Heritage Poultry Flock Breeding and Management, Part 1

Heritage poultry breeding isn’t nostalgia—it’s a disciplined, data-driven path to better birds and better outcomes. In Part 1 of this deep-dive, Frank Reese, Jr. joins Carey Blackmon and Jeff Mattocks to unpack what “heritage/standard-bred” really means, how USDA recognizes certified standard-bred labels, and why the American Poultry Association’s Standard matters on the farm and in the marketplace. We cover picking your purpose (meat, eggs, or both), matching breeds and lines to goals, and the real-world economics of selling eggs, processing birds, and staying solvent. 

You’ll hear practical guidance on breed/line selection (New Hampshires, Barred Plymouth Rocks, Delawares, Wyandottes, Buckeyes, Jersey Giants, Brahmas), realistic timelines and dress weights for frying vs. roasting birds, why roosters drive egg-production genetics in their daughters, and how to source from local breeders who select for utility—not just feathers. We also dig into maintaining a line without “chasing crosses,” culling with purpose, and building a small, sustainable program that pays its own way.

Key takeaways
• Define & defend “standard-bred/heritage” using APA standards and accepted definitions
• Start with outcomes: eggs to offset feed vs. meat sales vs. both
• Dual-purpose classics that still perform—and what to ask breeders about their selection goals
• Processing economics 101: when small-scale works (and when to pivot)
• Linebreeding, selection, and culling: how to actually improve year over year
• Part 2 drops next Tuesday—subscribe so you don’t miss the conclusion

Listen to this episode at www.thepoultrykeeperspodcast.com

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Transcript

Alex: 0:00

Welcome to another episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode Carey Blackmon and Jeff Mattocks talk with Frank Reese, Jr to get his thoughts on Heritage Poultry Flock Breeding and Management. Now let's join them for a great learning experience.

Carey Blackmon: 0:26

Hello Poultry Keepers. We are here tonight with Frank Reese. We have gotten, we posted some stuff online looking for some suggestions on what type stuff people wanted to learn about, and we had a ton of folks that were looking for information about breeding heritage birds, whether it be. How to set your barn up, how to line, breed and continue what you needed to do and all of that. And I couldn't think of anybody else better than Frank Reese to tell us about it. And when I reached out to him and he said, sure. I was like, he's in a really good mood'cause he just retired. So I'm super glad to have you on tonight.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 1:18

Thank you.

Carey Blackmon: 1:20

Couple of the questions that I had. First off, tell us a little bit about you and the livestock conserv. Not that the my mind just went blank. The conservancy that you have. I'm a member and I can't even think of the name.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 1:40

Good Shepherd Conservancy.

Carey Blackmon: 1:42

That's it. Good Shepherd Conservancy. I apologize for that.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 1:46

That's fine. I've been writing poultry all my life. I'm just in Kansas alone where I live. I'm fourth generation. I was born into this and grandparents and great grandparents. Betty had poultry. It was just part of living on a farm. We had cattle, hogs, everything and everybody, all the kids, all of us were in four H and everything. And I was one of the younger kids. So I got sent to the barn and to take care of the chickens. And so I proceeded to tell my dad, I said him. So that was my first exposure, but. Of, of trying to improve and get better and better birds. And of course joined the American Poultry Association very young. And but then also the important part is I began to meet back then, every little town in the country, a half tree, and were being supplied eggs by breeders. So I began to meet as many of the breeders. That I could, and that's where I began to learn what it took to improve poultry and to maintain. And back then, because it was just a different world. You wanted, New Hampshire knew who had the best, if you wanted Bar Rocks. She knew who had the best. If you wanted Jersey Giants, you knew where to go. Because back then there was people that dedicated their lives to those particular breeds and varieties, and not only did those chickens or turkeys or whatever rent the shows, more importantly, they also wanted the market. They were still good egg layers. There were still decent meat producers, and so just like every other animal on the farm, they had to work to survive. The animals had to provide an income to the farm. Yep. So the conservancy was established, oh, I don't know. The older I get, the, what seems like yesterday was 10 years ago the conservancy itself and building the building has been a dream of mine to try to do education and research, and it's been a very long haul to make it happen, and it's finally beginning to happen. This year, in fact, the very day I retired from the hospital work, I got a message saying that we had been given the grant that we've been hunting for to begin to do research. And so I'm working with two universities and the Land Institute here in Kansas and our conservative begin to do research. We're gonna start with egg production. In what heritage or what I call standard bread. Standard bread breeds of chickens. To begin to, develop part of it is gonna be two or three different studies, but one of'em is going to be using some of the new grains that they're coming out with to try to get away from the, and few things. So anyway, that's about.

