Down the Rabbit Hole - In Consideration of Rare Poultry Breeds

[trystinn]

In all my poultry dealings, I've never sold a bird over $20 and never bought one over $10. I recently bought 18 fertilized eggs for $25 - quite a steal, really. I'll likely be buying a few more (Bantam Cochins) soon.

But what I won't be doing is spending $200 for a few gorgeous birds' eggs. Here's the roughly best case scenario when you have a dozen fertilized eggs sent to you:

- 2, packing & shipping issues
- 1, non-fertilized egg
- 2, incubation failure
- 1, mishandling (dropping, turning failure, etc)

So now, you're down to 6 successfully hatching, hopefully. Of that 6, odds are 3 are males. (That is, you might get 6 males or 6 females, equally tragic.) So you might have 3 lovely ladies to breed with and your choice of 3 roosters. You're going to get rid of 2 males, most likely, even though most breeders will tell you, you should keep 2 and swap them out. So now, you're down to 4 chickens (3 hens, 1 roo), each valued at $50. Chances are, someone isn't going to make it to the first year. In fact, you might lose more than 1. And the price keeps going up for the survivors.

Will you make money breeding these rare of the rare birds? Sure. But you've only a very short time frame to do so because before you know it, all those eggs and chicks you sold will be grown up and breeding, too. And your former customers will now be your competitors. So your ultra rare breed chickens are now fairly common. *shrug* Them's the realities.

Comments

[midnightfae.livejournal.com]

That is really sad, actually. I know a few local poultry farmers (some backyard, some larger pastured operations) that are involved in rare poultry breeds and conservation.

These people will practically give you fertilized eggs if you plan on breeding them, because they're goal is preserve the breed. Some of these breeds are on the verge of extinction. Selling the eggs for $200 a dozen isn't helping. :(

[tryst-inn.livejournal.com]

Exactly, that's one of the things I love about the heritage and rare breeders - they are more concerned with saving the breeds than making money. Most will tell you they pay their feed out of eggs sales, the rest is gravy.

We've got a movement on the Island to save colonial breeds - goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, etc. I applaud their ideals and I get a kick out of the amount of history they've dug up on breeds.

That said, I really love the Asian chickens, personally. :)