan to ship. It can be tricky figuring out how to fold them. You can setup the boxes, put in the pads and attach the cups that will hold the gro-gel. The morning you are shipping, mix up enough grogel to fill the cups. I use 2 of the cups in each section (holds 25 chicks). Now you are ready to move in the chicks. If you are using a double box, divide the chicks between the 2 sides. The numbers of chicks varies by their size, ambient temps (fewer chicks when it is hot) and the number purchased. After putting in the chicks, I usually take a pic of the chicks, then put on the top and use packing tape to attach the top. Add the label and write the customer phone number on the top – “Hold and Call XXX-XXX-XXXX”.

Mailing the chicks

This varies a lot between branches, and sometimes you have to train the postal employee how to mail them. I almost always use Priority, not Express. Express is rarely enough faster to justify the much higher costs. There is a $15 surcharge on Priority chick shipments starting in 2025.

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Selecting breeders from growouts

I am busy now sorting chickens and creating the breeding pens for 2026. I wanted to write down some thoughts about how I go about doing this.

Chickens have a relatively short productive lifespan. I have had some hens lay well for 5 years or longer, most notably my Cream Legbars, but most breeds see a significant drop in egg production much sooner than that. Cocks often have even shorter productive lives than the hens. This all means that you need to select replacement breeders fairly often.

What are your breeding goals?

The first consideration is to understand your goals in running a breeding program. Breeding goals can vary a lot, it is not always to breed toward the SOP. I have a clear goal (or goals) in mind for every breed I maintain. Here are some examples of breeding goals:

  • Showbird Standard of Perfection (SOP)
  • Darkest possible eggs
  • Definitive chick sexability
  • Genetic diversity for long term gene pool maintenance

Culling from the growout pool

So, you have a lot more chicks growing out than you need for the next breeding pen, when can you start culling the ones you want to sell or give away? Again, it depends. Some breeds and some goals require that you wait until they are close to breeding age. An example from my pens are the Welbars. I have been selecting against crooked toes that are obviously genetic (not found in other breeds). The problem is that the chicks do not show any crooked toes until they are at least 4 months old, so early selection is a bad idea. The counterpoint is selecting for the best crests in Legbars. Legbars show their best crests before their combs get large, so you can pick the best crests when the chicks are about 6 weeks old, allowing you to remove the poor examples early. Decide what traits are most important to select for and start looking for those traits early. You will learn about each of your lines as you raise more generations.

Genetic Testing

This is new and exciting! There are a number of companies offering genetic tests, you should familiarize yourself with the current state of these tests. The technology is advancing rapidly, so check for interesting gene tests often. I use sexing tests for geese, and will consider them in other cases as the prices drop. Even more useful are the tests for the blue egg gene. This test is more expensive, but well worth it as it can replace a lot of test breeding or just ambiguity.