Speaker: 5:09

That's absolutely awesome. This

Frank Reese, Jr.: 5:10

is needs to be done at all your land grant universities, they don't do it anymore because there's no money. All your Lang Bresse universities, and I'm not saying this is bad or anything, they get their money and research from the big guys, whether it be Tyson or Purdue or Cargill or whoever paying those universities to produce students to work for the major corporations. There's not a lot of money in backyard chickens.

Carey Blackmon: 5:41

That's very true. So with that, what makes a breed heritage or standard? When you said that you refer to it as standard. That's the way I've always been told to refer to'em as well, because it's standard bread. Not a lot of people want to use the marketing term heritage. But it's standard poultry.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 6:05

Yeah. And that's what it is. The bad thing about using the word heritage is it has no backing, has nothing behind it, no organization or history that's, that can come in and labeled that as a heritage. I was at the meeting. 15 years ago or 20 years ago, whatever.'cause I've also been a member of the Livestock Conservancy almost since its founding. And we had a meeting in Virginia Tech pertaining to turkeys. It was all about turkeys. And that's my main thing. And it always has been. That's why they brought me in and they were calling, they started calling them heritage turkeys and I. I begged them for two days not to do that, but they did it anyway. So it became a huge marketing thing. But with the help now of the Livestock Conservancy, we have actually, we have written definitions. Of what a heritage is and to call a chicken or a Turkey heritage. It must be a known breed that existed prior to 1950 and has been recognized by the American Poultry Association as a pure bred chicken. So that cuts out a lot of these more modern things that have come about. So heritage should be something that is from out of the standards, out of the APA, which has the ability and the past history to identify certain breeds. And varieties. That also comes with the standard weight and size and shape and conformation and utility and everything. So when I proceeded to start selling my turkeys, it was, I wanted A-U-S-D-A label that stated, that this was a bronze or gansett or bourbon, red or whatever, Turkey. So it took me almost. A couple of years and some lawyers working, but I was, now my turkeys are labeled certified standard bread, so I was able to get it passed the USDA. So now the USDA and the government has actually accepted are definition of what you, we would call heritage. So if someone's going to market them as heritage and get a label. From the USDA that identifies the meat in the package as heritage USDA has accepted our definition.

Carey Blackmon: 8:56

That's awesome. So what does it take to set all that up to start a heritage flock? To be able to do what you're doing, obviously on a smaller scale'cause and I've seen pictures of your yard and your farm where you have your hundreds and hundreds of turkeys, which is absolutely amazing.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 9:20

Yeah, we'll do 10,000 turkeys this year.

Carey Blackmon: 9:24

Holy mess for

Frank Reese, Jr.: 9:24

Thanksgiving.

