Poultry Keepers Podcast

Bantams-Part 2

• Rip Stalvey, John Gunterman, and Mandelyn Royal • Season 2 • Episode 81

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This episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast features hosts Mandelyn, John, and Rip discussing the care and feeding practices for bantam chickens. They delve into the history of poultry feed components, emphasizing the importance of amino acids over protein, and the role of nutritional density. 

Discussions include comparisons between bantams and large fowl, highlighting bantams' resilience in cold climates, efficiency in feed conversion, and lesser need for space. They also explore breed preservation, predator vulnerabilities, and practical tips on feeding and managing both bantams and large fowl chickens. 

The episode concludes with a nod to the growing popularity of bantams in poultry shows and a reminder of the importance of breed preservation.

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Alex:

Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode Mandelyn, John and Rip wrap up their thoughts on the minatures of the poultry world. So, let's join their conversation on Bantums.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

I think what was happening, people were raising bantams and they weren't getting the growth and they weren't getting the feather quality and, and all those things that we were seeing in some of our large fowl breeds. And so they figured it had to be the feed. So they would start adding to it. They would add in like dog food, cat food, fish food.

John Gunterman:

Well, that was also the time that a lot of the feed manufacturers started utilizing adjuncts from other industries that were waste products. So they didn't. Equate the two. Right. They just realized My thought on

Mandelyn Royal:

it, if your feed is full of filler Where it's the wheat middlings and just, you know, the junk food that holds a crumble together. But it's going into a bird the size of a peanut, how much of that nutrition is coming off into that bird based on its capacity to eat it? Versus if you fed a genuinely good feed, it's not going to be chasing additional and trying to eat too much because it doesn't have the fillers in it. Because I was told Nutritional

John Gunterman:

density here is something that's important. I would say.

Mandelyn Royal:

Late 80s, early 90s, I was just told feed them like turkeys. Give them turkey food.

Rip Stalvey:

People were thinking, when they started mixing these other things in and forming all these secret recipes, so to speak, they were seeing improvements in their birds, and they realized, they knew that they were giving them a higher protein feed. Okay? So they attributed all these improvements to higher protein.

Mandelyn Royal:

And it was never the protein

Rip Stalvey:

and giving them a more diverse amino acid profile. It was increasing the amino acid levels.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah.

John Gunterman:

Come to find out it's

Mandelyn Royal:

the amino acids, not the protein.

John Gunterman:

And it was diversifying the amino acid profile because you're now you have all these different constituent building blocks for proteins coming from different sources.

Rip Stalvey:

Well, they, that was at about the same time when poultry feed manufacturers were trying to convince us that chickens should be vegetarians. And so they should be a pellet.

John Gunterman:

That was also the time where they convinced everybody that everything should be a pellet. Boy, it would be great to have Jeff on and give us a history of.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, I'm sure he has. I don't want to, I don't want to pick

John Gunterman:

on his age, but I mean, he's been in the industry so long that he saw the industry change. It would be a wonderful perspective, if you're listening, Jeff,

Rip Stalvey:

I'm thoroughly convinced that this all happened at about the same time we saw the switch to all vegetable based protein, which lowered the amino acid levels. And when they started mixing in other feeds, they were bringing back in some meat proteins that were missing from poultry feed. Yes. Folks are not vegetarians. They're omnivores. Yes. If you don't believe it. A little mouse run across the coop where my Rhode Island Reds are, and he's a goner.

John Gunterman:

That was one of the first attributes of my Chanticleers that endeared them to Mandy. When a mouse tried to run across one of my, one of my pens. One of her pens of my Chanticleers. Yeah,

Mandelyn Royal:

they dived right for it, and then a couple of months after that, I was down in the back field, and a little field mouse popped into the Muscovy pen. And the mama duck in that pen grabbed that mouse and her beak, beat it against a stone step three times and swallowed it whole. I was like, wow. Nature's

John Gunterman:

a cruel.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, nature's mean.

