Bresse Chickens Explained | Breeding, Processing, Selection & Why We Prefer Them Over Cornish

Today we’re talking all about Bresse chickens and why they’ve become one of our favorite breeds for a self-sustaining flock.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why we prefer Bresse over Cornish in many situations
• Meat quality, tenderness, and ideal processing age
• How to select breeder birds for width, body shape, and table quality
• Egg size, egg selection, and incubation tips
• How to build a breeding program around your goals
• The difference between breeding for production versus breeding for show
• Why Bresse may be one of the best chickens for homesteaders who want both meat and eggs

If you’ve been wondering whether Bresse chickens are worth the hype, or you want a better long-term option for meat production on your farm, this episode is for you.

Bresse chickens, Bresse chicken breeding, Bresse meat birds, best meat chicken breed, Cornish vs Bresse, self sufficient chickens, dual purpose chickens, homestead poultry, backyard chickens, poultry breeding, meat bird selection, chicken processing, incubation, hatching eggs, sustainable poultry

Join Carey of Show Pro Farm Supply and Jennifer of Bryant's Roost as we delve into chickens and quail (mostly)  to help you enjoy your birds more and worry less. Backyard chicken keeping shouldnt be stressfull, let's get back to the simple days

Valley Hatchery is a proud sponsor of Poultry Nerds, find more at ValleyHatchery.com

Transcript

0:38

So yeah, we're here. Yeah. How is everybody? I hope they're doing good. And from what I see on the screen right here, we're gonna fix them to talk about breeding. One of my favorite meals. It's been a hot topic here and I thought, you know what? I'm having to walk through it with with David and the kids a little bit, and I'm gonna explain why in a minute. But I thought, you know what, let's just walk through it publicly and maybe follow my convo, convoluted trail of how I get to point. B from a It is, it's funny that you say that talking about dinner is a hot topic. Yeah. So I just made what did you make? If you don't know already? We live so rural, we cannot get good Chinese food and I am a really good cook and I can cook pretty much anything, but I'm still trying to master like our favorite Chinese dishes. And so tonight, or today leper, I guess I made honey, chicken and rice. And of course we made it from breast. I think we are finally out of all of the Cornish, out of the freezer. I'm gonna have to dig through the bottom of it a little bit and make sure, but if there's any, there it's freezer burned and it'll be dog food, but the breasts they won't mind. No. So we eat a lot of meat and I don't know from the first time I made breasts dinner or chicken dinner with breasts, I guess you should say. It was instantly like, why are we even doing Cornish and. People. And when I see people say online that they, they're stringy or they're tough or whatnot I don't understand unless they're, the only thing David and I can come up with is, you know how you go to the store and you buy the chicken boneless, skinless chicken breast that's in the little saran wrap. Thing and you can just take it out. And it's ready and you can cook it almost from frozen state. I don't know what they do to it to get it to that point, but you cannot do that with a breast. There's a difference. Cooking a heritage chicken and cooking, I guess a processed Cornish like that, but. I didn't do anything magical. This was just a half, we do ours half chickens in va vacuum seal and put'em in the freezer because he likes white meat and I like dark meat. And so that works pretty well. And I took it out yesterday and didn't make it last night. So we made it today and I just took it off the bone and. Chopped it up into bite-sized pieces and made the honey chicken and you could cut it with a fork, and it was just as tender as. It was just as tender as could be. I don't know what else you could ask. I say you can't really compare it to getting something at the, at a restaurant,'cause that don't happen. So if you go to a restaurant and you get say, I don't know, chicken tenders or something or chicken nuggets. Per se, then those are more processed. I think they use like some potato starch and some onion powder and stuff. They process it and then make it look like a chicken nugget again. I've seen tiktoks on that, but this was just straight up. I took the meat, chopped it up. Put it in the batter. Put it in some tallow. I think it was tallow. It could have been schmaltz. I looked at it in the refrigerator and I was like it's some kind of a fatten. It's the fat I'm going to use to fry this chicken. And I don't know, because some, like you never know what you have in your refrigerator. No. Because at your place it could be anything. Yeah. Kevin. So that's why when you said it, I think it was tallow, I'm like. It can be towel. What was it? It could be lard, it could be sch small, it could be all kinds of stuff. You're still here, so it wasn't bad. No, regardless it's fat and you have to have fat to fry something, and so I just put it in the batter that makes the, for the Chinese food, you know it's a batter and you put it in there and then you fry it, and then you put the honey sesame. Sauce on it. And some rice. I cooked rice in the instant pot in five minutes and that's what we had. And it was good. And David ate it all. So