Carey Blackmon: 9:26

That's a lot.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 9:26

And I sold 26,000 fertile Turkey eggs. Incredible. I tell people it all depends on what it is you want the bird to do. Do you want it to feed you and your family? Do you want it to feed you and a few neighbors? Do you want the bird to produce enough meat or eggs to pay for its own feed? And are they just pets? It's like you keep a dog and you spend all this money on the dog'cause you love the dog and you just want the dog. You have to decide ahead of time what it is you want the bird to do. I've always told people if you wanna do it and not go broke, you have two choices. You stay very small. You raise the chickens or the turkeys that you want, you dress'em yourself and in most states, at least I know here in Kansas or in most states that I know of, you can hand dress them and sell'em directly to friends and neighbors. And the majority of the costs of marketing poultry. For me is the feeds course number one, and then number two is processing. Because if you got just a hundred chickens and you're gonna have'em processed, and if you pay$10 a bird to have them processed and packaged and inspected, you're already in the hole. Yeah. Unless you can get people to pay you a fortune for those birds. So if you sit down and put the numbers to it, you know it, it makes it really difficult. But if you can process the birds yourself and sell'em directly, and if you can sell'em for three or$4 a pound, you should at least do all right. Now what I've always done all these years is, especially with chickens,'cause chickens are far more difficult than turkeys to market as as meat birds. If you get a really good dual production breed, a breed of chicken that is capable of laying 180 200 eggs a year. And you got those eggs, you ha hatch'em yourself. You don't go out and buy the chicks, but you hatch'em yourself and you raise'em and feed'em and you process'em yourself. The eggs you sell should pretty well pay for all the feed and your profit's gonna be off your dress birds, but you have to pick a breed or variety of standard bread chicken that. Can meet that demand. And you've got to, you gotta get your hands on quality. Heritage chickens that will meet that requirement. Some of the hatcheries that are around today are beginning to realize that more and more people are wanting better and better quality when it comes to their dual production. I know the dress weight and the standard weight of newham, of Delawares, of barred rocks of above Orpington's. Of Rhode Island whites and of the Cornish game. These are all varieties that we have raised in great numbers for a number of years, and I've done all the breeding and selecting and improving in the birds. And so you've got to know exactly what they're capable of. So you gotta, if you. If you can't get your hands on some type of quality standard bread chickens if you're going to try to breed and improve them yourself, you can do that, but you better plan on at least a good five to 10 years of breeding and selecting to get to where you probably wanna go and. I always tell people you, we'll start with Bard Rocks. You can buy Bard Rocks from 10 different places and they will all be different. And so whatever you get a Rhode Island red, a Newham, a Bard rock, whatever it is no better than the breeder behind it. When people tell me Bard Rocks will do this and this. That's not true. The, those barred rocks are no better than what the breeder behind them selected that particular variety to do. If they selected for pure egg production, you're probably gonna get a skinny barred rock. If they selected for heavy meat production, you're probably gonna have really poor egg production. You've got, you've gotta know whatever it is you choose you've gotta go to that source that you got your birds from and ask them what they were selected for. What they were capable for.

Carey Blackmon: 14:34

That makes sense. What, so let's say somebody was gonna start and they wanted to. Pick out a bird that meets that, what are some standard breed birds that will consistently lay those two, that 200 egg per year? What are some of those that you would choose?

Frank Reese, Jr.: 14:58

New hams, they're excellent and they have dressed weight. If you get a really good old standard new ham, they'll be ready to process in 12, 14 weeks. They'll dress out three and a half, four pounds, and those hens will lay 182 a hundred eggs a year if you manage'em well. Barbed rocks, they'll do the same thing. But their growth rate is more like 15, 16 weeks before they get to what we consider marketable weight. You've gotta, the reason why weight is important is that whatever breed of chicken you have, you, the most money you invest in that chicken is gonna be in the first five weeks. The incubation, the hatching, and the feed, and so on to, to get'em started. In that last half of their life, especially the last three or four weeks of their life they're really putting on the muscle mass and so on. So you gotta know at what point now if you don't have quality, Bard Rocks or quality new hams and you kill'em at 16 weeks, they may only weigh two and a half pounds,

Speaker: 16:15

right?