Rip Stalvey:

I had a buff coaching cockerel one time that grabbed about a half grown rat and swallowed him whole. That's when I learned real quick that they don't need really fine food particles. They can swallow a whole rat. But they need to summarize

John Gunterman:

because

Mandelyn Royal:

they have vanoms with higher nutrient density without the fillers in the feed. And then you don't have to do anything special. Feed them exactly like you would your large bow. So long as the feed formula is appropriate and true to what it should be.

Rip Stalvey:

And honestly. The large fowl would benefit from being raised that way. If you have a well balanced, age appropriate, nutritionally dense feed, they're going to do better on it. And they're not going to require as much protein as you It used to horrify me, because I went down this road myself, because I would add in catfish chow, I would add in cat food, I would add in dog food. It was costing me a fortune to buy all those different feeds and combine them into one ration. When didn't know it then, but if I had bothered to do a little studying about it and realize the importance of amino acids, oh, wow, that would have saved me a ton of money over the years.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now, when it comes to their cold hardiness, I don't remember ever doing anything special for mine in the wintertime until it got consistently below freezing and my parents were generous enough to give up a basement room of our old, old house. So it was. like a, a cellar room, but they let me set it all up so I can bring my delicate little birds down there and winter them over for two months. And then I'd put them all back outside again for spring, but for January and February. I did put them up because my coop was not really a proper coop in the insulated wood built thing. It was like a glorified rabbit hutch that was giant.

Rip Stalvey:

I, I never did anything unusual for bantams that I didn't do for my large fallow birds. And they handle cold weather. Remarkably well. Now with that said, I'm in Florida. You guys are much further north than I am, and I don't have to contend with the temperatures you folks do.

Mandelyn Royal:

I knew they weren't gonna survive winter in February with nothing but hardware cloth

Rip Stalvey:

probably. That's pretty close. Yeah, because you gotta have,

John Gunterman:

I'd love to give them another try, but I had predator problems.

Mandelyn Royal:

Just going through the research for this episode makes me want bantams again.

Rip Stalvey:

Mm-hmm.

Mandelyn Royal:

I miss them. They're so fun. They have really cool

Rip Stalvey:

personalities, too.

John Gunterman:

They do. I've tried three times. I just They just seem a little bit more finicky to me. They're more vulnerable to predators, I've found.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh yeah, they're definitely Because the

John Gunterman:

smaller predator will go for the smaller Bird. Yeah, they're chicken nuggets. Perfect. So, predators that would not even bother with normal chickens will go after a bantam just because it's smaller inherently.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, even little little kestrels.

Rip Stalvey:

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I think, in a sense, bantams can be a little bit more finicky to feed and manage than a large fowl. But, they're certainly not extremely finicky. They're not very needy. But as long as you meet their needs and you're using a good quality feed, you've got them in a good coop, they'll be fat and happy.

John Gunterman:

I would say generally speaking, if you're in an extremely cold environment, like zone three or less that a Bantam may be a better choice for you than the large fowl equivalent. Just in that environment, it's inherently a little bit tougher and more resilient and just designed for that environment a little better.

Mandelyn Royal:

Well, and the space they need is so small that you can build better on a smaller footprint to protect them.

John Gunterman:

Mm hmm. As long as you protect them. From a sustainability perspective, that's, I think they're pretty awesome.

Rip Stalvey:

And you know, we talked about saving money on feed and all this kind of stuff, but another big savings to me is they don't have Unless you're going to raise a lot of them, you don't need really big pins and really big runs. I had a lot of four by eight foot pins that I could put five, six manoms in easily. And they did great in that size. Where with large fallow, you could put about two in that.

John Gunterman:

And unlike quail, which their eggs are a pain to break, if you're looking for egg production, you can put twice as, well, more than twice as many hens in the same amount of space and maintain the same production. So, yeah I don't really see a downside at all.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I'm like, can I find a lady petal?

