Here it is! Our first article regarding locally-adapted chickens. It’s been a long time coming, considering that it was a year ago last month that we brought up the subject. The idea and research took considerable effort because producing one’s own chicks is very convoluted.

Turns out that breeding chickens is a lot harder than it seems. Who would have thought?
It has taken just about a year to wade through all the different systems and styles. Look for this, watch for that- -it can be a lot to take in. Settling on a breed alone can be a daunting undertaking (we will cover this in more detail in the next post) and many of the great old production breeds no longer have people willing or able to hold them to the standards they where created with, making it difficult to find some breeds of chicken.

It can be easy to get caught-up in getting the very best birds money can buy and searching for the right bird with the right qualities takes time. I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a proper route to take, but sometimes time just isn’t an option. We selected our parent stock out of our existing egg-laying flock. It took time and some false starts to pick out our breeders, but we settled on birds that had been with us for at least 2 years. We had a feeling that the highest preforming chickens of that age in our production system would help to jump-start our local adaption. We have yet to prove this.

This is the first set of Rhode Island Red chicks that we have hatched on-farm.