Frank Reese, Jr.: 16:16

Because they haven't been selected for that standard weight. Another one's the Delaware. There's some excellent Delawares. There's a few breeders that are doing very well with Buckeyes. The wine dots. Some of the wine dots are, there's some excellent wine dots out there. You just have to traditionally, historically, if you go back and look at what was being raised through the twenties and thirties and forties, and up until in the fifties and all this disappeared, 90% of the broiler chickens being raised in the United States were Bard Plymouth Rocks. They were king. By the 1940s, they slowly got replaced by the Newham and the Newham started taking over and the Bar Rock started losing ground very quickly. And by the 1960s they were all gone. But these were chickens that were being raised on multiple farms, not in big buildings, but multiple farms and have a history of doing very well at doing dual what we would, I would call dual production. Now there's some varieties, like the jersey Black Giant that was developed that is a fairly decent egg layer. Maybe 160, 180 eggs a year, but they'll lay a really large egg. But they were never considered a good frying chicken. It's like the braa. The Brahmas used to be raised, the light bras used to be raised in large numbers. For the market, but the Brahmas and the Giants were raised for a roasting market and to be killed at 20, 24 weeks and to dress out five, five and a half, six pounds. You have to decide where, what is your market, where do you wanna sell'em, and how you're gonna dress'em. And that'll determine somewhat on what breed you pick.

Carey Blackmon: 18:14

So let's say that I wanted a bird that was a good general purpose bird that I could fry, or that I could grill, but would also give me a good number of eggs. What would you recommend someone to go with

Frank Reese, Jr.: 18:33

if they're gonna fry'em or broil'em? Okay, so you're talking spring chickens, you're talking dressing about three, three and a half pounds. The problem we've got a little bit is for the last 50 years, the consumer has gotten used to that abnormal dwarf little chicken in the grocery store. That three and a half, four pound fryer that they see at the grocery store that was killed when it was six weeks old. That is what they have considered as normal. And when they look at my chickens, which have no dwarf gene in'em. My chickens have longer keel bones, longer legs, and bigger wings. That's a normal chicken. It hadn't. It hasn't been dwarfed through the dwarf gene, so you've got that to face. Also, if you're if you look at all of the old cookbooks back prior to the 1950 fryer, chickens like my mother fried. All weighed two and a half, three pounds. So you know that's part of what you've gotta face a little bit. But if you want something that's somewhat competitive, not too far off from what they're probably used to seeing at their local grocery store, probably the Newham is gonna be your best. And I worked really hard to develop a really good line of Delaware. That's very, what is a Delaware? A Delaware chicken is developed by crossing Bard Rocks in Newham. That's how you get a Delaware. But if you cross Delawares, you can breed Delaware. Delaware and keep getting that Columbia pattern. That's what it is. It's a Columbia pattern with barring in the black. But the reason we did is we have a lot of people. One of a white feathered bird. It's a little easier for them to clean and to dress than a dark feathered bird. So the Delaware, I think, has done pretty well, but the thing about it is you're gonna have to develop'em yourself, and you're gonna have to learn how to maintain'em.

Carey Blackmon: 20:44

Gotcha.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 20:44

And we have lots and lots of growers in this country who have very few breeders, very few people that are breeding quality birds.

Carey Blackmon: 20:56

That is an, that is such a true statement. There's a lot of people that will hatch out birds and hatch out birds. They don't even know what coaling is or what to look for. Yeah.