that tells me it was good. But what I'm getting at here is the meat. It was not like eating Orpington. Orpington would have some chewiness to it no matter what you did, because they're older. The breasts are like 17, 18, 19 weeks when you process them. So they're much more tender. And so maybe people are waiting too long to process'em. Yeah. And I see a lot of that in some of the groups, people talking about when should I process? But that's really a hard thing to say because you have to know your birds and you have to know what you're feeding them. Because if you're feeding them a ration that's specifically designed for that purpose, and you finish'em out over a two week period. Then, you could have a juicy, tender bird probably what up to at least 16, 18 weeks. So I have finished'em and I have not finished them. And to be honest, I can't tell a difference and it's really quite a pain to finish them with the milk and the oats and blah, blah, blah. And so I just. I just don't do it. The only thing, and don't hate me, but the only thing I do is I take'em off of your feed and put them on a blander feed and some corn. I was gonna say about a week before, I ain't upset about that because if I was finishing a bird, I would, I'd probably feed it a mixture of like cornmeal and something, or. I would run, Ooh. I would run corn, barley, and oats through the grinder. Mix it up because if it's the last two weeks, yes, you want your bird to eat good. And that's a good mix of just grains. But the hatchability and all that other stuff that comes along with really good feed, you're not really worried about. And so I would do that, man.'cause I, that's what I did the first time I processed the Turkey for Thanksgiving, and now people don't want to store bought Turkey. And for that sucker, like putting it on that diet. For a couple weeks, is all that changed about its life? Yeah. So if you've ever had grass finished beef and it was processed in the spring, you're gonna get an onion flavor to the meat. So we always process our beef in the fall or late summer. You got those onions growing in the pasture, you know exactly the natural weed ones. And so the breasts or Yeah, so your feed has all got all those good fishmeal things in there. And while I can't. Some people can't taste it. I can and so I'm afraid to leave them on it and Yeah. Be fishy. Yeah, I would. I wouldn't. Yeah. So I just put'em on a plain old off lock with a whole bunch of corn, cracked corn in it. The other thing that's probably gonna make people gasp is we don't pluck really. We just. We just batch cock'em and cut'em in half in order to vacuum seal'em. We don't eat the skin. It's just, if you're gonna go to the store and buy chicken, that's how you should process them. So if you buy a whole chicken and you roast it and you eat the skin, then by all means pluck it. But we don't, we like chopped chicken in veggies or. I don't know. We, we just don't eat the skin. I don't do rotisserie per se, or baked chickens and stuff like that. So that's just not how we cook. And so we just skin'em. And that extra finishing at the end is what puts the fat between the meat and the skin. And if I'm just skinning them anyway. Point doesn't really matter point. Exactly. Yeah. I mean I do have a pluck and we do use it for the turkeys and for the orpingtons and stuff, but that's different. You have a huge mother pluck. I do like that thing is married folks, just so you can get a visual of those blue 55 gallon drums. That's what that thing was made out of and it's got the pluckers fingers you know that you can buy to fix your pluck. Whoever made that thing spent some time, but that thing works great. I have used the hose pipe while you stuck birds in it a couple times and I like it. Since you have been here, Taylor replaced my pulley system under on the motor. Thing, that thing will throw a Turkey, 50 feet. I think you have to watch it so now you don't have to worry about that. Okay. Yes, it's a big fluer. You have to be really careful, but. Let's let's just talk about the processing for a second. So the, if you do decide to pluck, you put your water scalar, which we just use like a Turkey fry and scald at a hundred fifty five degrees, and it won't burn your fingers, like unless you're dainty or something, but you're not gonna be in there for very long. So just leave the feet on and you swish'em. In the S you gotta leave your feet on because gotta have Soper with Yes. You gotta down. So those are their dipper handles now. Yeah. And so you put'em in the scalar and you, what your goal is to plunge almost with them because you're trying to get the feathers really close to the skin wet. And that's what your aim is. You don't really care about the edge of the. Feathers, right? The, you want'em to come out of the skin. So that's what you're after. And I think people don't maybe get that done really well. And then when you put'em in the pluck or you you turn it on and then you take the feet and you go around in a circle and then you've got the hose in the other hand. And, and then you let go and it finishes it. So I would say in the s calder, maybe 20, 25 seconds max, and I've got videos of them being plucked in The longest one is 23 seconds. Yeah. If you got your, if you've got your alder as far as the temperature. It loosens those feathers up and it doesn't do, doesn't take long. With a Turkey, if you're only doing one or two once you let's see, cut