John Gunterman:

Given the temperament

Mandelyn Royal:

One of my favorites was the sea brides. I had silver and gold both. And the two males I had, I named them Jibbers and Jabbers because all they did was jibber and jabber all day.

Rip Stalvey:

Mm hmm.

John Gunterman:

Mm

Rip Stalvey:

hmm. Here's a challenge for you, Mandlin. You ought to get some white rock bands.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh. Are you going where I think you're going?

Rip Stalvey:

I probably am. I know you like your project. And you get a male and cross him onto some small sized breast females.

Mandelyn Royal:

Like the really round bowling ball ones that I won't use in the purebred pens because they're just too round. Do they have a

Rip Stalvey:

rose

John Gunterman:

comb

Rip Stalvey:

version? I don't think there's a rose comb breast, is there Madeline?

John Gunterman:

No, in the, in the white rock.

Rip Stalvey:

No, it's a single comb.

John Gunterman:

Oh, okay. If you

Rip Stalvey:

want a rose comb version, get a white wind up, but they are, they're much rounder. The body conformation is much different than a breast. What about replicating my big project

Mandelyn Royal:

in the miniature version?

John Gunterman:

Yeah,

Rip Stalvey:

we

John Gunterman:

gotta get rid of those ridiculous combs and waddles for the northern

Rip Stalvey:

climate. You could, you know, you could go another 10 or 15 years getting all that straightened out. You'd be good to go. Keep you occupied.

Mandelyn Royal:

But I could raise three times as many birds if they were bantam. I know. I

John Gunterman:

like your optimism. So overall feed conversion ratio, right on point.

Mandelyn Royal:

I'd say they're more economical.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

Hands down. You just need more of them. And that's okay because that's the fun of it. For a bunch of

John Gunterman:

large fowl breeders, we're talking ourselves out of a job.

Rip Stalvey:

Large fowl, talking about feed conversion, three and a half to four ounces of feed per day. Yeah. Phantoms, most of those breeds you're talking about may be an ounce, maybe ounce and a half of feed per day. Yeah. Yeah.

John Gunterman:

Yeah, it's easier to switch over to grams and

Mandelyn Royal:

Their growth rate? When do they hit their adult size?

Rip Stalvey:

About the same as largefowl five, six months. Some of the breeds like the Asiatics are just like largefowl. They're slower to come around to develop.

Mandelyn Royal:

Well, some of the largefowl types like Jersey giant and Brahma and stuff like that, you're feeding them eight, nine, 10, 11 months before you get to that advertised weight. But the phantom version, five, six months.

Rip Stalvey:

Pretty much. No, no, it'll take you longer than that on the, You're going to follow the same basic. Trans and bantam breed as you will in the comparable large fowl breed.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now, did you ever mix your bantams with your large fowl or did you keep them all separate?

Rip Stalvey:

No, I kept them separate.

Mandelyn Royal:

I always had either or I never really mixed them.

Rip Stalvey:

I found that I wouldn't even do it at day old because a large fowl would bully the bantams and they weren't eating and drinking like they should. So I gave them their own brooder and that kind of followed through. And of course the Bantam doesn't realize he's a Bantam, so he's going to try to take on the large fowl carpels, and that doesn't end well.

Mandelyn Royal:

No, I'd imagine it wouldn't.

Rip Stalvey:

But you know, Bantams, as long as you treat them like chickens and feed them like you should, the only difference is the size when it comes right down to it.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now I have in the past, for the sake of brooding space and efficiency, if I had two week old Bantam chicks, It wasn't unheard of for me to drop a couple large foul chicks that were much younger in with them.'cause the younger ones almost respected the older ones, even though they were smaller.

Rip Stalvey:

You can get by with that. Mm-hmm But if you do it the other way,

Mandelyn Royal:

oh, they're gonna get trampled.

