Sex Linked Traits with Gina from Wrather Farms

Join Jennifer Bryant of Bryant's Roost and Carey Blackmon of Double R Farms in this engaging episode featuring Gina from Wrather Farms, as they delve into the fascinating world of sex-linked traits in poultry. Discover how to identify and utilize these genetic traits to create auto-sexing breeds, simplifying chick sexing and enhancing flock management. Whether you're a seasoned poultry enthusiast or a curious newcomer, this discussion provides valuable insights into poultry genetics and breeding strategies. Tune in to enhance your understanding of sex-linked traits and their practical applications in poultry keeping.

Transcript

Jennifer: 0:00

Welcome, Poultry Nerds. We have one of our special guests back, Gina from Wrather Farms. We have had her on before, but we have a new topic we're going to talk about today. Welcome, Gina. Hey, guys. Nice to have you back again. Thank you. Always awesome to be here.

Judith: 0:22

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Jennifer: 0:44

So we actually got a request. Carey, you got it somehow. You sent it to me. Somebody wanted information on auto sexing and sex sling.

Carey: 0:55

Yup.

Jennifer: 0:56

Yup. And I was like, racked my brains for three days and I'm like, Oh, I can't. I don't know. What do I do? Who do I call? And I was like, Tina knows. Tina to the rescue. Heck

Gina: 1:11

yeah. Time for me to talk about it.

Jennifer: 1:14

You have let's first define some stuff. There's a big difference between auto sexing and sex linked. And I think people sometimes don't understand that and they use those terms interchangeably.

Gina: 1:28

Yeah, so an autosexing breed is just that. It is a breed that breeds true generation after generation and you're able to tell the sex of the chicks at hatch based on their color and their traits. A sex link is a cross of two breeds and the differences in the chick color at hatch only happen in that first generation. If you breed them forward the ability to sex the chicks is not repeatable.

Jennifer: 2:02

Okay, so let's talk about autosexing first. So there are no autosexing variations in Coturnix quail that we know of. Nobody has found any yet. So that kind of rules that part out. So you have autosexing chickens. So let's list off some varieties of chickens that people will be familiar with. That would be autosexing.

Gina: 2:27

The most common autosexing breeds are the breeds that are based on the wild type color. Your black breasted, red, creel plus barring, which makes the creel. And then in the case of the Bielefelder, they are cuckoo red partridge. You also have your clemeth rocks, you're also known as a barred rock, and your dominiques to an extent. So they are barred breeds on black. But they are autosexing in the, to the extent that you can pretty well look at their headspots, and the males will have a larger white headspot than the females will.

Jennifer: 3:10

Now I don't have them, not familiar with them, but aren't leg bars autosexing too?

Gina: 3:15

They are. They would fall in the creel category. They're built on wild type, so if it's a brown bird with barring, It's going to be wild type. If it's a black bird with barring, then it's going to be built on extended black.

Jennifer: 3:29

Anything else, any other breeds you can think of off the top of your head?

Gina: 3:34

Some say that the Welsimer is auto sexing, but they're not really auto sexing by definition. There are breeders that have selected those traits in their line that makes them easier to identify male versus female, but they are not. It's the classical auto sexing breed.

Jennifer: 3:56

Not to divert off of our topic too terribly much because we never do that, but isn't Wellsummer's one of those breeds that people tend to double mate the serious breeders?

Gina: 4:09

I don't know. I'm not a real hip on the Wellsummer as a breed.

Jennifer: 4:15

Me either. It's just one of those little tidbits in the back of my head. I'm thinking. I read that somewhere, and so maybe that might create what you're talking about.

Gina: 4:24

Yeah, the more I learn about different breeds, the more I learn that there are a lot of breeds that probably should be bred in male and female lines. It wouldn't surprise me.

Jennifer: 4:36

Okay, so the ones that you have are the Bielefelders. Yes, that are autosexing. Okay. So let's talk about in turkeys I'm not up on turkey genetics, but to my knowledge, I don't think that you can autosex turkeys At least I've never heard of it. Have you?