things out. I'll say that and hang on for a little bit. The stress of that happening makes the feathers just. Let's let loose. So you start pulling real quick and you'll get all those pen feathers out and two minutes you're talking about turkeys, so that's a game bird. And when they are stressed. Live or dead. When they're stressed, they let the feathers go, right? So it's a really good opportune time to pull those hard feathers, like the flight feathers. But you can pretty much pick them bald. Before the flapping stops. Now breasts are not game birds, so that wouldn't work with them. No. But anyway, so that's rabbit hole number one. Yeah. Rabbit hole number one. Okay. So if you are going to try them, make sure you let them rest. Don't go out there and get one outta the yard and cook it for dinner today. You wanna rest'em? I would say three or four days. Now, one thing that you can do is you can rest'em at the front end or the back end. So say you put'em in a cooler today, bag'em tomorrow. So they're good, what, 36 hours or so before They're frozen, solid 48 hours. And then when you take'em out, rest'em again another day or two. So then you get three or four days of rest that adds up that way. And then, don't try to cook'em like a Cornish. At least not straight off the bat. If they've been rested for four or five days, you probably could. But yeah don't try to cook'em like a Cornish. It's not the same thing. No. And I can't really say anything else. They're just, I can't find a fault with them. I really didn't know. I didn't really have an expectation really when I got'em. I just wanted to try'em, and I'm in love with'em. Honestly, I'll never forget the first time I was there. And we were standing in the kitchen and you said, here, try this. I was like, oh, okay. And I was like, man, this is the best way I can describe it, is, how a really, like a good, real piece of fish, not something that you bought at a store. How it's got the flakes in it and the tenderness. That's how the breast is. Only it tastes like chicken and not like fish. Yeah. It's got a silky texture to it. Okay. So the best part about the breast though is that you don't have to keep buying them. Like every year, like the Cornish they lay eggs, you can incubate them, you can fry the eggs, like they're just a general all purpose chicken and they grow really quickly. Of course now I'm comparing them to my Orpingtons. Frozen molasses grows faster than my Orpington's, but. Yeah, the breast, the breasts do grow really quickly. So we operate here on quarters. We don't wanna be put'em in it in the freezer every like month or so. So we figure out how many we want per quarter, and. I raise enough here for at least three households, sometimes four. The kids, shop in the freezer when they come over. And so I try to figure out how many we're going through in a quarter and then that's how much I hatch off. And then we just all get together and clean out the pens, put'em in the freezer, divvy'em up, and. See you in a quarter, basically, right? Hey, you know what? It's good. I'm not gonna say clean fun because it makes a mess, but it's something that you can do as a family. And by God, if you only get to see'em once a quarter to, because they want to come grocery shopping at your house, at least it's worth it. Because, I would give my kid groceries to, to have a routine time where I could spend all day with'em. And, that's good. And if you can't do that many like at a time, then just do it like every 60 days or something. But there's no, it, you're a hundred percent in control. It's not like the Cornish where you can't do it in the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter, or you have to be home on a certain day or they're gonna start dropping dead. It doesn't work like that. The breasts just keep growing. So anyway, so let's talk about like how to get started with them. And of course there's different ways you could start with chicks or started birds or hatching eggs. But regardless, remember that you're just starting you're just getting your feet on the ground with them, and then you have to accumulate a quantity of them in order to essentially go shopping. To find the birds that you want to move forward, and then you're gonna eat the rest of them. So until you know the breasts, you're always going to be eating your coals. And I think there's a different mindset maybe than what people are expecting where they just go out there and the Cornish are all the people have it in their head that they're all uniform, but they're really not. If you've raised Cornish, they're really not uniform man. Ain't nothing uniform about them. Things are nasty. So you could get some that's four pounds and you can get some that's nine pounds at eight weeks. So the expectation that the Cornish would all be the same is unrealistic, and to get that uniformity straight off the bat with whatever you bring home is also unrealistic. And that is just true with any. I was gonna say that's true with any breed. Almost gonna say any species. Even if you were breeding dogs or something, you know it's gonna be the same. And the only way you're gonna know is if you have a relationship with the breeder and they specifically pick you out a pair or trio or five. For purposes. And that's only if their goals align with your goals. If y'all's goals ain't the same, then you're gonna have to get with yours.'cause like when I got'em. Yes, I wanted