Poultry Keepers Podcast

Heritage Poultry Flock Breeding and Management, Part 2

• Jeff Mattocks, Carey Blackmon, Frank Reese, Jr. • Season 3 • Episode 132

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In Part 2 of our Heritage Poultry Flock Breeding & Management series, master breeder Frank Reese, Jr. dives into the practical realities of keeping true utility strains going—how many hens you need to maintain genetic diversity, when to share bloodlines with trusted partners, and how hens vs. roosters influence different traits (hens driving body size and skeletal/health; roosters shaping egg production and plumage pattern). We also talk through the business side: define your market before you build, know your state/federal rules, budget for testing and processing, and price realistically.

Frank contrasts heritage strains with modern industrial hybrids (and why extreme selection for only meat or only eggs harms longevity and fertility), then gets delightfully hands-on about how to cook heritage birds—why older cookbooks (pre-1950) and pressure-frying/low-and-slow methods matter for flavor and tenderness. If you’re sourcing stock, he highlights Good Shepherd partners (NJ/PA, NE) and offers timeless advice: pick a breed you love, study the APA Standard, and learn from dedicated breed clubs so you can breed forward without “chasing crosses.” 

You can listen to this episode at www.thepoultrykeeperspodcast.com

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Alex:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. In this episode Jeff Mattocks, Carey Blackmon, and Frank Reese, Jr. finish up their discussion on breeding and managing heritage poultry flocks.So let's get right to it. Now I've been able to do it with under 600, like Barred Rocks between four and 600 hens. And I've been able to maintain and keep the line going and keep enough genetic diversity because there was no place for me to go get anything new. And mine are the old Ralph Sturgeon bloodline that goes way back. Turkeys you need to keep around 400, 500 Hens. Now if you're not capable of doing that, then what would be nice is if you can share your bloodline with two or three or four other people. And then you guys share eggs and or share chicks, or maybe you go to your every year or two and he'll, they'll let you take a rooster and bring a rooster in if, but you gotta know what a rooster does to a flock, and you gotta know what a hen does to a flock. They don't both do the same thing. If you wanna improve meat quality. Pay attention to your hands. The size of your hands will determine the size of your ros. You wanna improve egg production? Pay attention to your roosters. If you wanna improve collar or the pattern that your variety has, pay attention to your rooster. He's one that's gonna affect that. Overall skeletal structure and health is gonna come more from the hand. That's a big mistake a lot of people make with turkeys. Say my Toms are all dressing out 20 pounds and my hens are dressing out 10 pounds. And I said you need to get rid of the little bitty hen cause it's a Turkey hen that determines the size of your Toms. And you can breed great big old Toms. And if you breed'em on a little bit of hens, they're still gonna stay small'cause he's just carrying the genes of his mom.

Carey Blackmon:

Got it,

Speaker:

but, and when I was a kid. There, there was many breeders of barred rocks. There was many breeders of New Hampshires. There was many breeders of Delawares or Wyandottes or whatever. And we all basically had somewhat the same line and from the same background. And so we were able to share and share roosters or share eggs and that's how we were capable of keeping things going at that level. But a lot of that's gone today.

Carey Blackmon:

You got something you wanna ask Jeff? Go ahead. This makes sense.

Speaker:

If you're trying to do this and at least maybe break even. If not, try to make money. I periodically get calls from people who say. How can I do what you do? Or how can I make money at what you do? It's, if I knew 25 years ago when I started this national market, if I had any idea what it was gonna tell, I probably wouldn't have done it because it's been really difficult. It's fighting an uphill battle. Battle and, but now it's finally getting there and now there's, we have another farm back in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And so we have another farm, breeder farm up in Nebraska. It, I'm getting old, but it's finally happening and for the first time this year, finally we're going to do research and I'm getting some attention from, and other people.'cause because of what you guys are doing, you're bringing the awareness to this, but. If you don't do the work ahead of time, it's like I always tell people when they say they want to do what I do, I say, before you ever get a bird, before you ever build a chicken s figure out what it is you want to do. Find, if you wanna sell meat, if you want to sell eggs, go find out what your market is. But that market's capable of handling. Can you get, my friend back east, he can get twice as much for a dozen eggs as I can. My friend out in Idaho and California, they can get three times what I can get for a dozen eggs for eating eggs. So you have to determine that. And of course I have a big advantage because I raised thousands instead of just, 20 or 30, I could get my feed for probably a half or a third of what, if you go by feed a bag at the feed store, you're paying a lot of money for a 50 pound bag of feed. Or if you've gotta go and have your chickens processed at a small mom and pop processing plant, you're probably paying double what? I pay to have chickens or turkeys processed. I have to figure out, that's the other thing is be, not only find who is gonna buy your birds and where your mark is, or we could, what are your state laws and federal laws and regulations and, do I need state inspection? Federal inspections what is my rules and regulations for the state health inspectors and animal inspectors? And do I. Do I have to vaccinate or do I need to test my birds for Fluor and typhoid? Do I need to test for mg? And the list goes on and on. I spent a lot of money every year, just blood testing birds. And so thank goodness I really good vet, bless her heart, she's learned about Turkey diseases because it's not taught in that school as much anymore. And there's a lot to consider, but if you're just going to have a backyard, that's the simplest. If you're just gonna raise some quality meat, that's better for you.'cause we've done all the research on that already during the research on the difference between my bard rock meat and the new meat and the Cornish meat. And what you about the grocery store. You can avoid all of that. You can dress your own chickens and feed your family without all the inspections and everything else. But most people at least want something decent looking when they dress it out.

Jeff Mattocks:

Frankly, trying define

Speaker:

quality is really difficult.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. Frank, what do you think about the new kind of craze behind the American Bresse? What's, there's a lot of people chasing after the American Bresse chicken as the basically the new the Yeah.

Speaker:

French breeds.

Jeff Mattocks:

I don't know much

Speaker:

about'em.

Jeff Mattocks:

Okay.

Speaker:

From the dress birds I've looked seen they don't look any better than my new hands. They don't look any better than the, some of the Delawares I've seen. At least my New Hampshire. I've raised a lot of people also confuse, like Freedom Rangers are I'll get people who will tell me they have bar rocks or they tell me they have whatever, and I'll go and visit their farm. And they're not they're just. Mass produced Cornish white chickens, Cornish rocks that the industry has put Bard feathers on.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker:

They still grow in seven weeks. They just happen to have Bard feathers, totally incapable of natural reproduction. There was the La Val Rou. Which started in France and everything, of course, now that is owned by Tyson, they bought that label out and isn't a breed it's whatever. It's more of a way of raising that particular breed. Know they were doing the naked necks and all that. Now, part of the thing is that you can go to Tyson's website. And you can, there, you can pull up all these chickens that they have sale, and some of'em, they'll call them heritage. But they're all hybrids of some sort. None of them would ever meet the standards. They have been designed so you cannot reproduce'em. They will grow much faster than mine. The American breeze. They had to tell that they didn't get in trouble with France. I don't see, this. And people can raise whatever they want, the free country. In fact, I'm glad a lot of the people raise these other things because it makes a difference from what I have. To me the most important thing in reading poultry is what I was taught from the beginning, and that is to raise a balanced animal. And a balanced animal means that reproduction, muscle development and health and welfare are all imbalance. That you don't select one characteristic over another. If you select for massive meat production, you'll have no egg production and you'll have no fertility if you select for high egg production. If you select for a hand delay 320 eggs a year, she'll burn out in two years and you'll have no muscle mass. And both of those extremes, the high egg production or high meat production will affect the health and wellbeing of the animal. So it's very important to me that I still select for the wellbeing of the animal. And so that means you may get. Less eggs a year, or you may get, you may take you two months longer to get'em to market weight, but that animal was capable producing themselves, running, jumping, and flying. And you could take my chickens to any country in the world. They could reproduce themselves and feed that family without any intervention of man. And all these chickens that are being sold in the grocery store would disappear without some form of intervention. That they, like the modern industrial Turkey, can no longer naturally make. And the industrial broiler is almost getting there, where there it is gonna be really difficult for them to naturally mate, if they keep getting those legs shorter and that brass bro, broader and broader.