Gina: 4:56

No.

Jennifer: 4:57

No.Carey, you're being really quiet Do you know of any turkeys that can be autosexed?

Carey: 5:04

I'm sitting here I'm thinking about all the different ones that I've seen And I, I can't,

Gina: 5:14

If it was possible, Frank Reese would have mentioned it in that seminar back in Knoxville, right? Yes,

Carey: 5:20

that is true. Because there was a lot of stuff that was talked about at that seminar and that was not.

Gina: 5:28

Yeah. The autosexing kind of depends on, you'll notice, it depends on the barring gene. And if you have a true barring gene in quail, and I've seen you talk about, your barred quail. If you have a true barring gene and it lives on the Z chromosome, then, maybe An autosexing variety of quail would be possible. You'd have to pair it with the right color base, perhaps. Food for thought.

Jennifer: 5:58

That would be a Brie project. I'll just send her some and she can figure it out. Yeah. Okay, as far as ducks are concerned, I have Welsh Harlequins and they are actually autosexing. I don't raise any other kind of ducks. I've never have, so I'm sure there probably is something else out there. But I just know about them and their auto sexing and, I don't,

Carey: 6:22

one of them's face or their beak is different or something like that.

Jennifer: 6:27

Yeah, their beaks are different beaks. Their bills are different at hatch. They're different colors.

Gina: 6:33

Yeah. And, I think the popularity of the auto sexing breed and the sex links, the more we get into this homesteading movement, the more important it is. And the more, the homesteaders cater to the people that live in town that are slowly being allowed chickens, they have restrictions on, we can absolutely cannot take any chance on any roosters and that is. I dare say half of my customer base are people that tell me I have an HOA. I can't have a rooster and they want to support local. They don't want to order from a hatchery. They don't want to ship their chicks. They don't want to buy from the big box store. And so the sex link and the auto sexing breeds are amazing.

Jennifer: 7:25

So would you agree with me when I said that to keep the auto sexing traits. Clean and crisp going forward in your generations. You have to carefully select for it.

Gina: 7:41

Of course. You're a steward of any breed that you have. One of the things that any auto sexing breed is going to pride itself on is the ability to sex at hatch. I know when I first got into the Bielefelder, there were, there was a lot of talk about only selecting the clearly marked chicks. And the reality is those clearly marked chicks are also going to grow up to be your chicks with the best barring expression. Whether you pick the chick at hatch or you pick the chick in adulthood. You're invariably going to select for the best sparring.

Jennifer: 8:20

So I do the same thing with the ducks. I just got my ducks local. I don't show them. They're not like anybody's line or anything. And so I've just been working for a few years to clean them up. And obviously they have some issues in there. So I get orange bills, which is not, that's an automatic cull out of a breeding program. If it's sex, if it hatch, if the bills aren't the right color, or you can't automatically tell what the sex is right then, they actually get moved to a different brooder as just a pet quality, or I call them skeeter eaters, because I just put them out on the pond to eat mosquitoes. But they're not ever going to be part of a breeding program because you've got to select for that trait to go forward.

Gina: 9:10

So do you wing band your Skeeter Eaters so you don't pull them into the breeding flock later? Girl,

Jennifer: 9:16

you just, have you ever tried to band a duck? Negative.

Carey: 9:21

No. So I would like to watch Jennifer try to band a duck.

Jennifer: 9:25

So it's totally different. Those little webbed feet, they can shrink them up smaller than the diameter of their leg and you spend all that time cuddling them and holding them and putting that little zip tie on their leg and you set them down and they just look at you and they pull that little leg up and watch it just fall off and you just want to smack

Gina: 9:47

them. Oh my, what about wing bands? Can you wing band them?

