 Bantam Salmon Faverolles chick. Have you ever wished you knew which chick in a hatch came from which egg? Are you launching a breeding program and wondering how to keep track of matings and offspring? Or do you simply want to keep tabs on your feathered friends for fun? In this post, we’re going to talk about how to pedigree your chickens, which will help you do all of the above.
Knowing how to pedigree your birds is a valuable skill that will come in handy whether you’re a serious breeder or just love hatching chicks for your backyard flock. What does it mean to pedigree chicks? Put simply, it means keeping track of your bird’s genetic background. Depending on your breeding program or goals, this practice may take different forms and happen for different reasons. The pedigree process is necessary when managing a breeding program and allows you to trace the origins of the chicks you hatch by pen or individual mating. When breeding for egg color, you can track the color of the egg a chick hatched from (definitely helpful when selecting for darker Marans eggs!). Tracking the pedigree of chicks is not just for breeders, though. These tools are also incredibly helpful for identifying and separating breeds and crosses that look the same at hatch, or keeping tabs on an individual bird’s behavior, health, and vigor.
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 With a bit of trial and error, we’ve found a safe, reliable packing method for shipping hatching eggs that works for us–and I’ll show you exactly how we do it in this post.
One of the most common questions I get from folks who don’t have chickens, but know that we ship hatching eggs all over the U.S., is this: “How in the world do you send eggs in the mail without them breaking?” They are often surprised when I tell them that preventing breakage during transit is easy. The trick, though, is to pack an egg well enough that it not only doesn’t break, but also develops into a healthy, thriving chick. That, my friends, is no small feat–especially when shipping and incubating conditions are outside of our control. Once the eggs leave our hands and enter the labyrinth of the USPS, their ultimate fate is beyond our influence. They will face unpredictable handling in transit, and experience a range of incubation conditions. Our part in ensuring a good hatch for our customers is to pack their eggs with the utmost care. Of course, there’s more than one effective way to pack hatching eggs for shipping. I’ll also share some general best practices for shipping eggs, and discuss a couple good alternatives to our method.  A speckled Marans egg: our first pullet egg of the year. In this post, I’m going to chat about selective poultry breeding and the things we take into consideration when breeding chickens on our farm. This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive guide to breeding poultry--that is far too much for one blog post! Instead, I'll be sharing an overview that will give you some insight into everything we think about when making our breeding choices and what this process is like for us on our farm.
 An Ameraucana hen and her three babies. If you’ve ever experienced a broody hen, you know they are fierce and determined as they sit on and protect their eggs. They are also a great way to expand your flock, as they will incubate, hatch, and raise chicks for you.
On the flip side, she can be an unwelcome disturbance in the flock, especially if you don’t have fertile eggs or young chicks readily available. They also often need their own space, but they don’t pay egg rent. Not only that, but broodiness can put a real strain on your hen. In this post we will look at both sides of the broody coin: how to support and care for your hen while helping her become a mama, and how to break a broody if need be while minimizing stress to her.  Two bantam Salmon Faverolles from our hatch last week. Wondering why some of your chicken eggs failed to hatch after three weeks of careful incubation? In this post, we'll go over how to perform an "eggtopsy" aka breakout analysis. This process will help you troubleshoot your hatch and improve your hatch rate next time.
What is Clan Mating? If you are interested in breeding your own flock for the first time, know that there are a number of different breeding methods you can choose, including line breeding, flock mating, and clan mating. All have their pros and cons, and some might be a better fit than others for your own situation and goals. On our farm, we’ve chosen to use a clan mating system for our Ameraucanas and Black Copper Marans.
In this post, we'll define clan mating and discuss how you can start a clan mating program on your own small farm or homestead. Clan Mating (also known as Spiral Mating) is a system of breeding where chickens are separated into at least three different groups, or clans. You can absolutely have more than three groups if you wish, but three is the minimum. In the initial year of a clan mating program, chickens mate within their group, and in all subsequent years, males are rotated to the next clan over. (I was unable to discover where this breeding method originated, but I first learned about Clan Mating from Harvey Ussery’s great book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.) |
Hi there.We're just two shy chicks who are passionate about raising poultry. On this blog, we share what we've learned from decades of chicken keeping and breeding rare poultry on our small farm. 
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