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.