Jennifer: 9:52

I'm not comfortable wingbanding right at hatch. I usually wait like a week or two. I can't see that close and I don't know sometimes this might just be a waste of a wingband, if they don't make it kind of thing. So all I do is I just do different brooders. I mean you got to break them up anyway, so why not just break them up that way. And then you can band them, when they're ready to be mixed back up. Yeah. But I didn't even sell any last year. I just turned them all out to be skeeter eaters. There's 69 of them out there running around right now.

Gina: 10:27

Good Lord. That's a lot of poop.

Jennifer: 10:29

David counted them about a week ago and he's we have. 69 ducks. I was like, don't count them. We don't count ducks around here.

Gina: 10:40

I'm impressed that he could count that many moving. Not that he could count that high. That's not what I meant.

Carey: 10:48

But I'm just wondering, like, how David was that bored? Was he that, was he really curious, like, how many ducks am I feeding?

Jennifer: 11:00

Or, why do we have

Carey: 11:02

no mosquitoes?

Jennifer: 11:04

I will tell you that we do not have mosquitoes here anymore. They've eaten them all. All right, so see we digressed a little bit again. Okay, so let's go back to our thing. So let's talk about sex linked because that seems to be the thing that hatcheries and like what you were talking about the suburban homesteaders, they're really after, so people are really maximizing their profits on these sex linked chickens. So let's talk about how that happens.

Gina: 11:33

Sure. All right, chicken genetics. So female chickens have autosomes. What is it? 39 autosome pairs of autosomes, autosomal chromosomes, and then they have the sex chromosomes. So females have a Z sex chromosome and a W. sex chromosome, males have a pair of Z chromosomes. So there are some genes that you will only find on the Z chromosome. And therefore, the female can only carry or possess one copy. All right? That female lays an egg. She's either going to pass her Z chromosome or her W chromosome. Every time there's 50 50 shop. If she passes her Z chromosome, that embryo and that egg will develop into a male because it has no choice, but to get. A Z from the father. So ZZ is male. ZW is female. Alright, so the genetic information that she possesses on that Z chromosome, she will only pass to her male offspring. She cannot pass it to her female offspring. So let's say you have a barred rock, okay? She has the barring gene. She only has one copy because the barring gene lives on the Z chromosome. She's going to pass that barring gene to her sons. And only her sons, she cannot pass it to her daughters. So let's say we take that barred rock and we breed her to a. Rhode Island red. All right, her sons are going to hatch with a little spot on top of their head, which indicates that they have the barring gene and that they are male, her daughters will not have a spot on their head, and they will be females, they will be black sex links, and everybody's seen the term, everybody's seen the bin of them at tractor supply. So that is how a black sex link is made, is a barred hen to any non barred rooster.

Jennifer: 13:54

And they're called sex linked because the gene that we're manipulating to get what we want is on the sex linked gene.

Gina: 14:05

Gene is linked to the sex of the chick. Okay,

Carey: 14:11

so if you have a barred hen and a non barred rooster, the dot will be roosters. Correct.

Jennifer: 14:27

Now you do this at your farm, and you do zombies, right?

Gina: 14:32

I do. So zombies are a whole nother ball of wax. Of course! Yeah, zombies are a little more complicated. Most people use a white leghorn hen. under an I am Somani cock for their zombies. And the reason why that works so well is because you have two sex linked genes at play here. Your chicks are basically double sex linked. The white leghorn typically Careys the barring gene, and you wouldn't know that because they're white, and it's hidden under all that white. The white lagrine also Careys another sex linked gene called the inhibitor of dermal melanin. And this gene doesn't really play into any other sex linked hybrid, except when you breed it to an I. M. simani, whose identity depends on their dermal melanin being, black, fully expressed. And so when you take this hen and she only passes her inhibitor of dermal melanin, And the barring gene, which has a dermal melanin inhibiting action of its own, a very huge one. You end up with little males that have pale colored legs, combs, and waddles, and beaks. You end up with females with dark legs, dark columns and beaks. It would appear that the females inherit the fibromelanism trait, and that the males don't, but that's not true. Those two sex linked genes that I mentioned almost completely obscure any hint of fibromyalgism in most of the male chicks.

