Poultry Keepers Podcast

Selecting Dual Purpose Chickens: Hands-On Traits That Matter for Meat and Eggs (Part 1)

• Rip Stalvey • Season 2 • Episode 94

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In this information-packed episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, we dive deep into how to evaluate and select true dual-purpose poultry breeds for both meat and egg production. Join Rip, Jeff, Carey, and Mandelyn as they discuss hands-on selection techniques, key body traits, breed standards, carcass evaluation, and how to use real production data to make better breeding decisions.

Whether you’re breeding American Bresse, Rhode Island Reds, or other traditional dual-purpose breeds, this episode will help you understand what to look for in males and females at different ages, how to balance traits, and why the best breeders also process and eat their own birds.

Don’t miss this honest, experience-based conversation on making meaningful progress in your flock by focusing on structure, productivity, and purpose, not just appearance. This is Part 1 of a 2-part series. Be sure to catch Part 2 next week!

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Alex:

Welcome to another episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode Jeff, Carey, Rip and Mandelyn discuss selecting dual purpose breeds for production qualities. This episode is part one of a two part series previously recorded Poultry Keepers 360 Live stream. We have a lot of information to share so let's get started.

Rip Stalvey:

We have a show that we get asked about a lot, and that's how do you select poultry for production qualities? And we've got somebody here who has probably done as much about that as any of us. And that's Mandelyn, Royal. It is good to see you here tonight.

Mandelyn Royal:

Nice to be here.

Rip Stalvey:

All right. And of course there's Jeff and Carrie and myself here. But coming up in just a few seconds, we are gonna get started. All right. So mandolin, I know that you were just processing birds today and going through that whole selection process and all that. What do you look for when you're wanting to improve the meat qualities of your birds?

Mandelyn Royal:

It was about a week ago. We processed 23 cock rolls, and we do. Our own processing. So that gives me that view of what the living bird was like and then what that carcass was like after the fact. And I'll look at those birds and see what was the fleshing and what was I feeling when I handled that bird live? What was their structure telling me about their body capacity? What was their backend bone spacing like? Because that backend bone spacing is really important on males, just like it is on the females. I. And it affects their daughter's productivity for the egg portion. So I've spent a lot of time on the table traits, but there's a whole other piece that happens with the pellets after point of lay. And so you guys are probably aware of the 10% retention roll for breeding stock. And I get a lot of questions where people are like, what 10% am I keeping at 16 weeks? No, it takes a lot longer actually, if you're gonna do the dual purpose thing. You're not getting to that 10% until they're a year and a half, two years old.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

And you have to take a staggered approach to it while also monitoring your feed efficiency and your space and your housing. So when those birds are getting to be 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16 weeks, I blow through those cock rolls and look for who I definitely don't need. And then they give me my notes on carcass qualities and what my birds for more grow out need to feel like, to know that they're gonna be that same. Table yield, but in a breeding pen.

Rip Stalvey:

Okay. I got a question for you. In your birds, which do you find it easier to select through the males or the females?

Mandelyn Royal:

Both are pretty straightforward, but I do struggle a little bit with being as harsh on the females as the males, and I just console myself that they can always make breakfast eggs and to not force'em into a breeding pen.

Rip Stalvey:

You were talking earlier that. The pinbone spacing in the rear was just as critical for egg production as it is for meat production.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. If you process your own birds and you, they're real tight on the back end and you have to cut up both sides to get the innards out because there's just not enough of an opening to get your hand inside. So that's pretty inconvenient from just the table side of it. But then what they're passing on to their female offspring for their rate of lay. So like on the males, when they're 12, 14 weeks old, I'm already expecting'em to have, it's not a very technical measurement tool. I've just used my hands, so at least two fingers wide in between the pin bones and then three fingers from the end of the keel up to where those pin bones are. And then it just improves with additional age from there. But that's like my minimum threshold for it.

Rip Stalvey:

Do you use that same measurement and same expectations on males and females?

Mandelyn Royal:

Definitely for the males, the females, I would expect them to be just a little bit more. And then when they go into active lay in their into production, then usually you can add another finger onto that and then when they fall out of production, you can lose a finger.'cause the females have a flexing capability for when they're in or out of active lay.

