Wendy shares a good article on the value of genetic diversity, over at Sand Hill Preservation Center:
“There’s a good reason why Dorkings aren’t commercially available from many hatcheries. They don’t like to lay eggs all the time. They like to go broody, lots of the time. It’s sad when commercial places will take something like that breed and breed out non visible traits so you get something that looks like a Dorking but doesn’t act like one. It’s a Dorking in toe and color only not in all of its traits. One of our things we do here is we try to keep all the traits that are representative of a particular breed of variety with that regardless of the consequences it would be much easier for me to make money if I bred all of the broodiness out of the Dorking or the broodiness out of the Kraenkoppes or selected only for certain breeds that laid high production eggs regardless of what else went with it. That’s not the point of understanding diversity. When an illness no matter what it is goes through either the plants or the poultry you can easily figure out which ones share similar traits. I think way back to when laryngotrachietis was first introduced to my farm by someone dropping off diseased birds in the ditch. Sussex no matter what color are highly susceptible and I lost almost all of them. Dorkings don’t get it as bad. I watch coccidiosis as I don’t use medicated feed in the young ones, certain breeds are very susceptible others won’t even be phased. Those are true genetically diverse traits something we need to appreciate. To put all of our eggs in one basket and just put into one type opens us up to susceptibility for something we don’t know in the future. I’m a firm believer that there are chicken breeds out there that will withstand Avian Influenza. We unfortunately as a society have selected for only production, only confinement adaptability and have forgotten that we need to expose these birds to the real world so that they can adapt and we can figure out which ones have the traits that we want. We never know what we will need in the future.”
We agree heartily.
In 2021-22, thanks in large part to the inspiration of reading Landrace Gardening by Joseph Lofthouse, we studied and worked on creating landrace chickens, landrace corn, landrace pak choi and landrace pumpkins, with some success and some failures.
Our chickens are a mess of mixed up breeds now, and we’re no longer striving for “pure” bloodlines. We have game birds and Buff Orpingtons, various brown egg layers and Black Austrolorps. We hope to continue adding more types and crossing breeds in future years.
The rest of the seeds in the seed fridge are almost all getting mixed together as well.
Let’s just push it to the limit and grow for survival, instead of trying to maintain varieties bred by different people long ago in different climates.
May the best animals and plants win.
You can have greener thumbs by this weekend!
7 comments
I once bought a dozen dorkings for their supposed broodiness, and ended up with 10 roos and 2 hens None of them handled the autumn change in weather well, unlike my black australorps which seemed to be bulletproof. And NOTHING was suited to our situation and weather like the ducks, which are now in their 6th generation here. They are selecting themselves for the intelligence to stay close enough to home that they don’t get eaten, foraging ability, and good mothering skills.
I’m working on a landrace of melons combining the productivity of madhu ras melons and the sweetness/firmer texture of other varieties.
This year I’m going to try your method of combining dent corn varieties to see what happens :)
This is awesome, Jenn. Good work.
Our Austrolorps have been great as well. First hen that hatched her own babies in our crowded coop at the old house.
I tried to raise/breed Dorkings and the survival rate was poor, Although crossing them with red rangers made for great meat birds that tasted better than pure Dorkings which were already my best tasting chickens. The crosses ended up very hardy but I had to move before I got around to another generation.
Next time I get chickens its just leghorns. I know its not much meat but I am going to try to survive without a freezer or fridge so smaller birds for one meal is ideal.. egg laying rate and feed to egg ratio is a top trait to aim for these days.
Yeah, the leghorns are really a good bird.
Interesting.
Promiscuity in the hen house and on the farm, completely blowing away the myth of the inbreds in South Alabama. (Dueling banjos music in the background) I like it.
Is that where Turduckins come from?
In a landrace, when does hybrid vigor wear off? Or does it? I’m trying to wrap my mind around it. But then, there’s one way to find out..
The only time I’ve been tempted to try to keep breeds pure was when I entertained the idea of selling pure heritage breed chicks. For some reason people will pay a lot for purebred chicks, not as much for the “barnyard mix”. But it’s not worth the hassle, especially when I feel intuitively that a landrace is always going to be superior in terms of resilience. A great layer is worthless if it drops dead the minute it’s exposed to disease. And growing your own meat makes less economic sense when you have to spend a ton of money on grains to feed an animal because it can’t forage as well as its less overbred relatives.
I occasionally bring in a few pure breed individuals to add some new genetics to the flock, but then I consciously make that rare heritage breed even more endangered by letting it fraternize with mixed-breed chicken mutts. Beeders would recoil in horror if they knew what happened to heritage breeds on my farm.
I think it was the dog breeders that started all this “pure-bred” nonsense. Landrace breeding (and gardening) is what our ancestors did for milennia, that’s how we got many of the varieties we have today. But then people started acting like the heritage breeds and heirloom varieties, as they exist today, have to be perserved as they are for posterity, as if these “pure” breeds came down through deep time in their current form like artifacts of an ancient culture.
Our ancestors didn’t delude themselves into thinking they’d achieved perfection just because they had seed from a good food crop! They kept experimenting, because the nature of a landrace is that you keep improving it, or else letting it adapt again as the environment changes.
I’m reading “The Resilient Gardener” by Carol Deppe, and she talks about how monocultures only work in a time of environmental and climatic stability, which we’ve had for the last few hundred years. But during the more usual periods of flux, like the one we’re now entering, when there can be large variations in weather from year to year, you need to breed landraces for resilience so that you don’t lose your entire harvest every time the rainfall patterns are different from what you expected.
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