Jennifer: 16:31

Okay, so that was pretty complicated sounding. So let me back up for just a second. Is the Iamsamani over the white leggern, is that the only way to make a zombie or is there different ways?

Gina: 16:44

There are different, you can use other dominant white breeds for your hint. But it always has to be an I am Somani cock over a white breed. Let me okay. Scratch that from the record. Okay. Because there are other ways to do it. Yes, there are other ways to create a zombie. Most of the dominant white breeds are yellow skinned or white skinned breeds that carry this inhibitor of dermal melanin. The one other breed that immediately comes to mind that you can't use are the white breasts. White breasts are usually dominant white. They do not have the barring gene But the dominant white is key to creating a zombie. You can create a zombie with the breasts, but it will not be sex linked. Your males and your females will both have dark legs, combs, and beaks, and you cannot tell them as sex linked.

Jennifer: 17:56

Ooh, you just said something I did not know. So just because it's zombie doesn't mean it's a female or sex linked, right? See, for some reason I was thinking zombies were automatically sex linked.

Gina: 18:11

Most of them are, and there are some people that are using the breasts to create, because you gotta admit, a male zombie with that nice dark comb, waddles, dark legs, is impressive. So a lot of people are using the breasts to create zombies that are not sex links and cannot be sexed at hatch, but produce some really cool looking males.

Jennifer: 18:37

Okay, so for our listeners, they just need to understand that just because the word zombie is used doesn't mean they're automatically sexable at hatch.

Gina: 18:48

Correct.

Jennifer: 18:49

Gotcha. So I had seen somebody post that she was going to start buying zombie eggs and sell and hatch them and then sell the chicks as sexed chicks and wanted to know my, or people's opinions. It was a Facebook post and I said I would not do that because that would be staking your reputation on what the Breeder was doing and yeah, and you don't know So you just answered that question for me in the back of my mind.

Gina: 19:21

Yeah, it totally depends on what they're using for their hens and it also depends a great deal on the quality of the I am Samani cock that they're using over that because I have used some I am Samani that Produce some really clear male versus female and I've used some cocks that I need to keep these chicks around for a week and watch them before I can be confident on sex.

Jennifer: 19:50

So again, scrupulous breeding pays off,

Carey: 19:55

correct? There's a lot of people that, so when they look online they see The prices of I am Somalis and they think, Oh, I got a black bird. It's worth a hundred bucks. But since we talked last time on the podcast about that bird not just my it's one of the snobby breeds. I'll say that because if you don't have the right sheen in the feathering and everything is completely dark, if there's any red or anything like that. That bird's a cold, but people are still wanting a hundred bucks for it. And I'm like, no, you don't know what you have.

Jennifer: 20:48

Oh my gosh. I have to tell y'all something. So since she was on the show last time I didn't know. I didn't know they weren't supposed to have a sheen until Gina told us last time. And so now every time somebody posts, they have these expensive birds. I'm like looking at them going. I wouldn't use that one as my example picture because there's red in the comb or, there's something going on there. I would have never known. Why does that bird

Carey: 21:12

have a white beak? Yellow. That ain't a 25 check.

Gina: 21:19

But I paid a thousand dollars for this breeding pair and I have to sell all the offspring I possibly can. They're purebred, I promise.

Carey: 21:28

I hate to say this, I really do, because it's pretty unfortunate as it relates to poultry as a whole, but there's a lot of people out there getting screwed. Yeah. Because they don't know.

Gina: 21:43

Yeah not just

Carey: 21:45

the scammers. It's People say, oh, this one of my favorites. This is an exhibition Rhode Island red. That thing ain't mahogany color Yeah, that's a red sex link. That's been cleaned up a little bit like

Jennifer: 22:06

Let's talk about what the hatcheries are doing because they're making production birds With the sex link traits, which I mean, I'm all for I mean everybody there's a purpose for everything We're not making money We are not what did I get called out yesterday? Dragging out something. So comets and red stars and women, queens, Isa browns.