meat, eggs, but also wanted pretty, and I didn't have to be perfect. I just wanted'em to look good. Who wants ugly chickens walking around their yard? That's why I didn't want Cornish walking around the yard. They waddle anyway, they, they are different. And I've been enjoying working with'em for the last few years. So it's a, I've only had'em for a year and a half, but they turn over really quickly. And if you step back and really think about what you're doing with them, it's not a hard lesson to grasp on the breeding side of it. For example, with the orpingtons, you want them as. My Orpingtons, you want them as big as possible. So what we're spending time with on the first six to nine months is structure. And then they're going to start filling out on the breast is a little bit different. Yes, you want some structure, but we want them also filling out by 17, 18 weeks. So we don't want them spending a ton of time growing structure because we wanna be able to harvest what we need at the 17, 18 week mark. So if you harvested a. 17 week old Orpington, you probably would get more meat off of a quail. I was gonna say you would've a chicken sandwich instead of a meal. Don't that, it's all bone. You'd have some good bone broth. But you're not gonna get really far. So just keep that in mind. Whatever you get started with, think of it as an investment in quantity. And then you are just going to feed your incubating and hatching habit addiction like crazy so that you can then select from all of those. The actual breeders that you want, because those chickens will have been raised in your environment with your feed. Yep. The way you are gonna take care of'em, and that is a huge, I don't know. What am I to say? And you may not do that may not be the first, when you hatch out all you can hatch out and you got a yard full of birds, you're going to make some groups and pick some stuff out. And, when you give a, like when you have a plan and you're looking for something. You, you can't start at the beginning or start at the end and work your way back. You gotta start at the beginning and work your way forward. So you know, the first time you're gonna look for birds that you like the way they did everything better than the ones you started with. And then, you know those, you'll put in a breeding pen and you'll have some really good chicken. Yeah, and then you get to be like, Ooh, let me hatch out everything I can and do it again. And if you find something that grows up to be better than what's in your second generation pen or your foundation pen, then they get replaced. And you have cocoa van. So you know, it's, you're trying to better it, but you have to know your goals, people always say, what kind of chicken, what kind of chickens should I get? I don't know, there's like a million kinds, but what are your goals? Because that's what works your way backwards to what you should have. Okay. So if you guys are listening to the podcast, I actually did a little slideshow, so you might have to come check it out over on YouTube or the website. It's not fancy, but it is some pictures to illustrate what we're gonna talk about. So this is just a short introduction. The breast chickens come from France and they've been in the United States for 10 to 12 years now. Depends on if they came over legally or not. And they're just a real, they're white. Ours are white. There are different varieties. There's black and there's blue. I think somebody's working on splash maybe. But there I've seen some. Yeah but I think those are more for like pretty, and. Gotcha. Okay. So there's two schools of thought on the breast. There's a group of people who are trying to write a standard to get'em put in the a PA to show them. While, yes, I do the show world to a degree. I do not have any interest myself in showing breasts. These are meant for me for meat and eggs, and I feel like they would lose that. Purpose if we turned them into a show bird. Because to raise a show bird, that's a completely different mindset. So that's just my opinion. And if it upsets you, I'm sorry. When you're raising a show, bird. You're not thinking about what's going on your dinner table, right? Which is, the other purpose in a dual purpose bird, you're thinking about what that judge is gonna look at and compare it to. And like you said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But when your goal is what looks good on your kitchen table and what you can fry up in the morning. Then you know it, it's different, right? Yes. You want your birds to look like, feel like, act like what they should, or you would've picked a different bird. But at the end of the day, when you're worried about, when your goal is meat, eggs, essentially. You're more concerned with the picture that we can see right now because, it's not helping that while we're doing this. I'm hungry, but I would tear that chicken up. Okay, so obviously this is probably just your run of the mill Cornish rotisserie chicken, right? But. The reason why I wanted to put it up here was to illustrate some things I think people may not know when you're reading about something and the breeder or the author says, you really just have to put your hands on it to feel it. That's hard for somebody that may not have ever been taught to, to feel something. Okay, so obviously we have a rotisserie chicken here and in the front of the picture, that would be where the neck goes. And so this bird is upside