Rip Stalvey:

Take us through your process for evaluating your birds with step by step, blow by blow thing.

Mandelyn Royal:

So when I first pick'em up, I look for that heft.'cause you can tell right off if you pick up a skinny bird, it's gonna feel like nothing but fluff in your hands. So when I pick'em up, I'm just looking for that density. And then when I set'em on a scale to get their weight, I'm not going into that with a set weight in mind. Since I have been playing around with feed and I have been playing around with my methodology and figuring out what works, I don't have a rigid weight for them, but I compare'em against their peers. So I'll wear, I'll weigh every bird in that batch and then I let them stand on the scale.'cause they're pretty docile. Like I don't have to fight with'em. I don't have to put'em in a pillowcase and hang'em from a fish scale or anything. I just stand them there and they stand there and look back at me. And then I watch how they behave and I watch how they step off that scale, how they walk around, how their legs are tied into their body, where they're positioned at, how they're carrying themselves. Then after that, I'll grab'em back in my hands again and start really feeling on'em and checking out their skull shape all the way down to their back, checking the length, checking the depth, the width. But then I put'em back down and watch'em move around again. And my sort cage has three holes. So however I fill those three holes, it could be good, better, best it could be. Bert I've seen this season and then everyone else that was better. And it almost seems pretty consistent that I'll find. Let's say I've got 15 boys. I'll find two that check all the boxes. I'll find another five or six that are actually pretty okay, but they got beat out by the other two, and the other ones aren't in the same ballpark of quality that those other ones are. And that way I know how many dinner birds I have right off the bat. And I can go ahead and set them up for finishing. As soon as I know I don't need'em and they're of size, I'm usually looking for them to be a minimum of five pounds up to seven pounds for processing when they're between like 14 weeks, 16 weeks for texture's sake. The longer you wait, the tougher they get, then you have to adopt your cooking to suit the age of the bird. The younger they are, the more cooking options you have.

Rip Stalvey:

How long have you been breeding American breasts? Now

Mandelyn Royal:

I'm getting ready to start season 8

Rip Stalvey:

0 8. How do your birds stack up now to the, compared to the birds you started with?

Mandelyn Royal:

They're completely different flop. They don't look the same. They don't feel the same. They don't do anything the same. Other than having those boring old white feathers.

Rip Stalvey:

White feathers is not boring. Jeez.

Mandelyn Royal:

Hey, I used to get into patterns. I used to nerd out on lacing and. That stuff got complicated. I much prefer to focus on eggs, meat, more birds. It's easier than tracking feathers.

Rip Stalvey:

I believe you've got a PowerPoint. You want to,

Mandelyn Royal:

oh yeah. We can start looking at pictures.

Rip Stalvey:

Pictures are worth a thousand words.

Mandelyn Royal:

So these are two point of lay pellets as an example, and that bird on the left, she looks nice and square and boxy in her frame. In between the legs there, you can see you could probably fit your fist through there. The bird on the right, longer legged, those legs are tighter together and this bird is not gonna have that underbody width that really presents well in a shrink bag. She has a different body capacity. She's probably not gonna be as productive of a layer as the bird on the left. So once they come of age like this and I start looking at'em and. Like that. I keep the bird on the left and the bird on the right. Nobody gets there. She goes with dumplings. That is the best use for a bird like that is to go ahead and pair her with dumplings. Right. From your angle, like what does that kind of structure tell you about either of those birds?

Rip Stalvey:

When I see a bird that's wide like that has that open side to side measurement on the tail. That tells me that bird's probably got pretty good body capacity and sometimes you can get widths without the lengths, but usually if you got a nice wide body on a bird like that, they're gonna have really decent body lengths. Because if you don't have good body capacity, you really don't have a chicken. That's the bottom line, and it tells me a lot about the structure of a bird. And to some extent a little bit about the size because the size or weight of a bird should be coming from the bird's type. Do they have good type and the fleshing, not just the overall size of the bird. We can breed tall birds, big birds, overweight birds, but that's not the same as what we really want, at least to my way of thinking. When I see those narrow birds, I think of a bird that is lacking in body capacity, is probably not gonna be the best layer in the world that may have problems laying eggs because she is. So now that, that's a pretty narrow bird there on the right.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now, if you were looking at her from the top, she had top width. She just didn't get the bottom with. Yeah, so you have to look at it from all angles too, because they might trick you from one view.