Jeff Mattocks:

It's funny that you bring that up because right now there's two universities studying using the human drug, Metformin for diabetes. Okay. To control and limit weight gain so they can extend.

Speaker:

I'm meeting in Arkansas probably, oh, 10 years ago where some of the growers were raising for one of the big corporations, said, what are you gonna do about the diabetes? This is nothing new. This is an issue that, necrotic enteritis is probably the biggest problem that they have, and that's a direct result of morbid obesity and rapid growth. But what happens is those little chicks are born with hyperthyroidism, and then about three weeks or four weeks into their development, the pancreas. Quits producing insulin. The, and then the chicken gets very fat. The industrial broiler is a perfect specimen for human research on human obesity and diabetes.'cause that's what they have.

Jeff Mattocks:

Now they're going the other way. They're gonna use metformin to control this, to extend the breeder flock longevity. Because they're tired of only Yeah.

Speaker:

If you only gotta raise them for 42 days, if you buy a chick fried. Colonel Sanders, that chicken was killed in 38 days, right?'cause they found out if you kill 36, 38 days, you can get 10 pieces in a bucket. The Cornish rocks that you buy at the grocery store are a little older. Maybe another week that, they can get a lot of them if they, if you can totally control their environment you can probably get the majority of them to market. The breeders are the problem,

Speaker 3:

right?

Speaker:

Keeping the breeders alive long enough, they have to put'em on a star and diet to keep it from getting morbidly obese because the fatter, the roosters good or the fatter the hens than the sperm count. Almost nothing. And they've got to do something and so the, the chickens then be, can begin to consume a lot of water because they're hungry. And so then there's a lot of diarrhea and, the problems go on and on. It's like Dr. Ed Best told me a long time ago from Penn State. He says, he said, what is sad is we have a poultry scientists today who truly believe that they can outsmart mother nature, that whatever. As they begin to produce more and more of these. More will be dwarf chickens. That whatever health issues they face, we can find a drug or a vaccine to fix it. And so eventually, mother Nature will eventually win. You can only push, Dr. Paul Siegel, the head geneticist at North Carolina said, he says, their genetic diversity is not infinite. There is a limit to which you can push these animals genetically. They've already cut the amount of genetic diversity in the gene pool in half from their ancestor. So that's another whole issue. You probably didn't, weren't calling to have me talk about that, but you're right. You know the Metformin's, the next step to try to control the diabetes.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, for the breeder flocks they're trying to get some longevity out of the breeder flock because they can only get, so many eggs out of those pulls or out of those hens, right? They can replace the roosters, right? So they'll replace the roosters three times in a breeding flock to keep, in that weight range. But they can't. Yep. They, they can't do that with those hens. And by the time they hit 40 weeks old, they can't get'em the, the egg production falls apart. Fact they quit laying. Yeah. So they're only getting about 20 weeks of layout of'em, which, and that, their breeders are lucky to hit 85% production. Not, they're never gonna hit the higher nineties,

Speaker:

the nickel and dime business.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. But they keep doing it.

Speaker:

And so I totally, I know a lot of you, I've had the heads of Purdue here at my farm. I've had the heads of Tyson, had the heads of Liberty Foods, super kind people. I, I've spoke in Washington at a meeting wonderful people. And I understand where they're coming from and what they, and I've learned a lot from them, is just not what I do.

Speaker 3:

I've

Speaker:

got hands out there that are 10, 12, 13 years old that are still lying.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yep. And you can do that and, but people don't understand it. Yeah, I can do

Speaker:

that.

Jeff Mattocks:

But unfortunately the American society, I can

Speaker:

understand it. It just doesn't fit into their system.