down, right? So if the legs weren't tied, they'd be straight up in the air and if you turned it over, they'd be standing on the legs, right? Okay. The bone that runs and splits the breast meat right there, that's the keel bone. That is what? When you pick up a bird and you put your hand underneath of their gut, that's the bone that you're feeling. And you wanna make sure that it's straight, that there's no curvature to it. That it's not sharp, because if it's sharp, then there's no meat there. It's just a bony chicken. And if it's all squishy and. Blubbery. Then that's a big, nice, big layer of fat and you need to go back and listen to the podcast two weeks ago about overweight chickens. So what you want to feel would be like if you went to the store and bought a raw chicken and put your hand on it and you could feel that muscle, which is what the breast meat is. Then put your hand underneath of the chicken. It should feel about the same. That's your goal anyway, right? Now, next up would be, see the space between the legs. So on my birds, we're talking about how many fingers can you put between the legs? You'll see people talk about that on my birds. I have big hands and I can spread my fingers apart between the legs of my birds and that's what you want. You want a nice, big, wide bird that stands up on its legs like a Flintstone, Yeah. You wanna be able to put your, if a bird's standing, you wanna be able to put your fist between his legs without touching its legs. And like mine, when I pick up some mine, I have to like the grown ones. I pick'em up and then I have to like, pull their feet in so I can tuck their legs in my fingers and carry'em around like footballs. Because their legs are so wide.'cause they're a wide bodied chicken. And so if you flip this bird over, of course you're gonna see it's backbone. And what you want is the backbone. To not be in a curve like a roach called it roach back. You don't want that. You want it to be nice and straight and elongated, because the longer the back, the longer the bird, the more meat that's gonna grow. Because the meat is the muscle that's helping the bird to move around and do chicken things, right? So you, the more muscle you put on this bird, the more meat you're gonna have at the end of the day. So anything else we can think of on this rotisserie chicken to talk about? No, but I will say this. I know you like projects, so I'm curious if when you finish one of those breasts, if you give it a lot of that Italian herb seasoning, if that will internally flavor. Oh I don't think that it works like that, but I did have to buy an electric roasting pan because my turkeys have now outgrew my oven and I have a 42 inch oven that I can't find a pan big enough for it. And so I'm thinking this next round I'm going to go ahead and pluck a couple of'em and put them in this roasting pan and see if I can't make a rotisserie myself. It's a challenge in the kitchen for me. Okay, so the eggs of the breast chicken we were having this conversation before we hit record, so mine are this nice off-white, creamy color. There are a couple orpington eggs in this picture, so disregard those. They're the more tan ones. But are your breast eggs not this creamy white color? No, mine. Mine are that color. Oh, okay. Good. That's what they're supposed to be. Okay, good. Because again, we don't, I don't care about showing'em, I just care if the eggs are edible and the BS edible. Disregarding that big 57.9 and 59.2.'cause those are both orpington eggs. You'll notice that the rest of them are in the 60 gram range. Those are the size eggs that I like to set. Somewhere between 60 and 65, I have set larger. I don't feel like. That's necessarily a good thing. You can get too big. I also am super selective on the shape of the egg because you want to make sure that the chick has enough room to move and orientate itself in there. You don't want torpedo eggs or golf ball, eggs, or. Cracked eggs or dirty eggs. My, I do not wash eggs. This comes straight out of my nest box like this. I just simply bring anything inside that is not. Conducive to hatching, in my opinion as are edible eggs. Nothing goes to waste here. No. But that's a good place to do your first coal. Yes. Yes, because whatever you select is what you're gonna get. Now you'll notice also that I have numbers written on all of mine. No, the Sharpie does not impact my hatch rate. It does not matter. You'll see fives and threes and ones and twos, and I think that's all you see in there. And if a sharpie really impacted your hatch rate, then there'd be times that I had zero hatch rate. Exactly. Because I write on a lot of them now. I do just write on the end, the blunt end. I maybe if you wrote on a pointy end or something, it might matter. I don't know. No, I do the blunt end because when I put'em in the tray, I wanna be able to read it. Exactly. So those numbers are. From the pens that I got them out of so I can keep them separated later. And the other numbers, 63, 64. Those I weigh my eggs. Have been working on a little side project to dial in my incubators. Precisely to my environment. And an egg should lose 11 to 13% of its weight from day one to day 18. And right now I am hovering right around 10% weight loss. And so I have. I have been using 40%, so I've dialed it in again to 38% to see if I can bump it to the 11 to 13% weight loss. The idea there is to shorten the hatch window so everybody hatches