Rip Stalvey:

I'd like to see a bird. When you look at the body types comparing the two, and that's why I like to look at'em from the rear end. So I'm glad you got these two pictures here. But you can see that bird on the left that her width, body width carries down from her shoulders all the way to the bottom. But if you look at the bird on the right, more of a almost a wedge shape to that body.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah,

Rip Stalvey:

which is what you don't want.

Mandelyn Royal:

I think everything I have for pictures after this is a carcass. So any more questions on the feathered birds?

Jeff Matocks:

So before we move on, Thomas Jeffrey wanted to put this out and would like to see what the things are you're speaking of look like in practice. Does anybody have links to what this looks like or looks like in practice? Particularly evaluating them by handling them. So can you go into more rip and mandolin? Can you go into more detail when you're holding the bird a little bit more, what you're looking for? You talked about the heft, right? But, and a lot of people don't know how to measure the depth or the, the chest capacity or the body capacity of a bird. And there are measurements, right? RIP that you use like from the keel bone. Back to the vent. I think there's some kind of measurement there I hear people talk about,

Rip Stalvey:

rather than a set measurement. I tend to refer back to the individual breed standards because it's gonna be different for every breed. Rhode Island reds are supposed to have a brick shaped body fairly long, not quite as wide as it is long, but where Mandolins bird, I equate them more to. The Plymouth Rock style body, they're a little bit shorter. They're blocky birds. As far as resource I, I would check out Mandolins YouTube channel, Arcadian Orchard, orchard, as well as her Facebook page because she does these sorts of things on a regular basis, and so I know she's got some videos talking about this, and she writes about it extensively. So that's probably the resource I would send them to on that.

Jeff Matocks:

I realize the standard, and now we're talking, that kind of goes more into the show side of things. I, I felt like Thomas was like, when selecting this dual purpose breed, what we're doing tonight, what are we, what kind of capacities are we looking for? So even if it was me, it's like I, I know we're gonna go into carcasses. Here next. What is a wide back?'cause mandolin said the hen on the right in this picture or this pull on the right. In this picture to me looks like a leghorn, right? What I grew up, what I knew as a white leghorn, that's what the shape of a leghorn would be. And primarily only really good for egg production was a kid growing up. If you wanted the most eggs, you got white leghorns. But is there, I don't know, is there any tips or tricks or anything we can help him? I realize there's probably not any links out there that are valuable to help somebody evaluate. There's

Rip Stalvey:

really not right? There's really not, I have not seen,

Jeff Matocks:

I

Rip Stalvey:

haven't ran into one either. There's a good book. It's outer print, but you can get, you can download A PDF copy on archive.org, A-R-C-H-I-V e.org, and the book is called Call of the Hen, and it will help you learn how to use your hands to evaluate birds. We've also got a video on our Poultry Keepers 360 YouTube channel that I did that talks about. How do you use your hands to do that? But getting back to the breed standard, to some extent it's about show, but to a bigger extent, birds were created for a particular person, a particular purpose, right? And the standard was written to help breed birds that would fulfill that purpose. And I know Don Schrider has said several times, if you breed a bird. To the written standard, then you have a bird that is capable of meeting the purpose for which it was developed. I remember some of the old Rhode Island reds that I have seen that were pretty good layers, and they had reasonably good amount of meat on the carcass, but they were also bred to that written standard.