Jeff Mattocks:

The public thinks that our food is supposed to be cheap, right? And unfortunately, the US spends the least amount of their earned dollar, their income on food than any other nation in the world, okay? Of every dollar they earn

Speaker:

Turkey. I've got turkeys of pictures of turkeys being sold at a meat market in the 1930s, and they were 25 a pound, which sounds cheap, but minimum wage. My dad said at that time was 10 cents. But even in the fifties when turkeys got up to 40 nines. Minimum wage was 75 cents. Can you imagine people paying minimum wage per pound for a Turkey today?

Jeff Mattocks:

Wouldn't happen. But that's what you should be getting for your standard bread. Turkeys,

Speaker:

Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks:

Truthfully, in order for you to,

Speaker:

industry doesn't care about this anymore. No. They don't make any money off selling chickens or turkeys to grocery stores. That's not their market. That's more or less their giveaway.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. Money. It's all in the process.

Speaker:

Yes.

Jeff Mattocks:

We're the, they want further,

Speaker:

74% of all broiler meat being raised worldwide goes to the fast food industry.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. Chicken nuggets, chicken tenders, something like that. That's where

Speaker:

all the money is.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yep.

Speaker:

It's like turkeys. If you go to Subway or the sandwich shop or the delis and you buy Louis Rich Deli, smoked Turkey meat. And you're paying$5,$6 for a six ounce package. Take that times, ano, get it up to a pound, 16 ounces. Now all of a sudden, that Turkey that you bought at Thanksgiving that you paid 98 cents a pound now went up to 10,$12 a pound. So that's where all the money is.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. In

Speaker:

fact, for all Palm Turkeys being raised commercially are now sold. For value added cause they can get a 40 pound to in 19 weeks.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yep. It's crazy. It's crazy what they can do.

Speaker:

They did what they have to do. They're, it's brilliant. They're making money.

Jeff Mattocks:

They are. The average public doesn't know the difference. So we're getting close to our time. One question that, so if people wanted to get your Newham line, do you sell hatching eggs or do you sell chicks? So if somebody, if that New

Speaker:

Jersey, if they go to Good Shepherd website my partner Chad, he will sell Bard Rocks, Delawares and New Hampshire.

Jeff Mattocks:

Okay. And these are all being selected for the standard

Speaker:

year. I don't know if even, this is not the time of year to be buying checks now. I'm hatching a lot of checks right now, but I've got the facilities to do it all year round, but hatching right now for our research program. Plus I don't ship. It's just too, I'm getting too old. I don't want to deal with all that shipping. Why know Jed back in New Jersey or, where he's got all the Delaware, New Hampshire Bar Rocks? They all came from me. He's young and his wife is young and they're doing a really good and then Blake Bell up in Nebraska. Has got my bar rocks, my new hams. And he's also got, he's, there, he's got a number of really nice breeds that him and his wife are working on. They're a young couple, they just had a baby. And he's got a good eye for chickens and that's what it takes. Not everybody was born with that eye to be able to, walk into a flock and say, that's a good burden. That's a bad burden. If I put that hand with that rooster, this is what I'm gonna get.

Jeff Mattocks:

So if people want your genetics, they need to come visit you.

Speaker:

I'm sorry, what?

Jeff Mattocks:

So if people want your genetics, they need to come visit you in Kansas.

Speaker:

In the spring at this point? Not right now. Okay. All right. But we're probably gonna have a bunch of them for sale after research, but that'll be this time next year because the egg production research we're doing we plan we'll take nine to 10 months. And we'll start in April. So next December we'll probably have a bunch of barred rocks and I've got a really nice flock of Orpingtons too. Blake's trying to get me to do the Morans. He's got a nice flock of Morans up there. I know nothing about that breed. I know'em when I see'em at shows and so on, but I have no personal history of raising Morans. So I don't know what they're capable of doing.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, the Newham seems to be the winner or the Delaware from what I've seen.'cause you can get you can get pretty close to a four pound carcass on the cock rolls at 14 or 15 weeks. If under good management.

