ॐ Steamboat Island Farm

The majority of us need to forget we ever saw these numbers.

Egg production is a rabbit hole and generally misleading, so keep this in mind. All statistics are made up. An annual statistic means in a perfect, controlled environment, where light and heat are consistently managed, and only for the first 12 laying months of a chicken’s life. After that, they are given a permanent rest. That number is for commercial growers to project profit and loss statements.
That means not during the heat of summer, or Autumn molt, and not during the dark of winter. Chicken bodies need breaks, and they naturally take a few each year. A chicken’s ovaries respond to stress and to day length, both of which can be manipulated.
A breed that is said to lay 150 eggs per year is most likely going to give you MORE than 2.88 eggs per week. They’ll probably still lay 4-5 eggs per week. But their internal clocks may be harder wired to take those breaks. They didn’t respond well to commercial trials.
A breed that is said to lay 250 or 300 eggs per year is most likely going to give you 5-7 eggs per week. No breed creates eggs faster than any other breed, and an egg takes just over a day to make. At some point, the clocks are going to get off-cycle, and their oviducts won’t release the next egg until their body resets. But, they may not shut down as hard or as stringent during the winter break, or be as particular on how temperature affects them.
Different chicken breeds also lay different sized eggs. 4 Jersey Giant eggs easily equal 5 leghorn or comet eggs.
And last thought – all chickens have a set number of eggs inside them. A chicken that lays more eggs faster simply gets to henopause earlier. More than 2/3 of a chicken’s potential life is spent not laying eggs, forcing you to make decisions about whether you want to keep feeding them.

If you’re willing to do what it takes to maximize feed-to-production ratios, then pay attention to egg production numbers. If not, trust that it’s going to be OK and it’ll work out in the long run.

Considering my affection for green eggs, this is obviously the right answer. Congratulations!

I live in the PNW. My coop has a fully open wall, and I have no air conditioning. That being said, did I have Marans who refused to lay when it was warm? YUP. Did I have kids that needed frostbite protection for their combs and wattles? YUP. But would I choose one breed over another for it? ehh, maybe.
It does matter, although I weigh it less than I do other things, for us, here, in the PNW.
A more poignant question is what kinds of things you can do to care for all of your animals, regardless. On the hottest of days, are you willing to grab a hen and dunk her in a bucket of water (she’ll love it), or maybe go all in and install a mister in the run? Can you have some vaseline on hand to rub on those chapped wattles in the dead of winter?
Climate hardiness tells us what things to be ready for, but it’s a false hope if the idea is that you won’t have to be ready.

Of anything on this list, this one has mattered the most to me, and yet it is also the vaguest. I’ve learned that temperament can absolutely be a long-term, breed-wide trait. If even one person has a bad story about a breed, I tend to pay attention.
I’ve learned to avoid words like “lively” and “energetic”, and instead read them as “spastic with a high propensity to PTSD.” I’ve learned to like words like “foragers” because it can mean food motivated and therefore trainable. Initially, I thought I didn’t care about “foraging” because I would be feeding them.
Yet characteristics like “broody” seem to be far more about an individual than a breed-wise trait. Some girls make good mamas, and some just play at it.
The industry overuses words like “sweet and affectionate” or “docile”. What I WANT is a toddler rating system. I want to know whether even the ROOSTERS of a breed can tolerate a toddler thinking they’re a ragdoll. Not half or some of them. All of them. I want to know how many roosters, out of 100, turn into anything less than angelic after they’ve gone through 2-year old Tommy trotting them around on his tricycle. ((Tommy’s name has been changed to protect his identity, but when he grows up, he’ll know who I was talking about))

If you want a pet, you have to become the chicken whisperer. Being a prey animal, chickens thrive off PTSD. It keeps them safe. They’ll hide feeling bad or being hurt for as long as they possibly can. If they’re showing anything other than being inquisitive or casually looking for grubs, the line was crossed a while ago, and they’re already programmed to avoid that at all costs next time.

I do think that animals that are handled with more care, who are taught that you will respect their boundaries when they freak out, but also that you’re there to protect, nourish and nurture them, they mimic the same later on.