Rip Stalvey:

You're asking

Mandelyn Royal:

trampled. Yeah. If you're gonna mix your sizes. You get the little ones going first so that they automatically have some clout just by age and not necessarily size.

John Gunterman:

I was staggering my quail to be about a week older than my large fowl chicks if I was going to brood them together. And that worked out pretty good.

Rip Stalvey:

And if you wanted to, you could do the same sort of sex link crosses with Bantams that you can with large fowl. Like I said, my friend that across the New Hampshires and the Rhode Island Red Banffs got astounding production out of those birds, and they're a little bit bigger, so there was more of a carcass there than just a purebred bird.

John Gunterman:

Well, that F1 generation is always going to have that heterosis.

Rip Stalvey:

I guess the one thing that I would like to leave with people out of this, Is it if you like large fowl or you like bantams, I would give the advantage to being easier to care for and less costly to feed the bantams. But other than that, they're pretty much the same type birds, just the size is different. That's it.

John Gunterman:

And showing, I think bantams have a larger.

Rip Stalvey:

There's a lot more bantams at shows than there are in large fowl. Showing.

Mandelyn Royal:

And with the last show I was at, it was said that the bantams are going to keep growing and growing because they are more efficient to raise. They are cheaper per bird to raise out. And I would hazard a guess, gosh, probably 70 percent of the show was bantam.

John Gunterman:

Yeah. And we're always talking about this rule of 10 that you need to even maintain decent bantam. Yeah. Genetic direction in your flock, so if, if you're having to hatch out a hundred eggs a year, it's going to be much more cost effective and easier to manage all the way down the line if they're bantams than large fowls.

Mandelyn Royal:

Well, since I started with bantams, they were my crash course, and if I had started with large fowl probably would have been more intimidating because you just can't do the numbers and scale and experimenting that you can do with the smaller ones. Talk about my little science projects. Now you should have seen my seabrights crossed into this and that and this and that. Well,

John Gunterman:

I know where I can go for some nice Chanticleer bantams.

Mandelyn Royal:

Where?

John Gunterman:

Oh. Tripp has

Mandelyn Royal:

me curious now on replicating my other project in the miniature form.

John Gunterman:

Well, these are Chanticleer bantams. You're going to need. No, they're yours doesn't exist yet, so you should be used to make them. Oh, we're such enablers.

Rip Stalvey:

Be honest

Mandelyn Royal:

with you. Those are bad for chicken math.

Rip Stalvey:

Bantam breasts. To be honest with you, Madeline, in retrospect, I said a white rock. It might be better to start with a white Orpington.

Mandelyn Royal:

Hmm.

Rip Stalvey:

Because of the skin color.

Mandelyn Royal:

With my current project, I'm seeing a skin color go in different directions. And I think I can find what I need just by selection.

Rip Stalvey:

Oh, you could you could,

Mandelyn Royal:

but as we know, it's a numbers game and a percentage breakdown of who gets what within a batch. And if they all had. That right trajectory. It's one less thing to select through. Hmm. What makes you think about this?

John Gunterman:

You're getting into polygenetic selection. Yeah. Where each generation, you're like, oh, and I can select for this and this and this now, because you know, things are starting to tighten up in all the departments.

Mandelyn Royal:

Right. And it's that whole watch. Watch the spread, look at your percentages, figure out what's going on and what you can pull from to move forward with.'cause sometimes. Half of them will be decent. Other times it's 10 percent or less that popped off as usable for that next generation.

John Gunterman:

So yeah, eating a lot of chicken, laying a lot of eggs feeding, you know, what,

Rip Stalvey:

20 percent create balance. You're going to be needing more chickens. If you can't buy the head.

Mandelyn Royal:

Talk about efficient use of Penn space though. I've got a barn.

John Gunterman:

Anyways, so we'll see if this becomes the Bantam Keepers podcast in a few years.