Speaker:

Lot times you can do them at 12.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah. Under good management, good feed and all that. You can, you don't have to wait forever. On the Newham, so the Delawares yeah,

Speaker:

but those would be the ones that, try to get you what you can. And if you like'em, once you get'em going, then make sure that you go back and get, don't go crossing'em up with everything. Not, I encourage people to get a copy of the standards. I encourage people to join the APA. It's the oldest agriculture organization in America. Read up about if you choose the new hamper, if you choose the Delaware or if you choose the road the, and white. That's another good breed. Learn about'em, research'em, and read the standards. Finding good Rhode Island whites is a little more difficult. Most of the one,'cause they're to be rose combed. And a lot of what I've seen coming out of hatcheries or single combed and about half the size they should be. You don't really want one out of a Hatcher Rhode Island White Club. They can do that too. You can search and go to the Rhode Island White Club and contact some of the people that are focusing on that breed. There's a Plymouth Rock Club is probably one of the oldest clubs in America. But just make sure you have and learn what they should look like, how they should be built. What should they weigh at 10 weeks? What should they at 16 weeks, what should their breeding weight be? A good Bard Rock Rooster should weigh nine, nine and a half pounds, and she, it does, it don't breed with him. It's like a good Jersey Giant rooster should weigh 1214 pounds. So you understand your breed and do the homework it takes to do that.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, the Jersey Giant takes too long to get there, though. You're not gonna put meat on the table in a hurry with a jersey giant, so

Speaker:

No, you won't. It'll be the best eat chicken you ever had.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yeah, that's a true statement. That's a true statement. But be they were my mom's

Speaker:

favorite.

Jeff Mattocks:

Really? Okay.

Speaker:

Yep.

Jeff Mattocks:

All right, Frank. She always

Speaker:

liked him because they dressed out five and a half, six pounds. Mom didn't care much for fried chicken. She liked roast chickens. And she could get two young Jersey giant roosters in a big Turkey roasting pan. And that was about oh, 12 pounds of chicken. And she said that was the best eating you ever had.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yep. It's a lost art to know how to cook those. There's not many people left that know how to. Amen. Yeah. So

Carey Blackmon:

is there anywhere that you know of that someone could get some recipes or do some research on how to prepare a heritage bird?

Speaker:

I think one of the important things is go to a books, or go to any of these book places or whatever, buy a cookbook printed prior to 1950 and follow what it tells you because the industrial, the chicken everybody eats today didn't exist 60 years ago. It's one real fast. One of the, my, my friend who's a chef wanted to fix Coco V and so he came and got a chicken from me and he fixed it and brought it back, and I said, this is awful. I says, I don't know what you did, but he'd gotten ju Martha Stewart's cookbook, but it was, she revised her cookbook into the sixties to meet the modern. Industrial chicken. I told him take that chicken back, put it back in the pot with all that stuff. Cook it for another three hours and bring it back. The jed him and his wife, because she's the chef and she's a graduate from culinary school and. She has mastered, she's worked hard to come up with lots. But if you can get a cookbook that was printed in the twenties or thirties and follow it, pay attention to those temperatures in that time it takes to cook'em. Now you can. Thing was to get fried chicken done back in the twenties and thirties and forties. You had pan fried, took bread, the chicken, put the lid on, steam it and break it down, and then bring it back up crisp again. His big secret is he learned how to pressure cook pressure fry. Because he started with Plymouth Rocks. He didn't have industrial broilers, and he cut the cooking time down in half by learning how to fry that chicken in a pressure cooker. So they did one of my chickens, and they say It's tough. And I said then you ruined it. You didn't know how to cook it. Or you didn't pay attention to what I told you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker:

Now, one of the things you can do is you can take that chicken, cut it up, put it in a pressure cooker, pressure it under about 60 pounds for about five minutes, turn it off, let it cool off, put it in the refrigerator, then take it back out and bread it and put it in a frying pan. And you'll have fried chicken as tender as you want in about 15 minutes. So there are ways of doing it.