at the same time. They're healthier, you can get'em out quicker and get'em on food and water doing it that way. So that is just an advanced thing and if you want more information you can get that out of the incubation masterclass. Alright. These are Carries Hatch from this week actually. What are they, three or four days old now? Yeah. Yeah. I noticed you didn't use any shelf liner. There's no shelf liner in these baskets. Okay. They're okay, right? Don't, I don't have a problem with it on these, no. Okay. I don't know. I just use it for everything. So he sent me these pictures in a text'cause he was all excited. He is no eyeballs. And so when I saw the text before the picture, I was like, oh crap. He's hatching birds with no eyeballs. Yeah, some, sometimes there, there's an area that I spend a decent amount of time in that the cell service is less than ideal and it's frustrating because, I think she's gonna see that word before she sees the picture and she's gonna be like, what the crap is he doing? But yeah. That's thing. So the idea we have here is when you look straight down on these chicks, you cannot see their eyeballs. And that tells you that they have a nice wide head, and a wide head should carry through to a wide bodied. Older bird. That is the idea behind that. So if you can see their eyeballs, that is because their head is narrower and they will have a narrow body when they're older. I had a person that has been around chicks longer than I've been alive, and they were starting to help me learn to select and that kind of stuff because. When I was younger, we just, all these look good, we'll put them together and have some more. And he's I did my first coal out of the hatcher and I was like. What, why didn't he tell me how to do this like a year and a half ago? I could have saved a lot of money on chicken feet and he said you wasn't ready for it. I say that to people because not everybody can Cole ruthlessly like that. And I, I don't care if you do or you don't. That's not your program. It ain't your program. I run a breeding program, not a hospital. And the ones where that does happen, I have an outlet for those. So they don't go to waste. They don't go you just eat those. You can just eat'em. You just want to band these. What I do is I brood'em separately. So you would put these in one brooder and put the skinny headwinds in the other one, and then you would ban these'cause I banned it about 10 days. And paint. Paint, no polish. Livestock markers work really good too. I use a lot of livestock markers. So I can't go steal that from my daughters, but I can go steal nail polish. Okay. But anyway, you'll need two brooders or you'll need to band them somehow, but two brooders just pretty foolproof. And then you can either sell those chicks, as to somebody else who wants to get started because everybody has to have a starting point, right? So don't feel bad, just tell'em, say, look, I'm breeding for width and these did not meet my needs straight out of the brooder, but they're a great start for you. Just be honest. It's fine. If you went to my. Page on my website, it will tell you on there that I might have some leakage here and there because you don't eat feathers and I'm not overly concerned about it. So breeders should be honest with the things that they're working on and what may pop up and that's fine. Yeah. If I see the leakage, that's not necessarily a deal breaker for me to go to the breeding pen. If. Every other quality about you I'm in love with. But if I'm not in love with all the other qualities, if you got one, if you've got a flaw besides the leakage, then I'm going to eat you or something's gonna eat you. But it, again, it depends on your goals. I will end up with nice pretty white birds, but right now that is not in my top three things that I'm concerned about. Okay, so this is actually one of my, this is actually one of my breeders and as of now he is about 15, 18 months old without pulling his band number. He is probably going to be my foundation bird for my flock going forward. So like we talked about at the beginning, you're just hatching quantity in order to shop your own property for what you want to move forward. So when we do the selection on these breasts, it's very different than if you were selecting, say, for the Orpingtons or your Red Eye, Rhode Island Reds, because we won't select those till they're darn near a year old. These guys, what we're doing or what I'm doing, I can't say that it is. Like the way it's supposed to be. This is just what I'm doing. I took him at 17 weeks and I said, you know what? This is what I want to see on my table. He had great spacing. He had deep chest, he had a straight keel bone. He had all the meat that fleshing that people talk about. He had what I want to see on my dinner table, and so that's why I used him as a breeder. No, dude, that bird has what most everybody wants to see in their yard too. He's, and he's so sweet. Now he is 10 pounds, four ounces, but really that's not relevant. What's relevant is that he was seven pounds and something at 17 weeks, and he was the shape and the size of what I wanna see on my table. Because the 17 week mark for me is the selection point for the boys. The girls are point of lay. Because once they get to point of lay, they don't really grow too much more the kind of their body's moving to, okay, we're gonna lay eggs now we're done growing. So your selection point in what