Gina: 22:31

Yeah. Yeah, I think there's what, 18 or 20 of them now, right? Oodles and oodles. And, you've, again, you've got red sex links, which come under a variety of names. And then you've got your black sex links, which somehow have. Escaped all of the different names, everybody wants to put their own stamp on their red sex link. So cackle uses a Rhode Island white that isn't a Rhode Island white. It's like the Rhode Island red debacle. The Rhode Island white is what we use for our zombies. from Cackle. They're a single comb, and a true Rhode Island White is a rose comb. They resemble nothing like a Rhode Island Red. Which, the true Rhode Island White should have the same body type as a Rhode Island Red. But anyway, they use, Cackle uses their own version of a Rhode Island White for their Cinnamon Queens. Hoover Hatchery, what's Hoover Hatchery's red sex sling? There's a red

Jennifer: 23:33

star. Somebody has a red star.

Gina: 23:35

That may be theirs. Yeah. The golden comet is, some other hatcheries. They, they trademark all these names, but they're basically the same bird. They're high production. Red cross to a high production silver base and silver is another one of those sex linked genes. The red sex links are typically a Rhode Island red or a New Hampshire cross to something carrying the silver gene. And again, that silver hen Passes her silver gene only to her sons and the little white chicks They'll pluck out of the hatching basket as males and they'll ship out the little red chicks as females

Jennifer: 24:20

and they have a purpose I mean you and I both sell a lot of female chicks and I mean we end up eating the roosters and I know you that you do too we can handle the extra roosters if people don't want them. So we're not dogging on the people buying just the pullets. That's not what we're doing now. These are production breeds. And so they're meant to lay a large amount of eggs in the 1st, what? 2 years. And they serve a purpose but buyers need to understand they, they don't reproduce true at all. They're just going to be hybrid backyard mixes if you breed them.

Gina: 25:03

Yeah. And they can be bred forward. If you're a barnyard mix and you want to let that, red sex link sit on eggs and hatch them or you want to shove her eggs under your silky. Go for it. Yeah, all you can do is create a heartier chicken.

Jennifer: 25:19

Yeah. Oh, yeah, hybrids are best.

Gina: 25:21

Yeah

Jennifer: 25:23

But I just don't want I want to make sure people understand that if you took an isobrown to an isobrown You're not gonna get another isobrown

Gina: 25:31

Absolutely. The one that I get asked about the most is I shouldn't say the most but frequently are the sapphire gems do you breed Sapphire gems? I'm looking for somebody that breeds Sapphire gems. And if anybody tells you that they can sell you a Sapphire gem and they didn't buy it and resell it directly from Hoover Hatchery, they're not selling you a Sapphire gem. Sapphire gem is another sex link. Mystic Morans. Yep. There's another sex link. You're, your local homesteader is not going to be able to reproduce those birds. Know what you're buying before you decide, you want a specific chicken breed and find out, is it even a breed or is it a first generation hybrid?

Jennifer: 26:21

Yes some of the best things I ever sold were they, they weren't sex link. This is just another digression in our conversation. But for hybrid, it was a coaching over in Orpington. They were just beautiful birds and they had the best personalities from both breeds. Nice. People ate them up. I don't do it. I might do it this year. I've thought about doing it again, but Hybrids are fantastic. They're very healthy. Yes. All right. So let's divert over to quail for just a minute I know that you don't do quail, but since we're talking about the sex linked I have a cage set up to do auto sexing at hatch and the chicks are Egyptian hens and the phenotype of pharaoh is the male, meaning the brown ones are males, the gold ones are females. And you do that by manipulating the sex linked genes. You put an Egyptian rooster over pharaoh hens and they're sexable at hatch. But only those birds you can't do it those birds and do it again. It always has to be clean Egyptian Pharaoh to be able to do that

Gina: 27:38

Interesting.