Frank Reese, Jr.: 21:09

It's like I tell people, how do you walk? Of course I'm talking more turkeys, but how do you walk into a flock of 5,000 barred rocks or 5,000 bronze turkeys and pick out the top three? And why? What is it you're looking for? Like when we get ready to this fall to do our 8,000 turkeys for Thanksgiving, it would be my job to pick out the top 100 Toms, because I know that those Toms that I pick would determine next year and the next year. And the next year the quality of my turkeys. And I gotta pick out, a thousand hens also. So you gotta know what you're doing. Or when you walk into a flock of barred rocks or Delaware's a new hyn which ones do you send to market and which ones do you keep? And so then you've gotta decide. Then you've got to learn. What qualities affect what things? You know if you have poor egg production, A lot of people focus on the hens, but it's actually the rooster that carries the genetics genes to improve egg production. So you have to know the lineage of your roosters. Was that rooster's mom a good egg layer?'cause he's gonna pass that on to his daughters. So it's getting to know your flock, know your roosters, know their lineage and where they came from, and that'll give you some idea of, when you ask that question, which I appreciate. If I wanted 800 eggs a year what breed would I suggest? To me it's more than just saying newham. It's saying who's Newham? What line of Newham are you getting? That was actually gonna be my next question. They have Far Rocks or newham or whatever. The first thing I always ask them, I say, whose do you have? Because that will tell me real fast if they've got a mess or if they need to start over or whatever. Because some of these varieties and lines that are being sold that are out there, mercy, 10 years, you couldn't improve them because a lot of'em have leg or blood in them. The industry has crossed them over and put barred feathers on a little chicken that's built like a legrend. They call it a barred rock'cause it's got barred feathers,

Carey Blackmon: 23:44

right? And they want that egg laying capacity that the RINs have. So Frank, where does somebody fill?

Frank Reese, Jr.: 23:51

Yeah. And so they're excellent egg layers, you can't feed a bared rock chicken for 16 weeks and have a dress out at two pounds and go anywhere. You're gonna go in the home. You could eat it, but you'll have a heck of a time selling it.

Carey Blackmon: 24:07

That makes sense. You can eat

Frank Reese, Jr.: 24:08

anything. You can eat a 10-year-old rooster. You just gotta know how to cook it.

Carey Blackmon: 24:13

So that brings me to two questions. Number one, where would somebody go? Let's say they, they figured out what they want to do and you recommend the new hams. Where would I go to get the best new amps to start my project or my homestead with?

Frank Reese, Jr.: 24:33

That's such a hard question. The, I would think Good Shepherd Poultry Farms is we, if you go to a chicken show today Most of the new hams that are being shown, I wouldn't drag home. Because they're now selecting for big, fancy feathers. And like I was taught as a kid, you don't eat the feathers, right? And so that makes it really difficult. And then also they imported a bunch of new ham from Germany a number of years ago and a lot of these new s that they have had chose now look, nothing like the new hands, that I had 60 years ago as a kid. And so it gets really difficult. Sometimes when people ask me,'cause I get those, that question a lot. My first thing I'll ask them is where do you live? And I can often find somebody close by. Because there are a few people that still got good New Hampshire, Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey in Nebraska down Texas. There's some decent ones back in California and Idaho. I, it's, I always tell people try to buy from a local breeder, if at all possible. Spend time talking to that breeder, find out what it is that they're doing, and what issues and problems they have with their particular line. I am from the old school. I think a chicken that wins on the farm, wins on the market should win. And the show ring as well. That's the way I was taught. There shouldn't be any difference between a show chicken and a farm chicken, but some of that is getting, I'm sure when I was a kid, all the people, men and women who taught me, I'm sure I drove them crazy with 50 million questions, but that's how you learn. Yeah. Also if you keep a small flock, not keep the amount of birds that I keep, but if you're keeping a small flock, then and if you're new at what you're doing, don't go buying chickens from other people and bring'em in. Go try. If you find a line that you like. Like when I was a kid, gold Miller had the blessed Best Jersey, black Jersey Giants in the nation. So every year, for as long as that woman was alive, I bought eggs from her and hatched them. I never bought from anybody else. I proud that the line of Jersey giants I had were pure Golden Miller line, and I knew exactly what it was to look like, what they were capable of doing. But a lot of people, now that she's gone, I have to keep a really large number to be able to maintain the line. And if you're going to get a line. After you've done it for 10 or 15 years and you really know your birds and you know that breed, you know that conformation, you know what they're capable of doing. You could go and get something outside of your line and bring'em in, but just be the really. Intelligent and calling and getting rid of the birds, that will not improve your flock.

Alex: 28:05

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. Be sure to listen next Tuesday when we bring you the conclusion of this information packed session on heritage poultry.