I'm doing for my birds is I'm selecting for the table and the birds that have those. Positives that I wanna see on the table at 17 weeks are the ones that are gonna move forward to the breed pen. The biggest pain in the butt about that for me is the hens because you can pick out a rooster pretty easy. But if you wanna make sure a hen's laying five eggs a week, if you wanna make sure she's laying uniform eggs every time, if you wanna make sure she's all of that. It's a pain in the butt. It is, but I have a fix for that. I have a fix more pen space? No. So I did some wheeling and dealing and I traded a guy in Nashville. Some stuff for a hutchin time. Chicken cage, you've seen it. It has nine holes in it and it's big enough and it has an egg rollout. It's big enough for these birds. Not him, but it would be big enough for pulls. So what you could do, and I haven't done it with the pulls, but I have done it with the boys, is put them in there. Just put'em in there for, I don't know, a day, even two days. And just to see what their egg is and looks like and what size it is and make sure it's correct and then put'em back out. We're not talking about keeping them in there forever, but just long enough to see who lays what egg. I did have a hen, I do have a hen she's about a year old and she is laying a wonky egg and I wanted to. Move her out to to, I wanted to sort them like that and figure out which one she was. But then I was like, you know what? I am not hatching off of this group going forward. She's not with this guy. So I just, her egg always has a flat side. I dunno why. It's just weird. It's just flat on one side. And I don't know if they're still super soft when she lays'em. And so when it falls down it's just flat. But I just, you can tell her egg every day and she lays one every day.'cause I always have a flat sided egg, so I just, so if I had one like that, that would give me an egg every day. It just wasn't what I wanted to breed. That goal with my layer flock. Yeah. So def definitely dinner quality and reliable. And e every once in a while if I didn't have enough extras from my regular breeding flock, I might even put a rooster in there. And some of them. So she's with a guy. But because her egg is so obvious, I just always just put it, I always carry, I put my eggs in pitchers, like the plastic pitchers to carry the meat in. So I always put her egg in with the eating egg. It's so obvious it really doesn't bother me and she's a placeholder with him, so that. He doesn't wear anybody out, there's enough in there. So it, right now it's working. I may change that up later. And that's the beauty of this whole situation is you can always change it up later. But as far as this guy is concerned breasts should have those blue slate legs. That is the marker for a true breast bird. And that is the end of my fancy slideshow. But I think, I mean we covered everything. Yeah, we did. We covered a lot. And like I said, with not today we're talking about breasts.'cause she and I both have'em. We both love them. With any bird regardless, you should start with your goals. And she and I were talking probably like a year after I got mine, maybe. About it and,'cause she did a lot of Cornish and she's I've been reading a lot about those birds. And she's I wonder, she started asking questions how often do they lay and, this, that and the other. And then, next thing I know she's wanting to get her some'cause. If your goal is self sustainability. Then in both of our opinion, this is the perfect chicken for you. Because it's'cause they lay a lot of eggs on a proper diet. They grow really well and they're not jerks. They're playful chickens. Yeah, they have a little bit more flightiness to'em than my Orpingtons, but I always joke that the Orpingtons are like a step above dead. So really anything is gonna be more flighty than they are. Like when I go look at mine, they're, the Orpingtons are like just laying there Hey, did you bring me some food or a treat? Why are you out here? With the breasts and my reds, they, they come, hey Hey, what are you doing? Don't come over here. Will you pet me? I send my grandson in there to get the eggs. They don't bother him. They're fine. I don't know that they necessarily wanna be caught up in. Wanna sit in my lap or anything, but I can walk in there and pet some of'em if they're standing on the roost or something. They're not crazy like they wanna attack you. But if a bird that was sitting in your lap was your goal, you'd have silkies and not breasts. One of these days we'll find a silky breeder who's willing to come on. We've asked, I don't know how many we can't get. And look, I'm gonna say this'cause there's a lot of people out there that absolutely love silkies, and if you are a silky breeder. And you would like to come on the show and tell us about Silky, what you like about'em and your breeding program, please by all means send either one of us a message. Either carry at or jennifer@poultrynerdspodcast.com or poultry nerds@gmail.com, whatever, and let us know, we'll get you our scheduler. And get you on because, we've been trying to get people, because a lot of people will ask us, Hey, why don't y'all do a show about Silkies? I'm like, I don't wanna say, because they're, people hate talking about'em because when you see their people, they love'em. But we just can't get'em on our show. All right. I got nothing else for today. Nope. Me neither. I'm good.