Jennifer: 27:39

Yep. And so that's one of my biggest sellers is those Egyptian hen chicks because people only want hens Sure, even in quail.

Gina: 27:51

And are those the people that pretty much want quail only for their eggs? Yes. Okay.

Jennifer: 27:57

Yeah. When I ship out the chicks, most of those are going to be to people who just want a handful in their backyard, they live in a subdivision or something, want the kids to be able to collect eggs. Something along those lines. They're not prepared to cull or to eat them or deal with extra roosters. And so it fits a need for them. Which I'm all for, if it teaches the kids to collect eggs and where they come from, I'm all for it.

Gina: 28:27

Oh, for sure.

Jennifer: 28:28

Yeah, I can handle the extra roosters. It's not a big deal. Nice. Yeah.

Gina: 28:35

Have we covered

Jennifer: 28:36

everything?

Gina: 28:36

Just about. I think, there's two other sex linked genes that we didn't touch on.

Carey: 28:42

Okay.

Gina: 28:43

And that would be the chocolate gene. Which a lot of people don't ever think about. I don't. The chocolate gene is a sex linked recessive. And in order for a sex linked recessive, or any recessive gene to show up, typically, you have to have both copies. A copy of the mother and the father. So for a rooster to be chocolate. He had to have received a chocolate gene from both mom and dad, but females having only one copy of that Z chromosome will express a sex link recessive when they have one copy. We call that hemizygous instead of homozygous because they only have one copy and they don't have the matching Z chromosome. So if you take a chocolate rooster and you breed him to just about anything, his, he's going to pass his chocolate gene 100 percent of the time. But if he passes it to his sons and his sons only get one copy of that recessive gene. They won't be chocolate. If you breed him and he produces a female, that female will be chocolate every time. That's an interesting sex link cross. Breed him to anything and if it comes out chocolate, you have a girl.

Jennifer: 30:21

Nifty!

Gina: 30:22

Yeah. And then the other one Carey, you would be familiar with this one, the Slow Feathering Gene. And Rhode Island Reds have the Slow Feathering Gene, and you'll notice on breeds that are that have the Slow Feathering Gene, the males feather in extremely slow, because it's a sex linked gene, and they have a double dose. It's a incomplete dominant gene. So the girls will be slow feathering, but they won't be as slow of feathering as the boys who get two copies. And that's another

Carey: 31:03

Yeah, that's why you have to, people are like, Oh, I only need hens, but I want Rhode Island Reds. You're gonna have to wait until they're about two or three weeks old.

Gina: 31:11

Yep. Yep. Once those little shoulder feathers start popping out that's my tell on my line. The little girls always pop those shoulder feathers out first.

Jennifer: 31:24

Interesting. Orpington chicks the girls pop out their tail feathers first.

Gina: 31:31

Yeah, that is another way that you know, you see the little graphics Everybody likes to pass around on the internet about how you wing sex chicks. Oh my gosh. I hate that thing I know Yeah, it pretty much doesn't work except on specific crosses You have to cross a slow feathering breed to a fast feathering breed And only then will you end up with what slow feathering males and fast feathering females.

Jennifer: 32:01

I'm sure both of you know that graphic is part of a longer article, and I've read the whole article and every time somebody posted I'd post a link to it. I wish you'd read the whole article. Never

Carey: 32:15

And like also I, another one that I've seen is people will be like. If you let them hang by their feet, if they try to get up, that's a roo, if it doesn't, then that's a hen.

Gina: 32:30

Just stop it.

Carey: 32:31

And I'm like, Hey, that may work sometimes. But sometimes you just have a hand that don't wanna be upside down. Hey, it works 50%

Gina: 32:41

of the time.

Jennifer: 32:43

I had somebody come get Pulse one time. My kids

Carey: 32:46

do too.

Jennifer: 32:47

I had somebody come get Pulse one time and they put'em in their hand and let their legs Dan dangle. And they said if their feet come up, it's a boy. And if they stayed dangling, it was a girl.