Mandelyn Royal:

No, it won't. My meat buyer still wants those big ones. And I do too. They fill in my Dutch oven really nicely. And I think it would take probably three Bantams to fill that Dutch oven, but then I'm calling them three at a time as well. So there's probably

Rip Stalvey:

would. Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

Hmm. I need to get off this topic.

John Gunterman:

Well, something else that I do see bandied about a lot is a lot of people do want to feed crumbles and there's this misconception that crumbles are water soluble and you don't need grit. Bantams still have gizzards. They still have the same physiology as their larger counterpart. All birds need grit. Crumbles are not water soluble. Crumbles are, crumbles are just pellets that have been ground down because people think that's what they need.

Rip Stalvey:

And another thing about crumbles and pellets, they all are going to, they have to have a filler in there to make the pellet hold together. Yes, I can't make it without a filler.

John Gunterman:

No, it needs a binder to be a pellet. So if you're milling your own feed and sourcing your own grains, you're already well ahead of the game. You've probably been listening to this podcast for a little while. So we don't need to be talking to you folks. But if you're going to use some nutritional supplements, there's, you know, there, there are a few products out there that do what they say that they're supposed to do.

Mandelyn Royal:

And a lot of the good ones, they're just amping up those amino acids and the micronutrients and your B vitamins, vitamin A, vitamin D, all those essential things.

Rip Stalvey:

Well, that's because the quality of the commercial feeds anymore is so poor. We don't really have any choice. Either make our own, find somebody that will do a custom mix for us or supplement. Yeah,

Mandelyn Royal:

I'm doing a supplement route over top of a crumble feed currently because I still haven't found a meal within a half hour. That can mix it the way we need it mixed. And I'm not prepared to go out and buy all the stuff to do it our own. I don't have a silo for long term grain storage because I do appreciate how your whole grains will store. For so long, you really can go out and get bulk corn, bulk wheat, bulk, however you're blending. And it'll store in its whole form for years. But the very moment you mill that feed, you've got three months or less to use it up.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. The bulk

Mandelyn Royal:

already mixed, already milled. You can't stock up. It's going to get too old. And what is it? The B vitamins are the first to go in the degradation.

Rip Stalvey:

Well, guys, I don't have anything else. I think I need to lay on the folks that we've covered it pretty well. Yeah,

Mandelyn Royal:

Bantams are awesome.

Rip Stalvey:

And when it comes to showing, you know, you can interment APA shows or ABA shows, American Bantam Association, because they have all We didn't

Mandelyn Royal:

even mention them yet, the American Bantam Association, they have their own club and everything.

John Gunterman:

Yeah, and it's so important from a breed preservation perspective that we have people active. In this area of,

Rip Stalvey:

excuse me, breeding. I'm going to lay this out there and then I'm going to get down off my soapbox and be quiet. But from a standpoint of breed preservation, I always hear them talking about large fowl breeds, but there are plenty, plenty of Bantam breeds that are in need of breed preservation or they're going to be lost.

Mandelyn Royal:

As soon as the cornerstone breeders retire. Who's picking up the torch?

Rip Stalvey:

Well, that's happening all around the poultry industry. So I guess, or any, you guys have anything you want to bring up before we go?

Mandelyn Royal:

I think we pretty well covered it.

Rip Stalvey:

Good job.

Mandelyn Royal:

Next time we're diving into the whole other category of poultry.

Rip Stalvey:

The end of 2024, we hit 50, 000 downloads and we also had 43- 4400 downloads just for the month of December, that's the first time we've ever done that, so. You know, we're not doing too bad for a little 18 month old podcast.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, it's blowing my mind a little bit.

Rip Stalvey:

Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next Tuesday when we'll be back with another episode of the Poultry Keepers podcast where we talk poultry from feathers to function.

John Gunterman:

Bye now.

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John Gunterman

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Mandelyn Royal

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Rip Stalvey

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