Mandelyn Royal:

To me, when I read through the standard, it sounds like the blueprints to build a bird, and when you go. Feature by feature, like for the American breast proposed standard.'cause they're not in the A PA yet. They've got quite a bit of work ahead of them before they come anywhere near being in the book. But there's terms, like when it talks about the front, it says broad. Okay, what does broad mean? To me it's about finding the birds within the group you're looking at and comparing them to each other and finding those that go, that make you say, oh yeah. Okay. So that's broad. That's a broad bird. Okay. And then use that bird to compare the other birds to that one, and then do that trait by trait. And you start to almost form like a puzzle in your mind of what these birds should be. And then I always rely on peer against peer, which helps keep me in line because if I look at birds that I had three years ago and I'm basing it off of what they were, then I'm not gonna progress much further. If I look at commercial hybrids and try to aim for that too harshly, I'm gonna get away from. The standard, and I'm gonna end up in that dangerous territory of too much, too fast, which is a whole other topic.'cause you can over breed'em, you can totally get somewhere where you shouldn't be. And then you start seeing complications from that. Like the standard's there to keep you balanced.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. Mm-hmm. And oh, you hit a key word there. Balanced. You want the bird to look balanced and width and height and depths of body and lengths of back. If you've got one that looks. One of those areas that looks out of balance with the rest of'em, then your bird's gonna be off. And Rob posted a question or a comment said it makes him wonder how many standards work against production qualities. Rob? In all honestly, the reason our standard Red Birds are not productive is they have not been selected for that within, since about 1940 or 1950. Up until that point, standard Bread birds were the commercial breeds. There were no hybrids at that point. So to me, if a bird is bred properly and you're selecting for production qualities, you're gonna have a good productive bird. But it's something that you have to select for. It's an ongoing process. It's a real battle. Production is something that is easy to lose and can be hard to get back once you've lost it. But Mandy, I think is a ca Prime example of. She didn't have it when she got her American breasts in her birds. But she's worked for a, a number of years and her birds, I've seen pictures, her birds look nothing now compared to what they look like when she started with them.

Mandelyn Royal:

It's amazing what you can do in three generations and even more incredible once you get to generation five. If you really put your head down and focus on what it is you want these birds to be doing and what you want'em to look like and. You do that with a ruthless sense of, I never go into a season thinking I'm gonna retain 100 pellets because I want 100 layers. I'm gonna filter and sort and select my way through all the way until they're a year old, and then I'm gonna see how many I have left that I actually feel like hatching from. And then I don't have a hundred birds anymore by the time I go through every little thing. From how they grew, what they handled, like what their flushing was like, what their growth rate was like. And then when did they come into Active Lay? Did they make weight when they came into Active Lay? What was the rate of Lay? How long did they stay in Active Lay? And then after all that, then I look at it and go, well, is it pretty

Rip Stalvey:

well? And that's the way you should be doing it. That's the way you should be doing it. And the exhibition folks have given a lot of reads of black eye because that's not what they're doing. They're going for appearance first and with little to no consideration about production qualities and production qualities are one thing that is highly heritable. When you get it going and you're looking at things, and maybe we'll do a show on this here before too much longer, things like persistency. How many days in a row does a bird lay an egg? Pause. Yeah. Some

Mandelyn Royal:

of'em will start off strong.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. Pause. How many days do they take between laying? It's much better to have a bird that'll lay four, five or six eggs in a row and then pause for a day. I've had some birds over the years that would lay two eggs in a row and paused for five days.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, me too. They never, never gonna get, they were.

Rip Stalvey:

You'll never get good production outta those. So persistency, pause and the overall production numbers is what you want to look at. Back in the mid to late twenties, they had a program going through the USDA called record of production, and they were encouraging farmers to upgrade their flocks there on the farm by using production bred mails. You may, if you look up ROP record of production, you can find some information on it. And that did more to set the trend to better production in our birds. And then we kinda lost track of doing that, but, which is a shame. You got some, you do have some carcass pictures, don't you, man? Yeah, you do.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh yeah. I, I wanted to get a sneak peek at the next one up so I can formulate a thought about it.

Rip Stalvey:

Go for it.