Gina: 32:59

Yeah. I had a fellow show up one time and was. He said you let me pick out my chicks. And I said okay. He's cause I don't want any roosters and I'm really good at picking out. And I was like, okay. Yeah. He was cocky. And so he looked off in that bin of chicks and he's. Studied him for a minute and he got real quiet and he said I don't know on these. They all look like So he picked him out and I heard from about six weeks later and he said, you know That dozen chicks I got from you. I got to pull it.

Jennifer: 33:43

Oh My gosh

Carey: 33:45

Yeah. It kills me because the ones that do that are the ones that spend hours on Google and YouTube and have no chickens.

Gina: 33:58

Yeah.

Carey: 33:59

They have a handful.

Gina: 34:01

He was apparently

Carey: 34:02

a

Gina: 34:03

lifelong poultryman.

Carey: 34:07

Okay. Sometimes you might want to see what the breeder has to say because if they've been working with the birds for a long time they may know a thing or two about them.

Jennifer: 34:19

I think we covered all of our topics today, autosexing and sex linked, and I think we tried to touch on all the different species that we usually talk about. So we hope that helped everybody understand the difference and make good decisions for what you want this spring. Because it's almost chick day time. It is

Gina: 34:41

chick day

Jennifer: 34:41

time. I know you're sweating already. It's

Gina: 34:45

on.

Jennifer: 34:46

Yep. It's here already, quickly.

Carey: 34:51

I've had people messaging me for the last three weeks. Hey, do you have any American breasts for sale? I'm like, do I have them? Yes. Get back with me in March or April and you have better luck. Why so long? Why so long? I have a waiting list.

Gina: 35:15

Yeah. And part of that waiting list is

Jennifer: 35:17

me. Exactly. We hatched for ourselves first. Yeah. Yep. And that tests fertility at the same time too. Yes. Yeah, it serves a lot of purposes. We're going to have you back so we can talk about how breeders set up in the spring to handle everything.

Gina: 35:34

Yeah, that'd be good.

Jennifer: 35:35

Maybe give everybody an idea of what we do behind the scenes. There's a lot of adventure. You mean there's

Carey: 35:42

something two breeding? You don't have just like

Gina: 35:46

a giant pen full of chickens and you just collect eggs every day?

Jennifer: 35:54

In our white frilly dresses?

Gina: 35:56

Yeah, with the little pockets

Jennifer: 35:58

for each individual egg.

Carey: 36:00

I wear a lab coat. Hey,

Jennifer: 36:02

I have an egg apron. It's hanging duly in my incubation room where it has been since I got it. That's

Gina: 36:09

one of my friends. Sent me a picture of the one that she was getting the other day and she was like, do you think there's a market for these? Could I make them? And I said, I just about guarantee you that everyone that owns one used it one time and hung it up. And you just proved me right.

Jennifer: 36:26

You know what happened? I put the eggs in it. I had a sharpie up in the front pocket and I'm marking all the eggs and I was like, this is going to be cool, from all the different pens and everything. And then I squatted down to pick one up and crunched all of the ones that hit my lap. Yep. Yeah, that was it. I was done. Went back to my egg trays I carry around, alright, let's wrap it up for today. Thank you Gina for coming back. Tell everybody where they can find you if they want to come see ya.

Gina: 36:56

Yeah, we are Wrather Farms ColumbiaTN on Facebook. We are WratherFarms. com on the internet. We raise Rhode Island Reds, Splash Americana, Bielefelder Easter Eggers. I Ayem Cemani, Fibromelanistic Easter Eggers, Zombies, Black Copper Marans, and Olive Eggers. You got your hands

Carey: 37:23

full.

Gina: 37:24

Yes, I

Jennifer: 37:25

do. That was a lot.

Carey: 37:28

Yeah.

Jennifer: 37:29

Alright, Poultry Nerds, we'll see you guys later.

Carey: 37:33

Take care. Mhm.