This is a tough cookie, so bear with me, because we’re in the same boat.
What a guilt free world it would be if we could just eliminate the problem of too many roosters!!
I get it. If you and I don’t have to deal with it, that’s all that matters. And I agree! Some of us live in city limits and can’t have roosters. Others just choose not to. Even for people like me, that keep roos in our flocks, too many is anything more than I already have.
Why Nature still creates a 50/50 mix of boys and girls if a flock is only ever going to be 5-10 girls to one boy is beyond me. It seems unfair.
But, especially nowadays, do not buy into the lie that anyone can guarantee you, with 100% certainty, that they’re selling you only girls.
Auto-sexing breeds rely on down feathers, different from adult feathering, to tell whether a chick is a boy or a girl. It’s pretty good at being accurate. One has stripes and the other doesn’t. Except for when it fails. Sometimes the stripes are less apparent, or they show up on the wrong sex, or they looked one way, but then grew a little bit more and shifted. It’s 90% accurate.
Sex-linking breeds are the exact same thing, except on a hybrid bird instead of a purebred bird. Both of these work on barring gene, a chromosomal anomaly that causes chicks to appear striped like a squirrel, or to have a spot on their heads. Boys get 2 copies and appear blurry, whereas girls only get one copy and appear sharper. But because blurry and sharp are subjective, it’s still 90% accurate.
If you get to choose from the 90% accurate pooling, and know what you’re looking for, your chances go up much higher. In fact, there’s scientific studies to show that if you keep doing it, years of practice will statistically make you perfect. which brings us to vent sexing.
Vent Sexing is still practiced, but it’s also frowned upon in the retail space, both due to cost and also activism. Not so much in the industrial space tho… But they’re training AI, which will put this ALL to shame. Vent sexing is highly invasive, needing to peer INSIDE a newborn chick’s opening by, um. Don’t worry about it. It’s takes a highly trained professional, and the longer they do it, the better at it they get. Guess what? It’s STILL only guaranteed about … yup… 90% accurate.
Straight Run is what we call everything else, and what we all wish didn’t have to exist. A Straight Run means that you have to see ALL the chicks that were hatched. Nobody is hiding half of them away, and you have just as much chance of picking up a boy as you do a girl.
Unless you’re ME. If I pick from a straight run, I’ve statistically chosen boys. Why? Interestingly, it’s because I chose for personality! Prior to me hatching my own, I didn’t understand that in a straight run, boys are still boys and girls are still girls. That means boys tend to be more inquisitive, learn how to fly up high first, and always keep an eye towards the skies. Girls stay lower to the ground, out of harms way, and wait for signals that everything is safe. Now think about how that behavior plays our when a grabby hand reaches into a brooder, and you’ll quickly understand why choosing what appears to be the cutest, cuddliest, interactive one ended me with a lot of roos.
Nowadays, I can sex their genders pretty well, based on behavior alone. At least to a 90% accuracy. The first few from the clutch to figure out how to fly to the top of the brooder box get tagged as probable boys. The ones that stand up tall, get tagged. The ones that run up to me first each morning, get tagged.
Silverudds don’t have the barring gene, but they DO present with bigger combs, thicker beaks, and larger legs, beginning in week 2. If you’ve spent a long time looking at them, and you have both boys and girls to compare and contrast against, you can sex them – at least to a 90% accuracy. I STILL get it wrong sometimes. There are STILL anomalies, where a boy is a late bloomer, or (worse) a girl presents a little larger.

I hate it when I get it wrong. I don’t want to sell people future disappointment. When someone wants a flock of 5 girls, and they end up with less because one turned into a roo, that’s a long-term disappointment. Adding a new girl can quickly become dangerous if she’s not the same age as the rest of the growing flock.
Even worse, the next decision they now face, with an animal that they’ve now cared for and bonded with, is enough to squelch some people’s enthusiasm forever. Nothing about that is joyful.

Getting older birds is one of the 2 failsafe methods that I know can guarantee you past that 90% mark. The first is getting older birds. The negative is that you lose those first formative weeks and months of life.
Most breeds don’t begin presenting sexes until probably 2-3 months or so, and the “is this photo a cockrel” game is a favorite of social media. Silverudds being “early presenters” is a big deal. Even a few weeks makes a huge difference in changing the odds.
Getting double is the other failsafe method. Meaning, if you want a flock of 6, you get 12 hatchlings. The negative is that you’re also signing up to have to make that bigger decision when the time comes. Either working back with wherever you got them, if that’s an option, or finding your local poultry auction house, or gearing up yourself to take matters into your own hands.

I know this is long winded, but just one final thought, because I often have people call the farm, asking if I can take in their special boy, and biosecurity makes it a rare exception when I can. But, it helps me (a little) shifting my perspective on that animal’s life. Nature is absolutely brutal for roosters. Their purpose is to be the sacrificial meal for predators, so that the alpha and hens live on. That’s what they can hope for. In our world, it’s even worse.
The US hatches 50-100 MILLION chickens annually, just for backyard flocks. That’s not for eating, that would be billions with a B. This is just for backyard flocks. Half of those are boys, and only about 5% of them will make it past but a few months old, let alone live to a ripe old age of 7 or 8 years.

So HOW LUCKY was that little guy NOT to be part of the billions, NOT to be part of the millions that died in the first hours, NOT be part of the millions that didn’t make it past the first few weeks, but, INSTEAD, for them to have been given the beautiful life that they’ve had up till now? That’s a blessing. Maybe you can’t keep it going forever, but you kept it going as long as you did, and that’s HUGE as compared to what could have been.
As compared to all the sex-linked, autosexed, broiler, and vent-checked layers,