Why are there so many chicken breeds?
Why
are there so many chicken breeds to choose
from? A lot of it is just looks. Within the last century,
dozens of types of chickens were developed with unique plumage that made
them good bets to win a prize at the county fair, but these lookers are
unlikely to be prime homesteading birds. Not only is efficient
egg-laying
and meat production often ignored when breeding exhibition-quality
birds, but chickens with feathered feet have a hard time scratching for
their dinner, and those with fancy plumes can't glance up. In
general, fancy fowl tend
to be eaten by hawks in short order, and they usually don't produce much
compared to how much they cost to feed. The serious homesteader
will
be better off giving these birds a miss.The rise of fancy fowl is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1868, Charles Darwin (with the help of a "Mr. Tegetmeier") published a survey of the currently known chicken breeds, which included Game, Malay, Cochin, Dorking, Spanish, Hamburg, Crested or Polish, Bantam, Rump-less, Creepers or Jumpers, Frizzled or Caffre, Silk, and Sooty. As you can tell, Darwin's descriptions were mostly categories rather than actual breeds as we consider them today, so it's not surprising that only thirteen types made the cut.
The
heyday of chicken breeding didn't last forever,
though. The discovery of vitamin D not only made chicken keeping
more economical
for the homesteader, it also allowed large chicken farms to raise
thousands of birds at a time. During the same time period, many
Americans were moving off farms and into the cities, and while some
ex-farmers bred
miniature chickens (bantams) to take with them, others decided it was
simpler to buy their eggs and meat at the store. Before long,
homestead-worthy chicken breeds were dwindling and being replaced by
types of chickens that did well in the cramped quarters of factory
farms.
The more recent surges in backyard chicken-keeping of
the
1970s and early 2000s have mostly focused on the breeds that already
existed, although the choices were reduced to those that had
survived decades of backyard disinterest. And while most of the
chickens that were alive at the time Darwin was writing were probably
scrappy farmyard birds with no pedigrees who fit the farms they'd been
raised on, the modern homesteader looking to develop a productive flock
has more choices but a harder time finding productive genetics.
That's why, despite the wide variety of chicken breeds out there, it can
be tough to find a good homesteading bird. Thrifty Chicken Breeds is all
about tracking down that productive breed that can feed your family at a low cost.
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Thrifty Chicken Breeds.
If so, why not read the whole thing for only 99 cents? Or stay
tuned for another excerpt here on the blog tomorrow.
| This post is part of our Thrifty Chicken Breeds lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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It seems to me that a breed is more or less what breeders agree that it is? A label more or less. As opposed to e.g. a objectively measurable characteristic.
So a mixed population of chickens could have a variable amount of breeds depending on who does the classifying.