Jeff Mattocks:

Yep. Okay. Either do either low and slow or you pre-cook it.

Speaker 3:

Yep.

Jeff Mattocks:

Pressure cook it, just like you said. And then as soon as it cools off, you can bread it and you just finish frying it to crisp it up. It's really already cooked, but yeah. So

Speaker:

it's been around for two or 300 years. Yep. And they didn't have this modern industrial chicken up until about in the early sixties. All those years before and all those hundreds of chickens, my ride and we ate every Sunday. They were barred rocks or we ate a lot of fried RINs. They were as good and tender. You just, people don't know how to cook anymore.

Carey Blackmon:

Yep, that's true too. If they're used to

Speaker:

eating, that's what everybody has today. That little chicken that you, that four pound chicken that you buy at the grocery store is only six weeks old when it was killed. So that's just a little baby bird, a whole bunch of flab and fat.

Jeff Mattocks:

Frank, we're at our time. We're at our time for the show anyway. One last, just give him, give them the most important advice for starting the adventure you're on. What's the best tip that you give?

Speaker:

What determine what your goal is, what is it you wanna do? And then pick a, and then pick a breed that just delights you. You just love it, watching it, and you'll put up with all kinds of things. If that Bard Rock pattern speaks to you, or if that Rhode Island Red Pattern speaks to you, or when you look through the standard book and you're just blown away by the beauty of the live drama. Then become the best light Bresse breeder that you can be become. And before you and master that, spend time studying, talk to other breeders, talk to people that have been at it for a long time. You can learn so much by doing that. And try to buy from individual breeders. If at all possible

Jeff Mattocks:

and get to know that person.

Speaker:

Probably no one. Probably

Jeff Mattocks:

not at the poultry show though, right?

Speaker:

It all depends on what the breed is, some of the breeds haven't been screwed up yet and some of them have, because they, a four foot tail on a leg and rooster is not gonna produce you any more. Eggs may be pretty in the cage, but it isn't gonna do nothing for that utility, for that egg production. Sometimes though, if, even if you get some of those hidden within the genes of that bird is its ancestor. And if you breed select, you can bring it back out again. I would say a lot of those shere birds are probably closer to their ancestor than what you're gonna get from a catalog.

Jeff Mattocks:

That's true.

Speaker:

Now, some of the really odd, not odd, that's not fair. The more. Unusual varieties like the Alaya or the crevices or the shemos or some of those breeds from the catalogs usually aren't too bad because they're so rare and they're so few of them. They can't they haven't messed them up. What they've messed up is what I call the historical American utility breeds the old working chickens of America. The Bard Rocks, the New Hands, the Delawares, the true American breeds the wand dots, and those are the ones that are screwed up and are really, and they need a lot of work. The ones that fed America for first a hundred years. But first of all, fall in love with the breed that you pick and just and also make sure you have a good clue of what you want that bird to do and what that bird is capable of doing. If you just want a bunch of eggs, then get whatever, buy the catalog. Bard Rocks and that have been selected for egg production. They're half the size, but they're not gonna be meat birds. No. And I'm all about preservation. I'm all about saving genetic diversity. And so that's, that was the main thing I have, about 25 years ago, I began to realize all the people that I knew that I got turkeys from my whole life were all dying and disappearing and along with them from all their birds. So I'm very proud that my bronze turkeys had been here on this farm in Kansas since 1917, and I'm working really hard. To save'em from extinction.'cause once they're gone forever. You can never bring'em back.

Carey Blackmon:

So Frank, we appreciate your time and we appreciate you coming on and telling us about what you've got going on and telling us about the heritage breeds. We certainly do appreciate it.

Speaker:

All right, thank you. If they have any questions then go to the website for Good Sheppard conservancy.

Jeff Mattocks:

All right. That sounds great. Have a nice evening.

Alex:

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. Be sure to listen to a new episode next Tuesday. Untill then, keep learning, keep improving, and keep enjoying the birds you love.

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John Gunterman

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