Mandelyn Royal:

So this is one of the things where I use my hands for evaluations on the living bird feeling for integrity of the keel. So on the left side is a caved in chest, and when the bird is covered in feathers, you might catch a visual if you know what you're looking for, but you might miss it totally. And you always wanna do your selection from far away. Get a look at'em, watch'em. But then you need to get your hands on'em so that you don't miss stuff like that because that caved in chest has a direct correlation to no meat past that divot on the keel, the breast meat fizzles out. It doesn't stay flushy for the whole length of the keel. It affects the internal capacity and the body capacity because it's pinched up on the back end. That's a keel with problems just from being caved in like that. So on the right side, that keel comes. Nice and level, straight up and down the bird. The flushing is true all the way down, and this is stuff that I was working with early, like this might be from year two or three when I was sorting out the good from the bad because the birds I started with, they had problems, but I saw promise in'em because of how many of'em were decently needy, but I had to. Sort and select through a lot of super junky traits of structure, flaws like that. I saw keel problems all over the place. Some were squiggly, some were, I had to straighten out a lot.

Rip Stalvey:

And Mandy, you bring up a good point that when you're working to improve birds, it's not an overnight process. And you have to pick your battles of what you're gonna work with. If you try, particularly if you're just starting out, if you try to work on correcting more than one thing, two, if you're lucky, if you think you're gonna correct it all in in one year or two years or three years, that's not gonna happen. You'll make better process if you go slower working on one thing at a time.

Mandelyn Royal:

I started on Kehl because that's where. The table presentation is no one's looking at the back of a bird.

Rip Stalvey:

True.

Mandelyn Royal:

Once you have'em in a shrink bag and you can't market birds, excuse me, you can't market carcasses that don't look right. There's no market for'em except the dog food market.

Rip Stalvey:

Oh, many old time breeders would tell you that the best poultry breeders eat a lot of their own chickens. Not only do you. Is that part of the cuing process? But it lets you know what's going on with the bodies on your birds.

Jeff Matocks:

Yeah. It tells you. How much do you bri, how much do you think is that is actually still going on out there? The breeders that I've talked to and with I, with all the junk that I see people feeding to their birds. Yeah, I wouldn't want to eat'em. Cat food. Fish food. And it seems like everybody still has a supply of antibiotics somehow. Even though I know it's gotta be expired by now,

Rip Stalvey:

outlaws Jeff. There's not as much as there was back in the twenties and thirties. Okay. There's more than there was within the last five or 10 years I think.

Jeff Matocks:

So it's coming up again.

Rip Stalvey:

It's coming up again. People are seeing the need, uh, and I get asked these questions on a regular basis. How do I improve production? How do I improve production? And. Golly, one of the best things you can do is go back and read some of these old historic poultry books, because it's all spelled out in there what they did, the steps they went through, and how they sorted their birds to make these improvements. Yeah, and then when the hybrid birds came along, that became the poultry to raise, and so then the standard bred birds were kept alive, only because folks like to show'em. But again, they lost faith in working on their production abilities.

Jeff Matocks:

I just, I think, I don't know why people don't eat'em, but I agree there's a revived interest in dual purpose birds. Yes. Especially with the homesteading movement picking up steam, but like the folks I would've met at Ohio Nationals, for the most part, those people are not eating their calls. No, they're not putting birds on the table. And it seems like we've gotten away from that. I'm not that much younger than you rip, but yeah, I remember grandma had a flock of chickens and you never know who was gonna, who had the unlucky day. But

Mandelyn Royal:

for my great grandmother, it was the first RO that looked at her sideways on Sunday afternoon,

Rip Stalvey:

or the one that was easiest to catch.

Mandelyn Royal:

She'd go out with a pan of feed, she totally cheated. She'd throw down some feed and stand there and talk to'em, and then just reach down, grab one right by the neck and. That was it.

Jeff Matocks:

That's how you're supposed to do it. That's right.

Mandelyn Royal:

She had that swing down to an art. She didn't even need a knife or a cone. She didn't need any equipment. She didn't see that she was only four foot 11, so she just had to walk out there and not reach too far down to the ground being as short as she was.

Alex:

This concludes part one of Selecting Dual Purpose Poultry. Be sure and listen to part two next week. We appreciate you joining us for this information packed episode, if you found it helpful, please share it with a poultry friend so they can enjoy it too. We'll be back with the conclusion of this topic next Tuesday. Until we do, keep observing and enjoying your flock. So long everybody.

People on this episode

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John Gunterman

Co-host
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Mandelyn Royal

Co-host
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Rip Stalvey

Co-host