WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast.
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In this episode Mandelyn, John and Rip wrap up their thoughts on the minatures of the poultry world.
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So, let's join their conversation on Bantums.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I think what was happening, people were raising bantams and they weren't getting the growth and they weren't getting the feather quality and, and all those things that we were seeing in some of our large fowl breeds.
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And so they figured it had to be the feed.
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So they would start adding to it.
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They would add in like dog food, cat food, fish food.
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Well, that was also the time that a lot of the feed manufacturers started utilizing adjuncts from other industries that were waste products.
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So they didn't.
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Equate the two.
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Right.
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They just realized My thought on
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it, if your feed is full of filler Where it's the wheat middlings and just, you know, the junk food that holds a crumble together.
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But it's going into a bird the size of a peanut, how much of that nutrition is coming off into that bird based on its capacity to eat it?
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Versus if you fed a genuinely good feed, it's not going to be chasing additional and trying to eat too much because it doesn't have the fillers in it.
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Because I was told Nutritional
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density here is something that's important.
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I would say.
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Late 80s, early 90s, I was just told feed them like turkeys.
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Give them turkey food.
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People were thinking, when they started mixing these other things in and forming all these secret recipes, so to speak, they were seeing improvements in their birds, and they realized, they knew that they were giving them a higher protein feed.
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Okay?
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So they attributed all these improvements to higher protein.
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And it was never the protein
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and giving them a more diverse amino acid profile.
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It was increasing the amino acid levels.
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Yeah.
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Come to find out it's
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the amino acids, not the protein.
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And it was diversifying the amino acid profile because you're now you have all these different constituent building blocks for proteins coming from different sources.
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Well, they, that was at about the same time when poultry feed manufacturers were trying to convince us that chickens should be vegetarians.
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And so they should be a pellet.
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That was also the time where they convinced everybody that everything should be a pellet.
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Boy, it would be great to have Jeff on and give us a history of.
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Yeah, I'm sure he has.
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I don't want to, I don't want to pick
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on his age, but I mean, he's been in the industry so long that he saw the industry change.
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It would be a wonderful perspective, if you're listening, Jeff,
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I'm thoroughly convinced that this all happened at about the same time we saw the switch to all vegetable based protein, which lowered the amino acid levels.
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And when they started mixing in other feeds, they were bringing back in some meat proteins that were missing from poultry feed.
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Yes.
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Folks are not vegetarians.
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They're omnivores.
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Yes.
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If you don't believe it.
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A little mouse run across the coop where my Rhode Island Reds are, and he's a goner.
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That was one of the first attributes of my Chanticleers that endeared them to Mandy.
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When a mouse tried to run across one of my, one of my pens.
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One of her pens of my Chanticleers.
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Yeah,
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they dived right for it, and then a couple of months after that, I was down in the back field, and a little field mouse popped into the Muscovy pen.
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And the mama duck in that pen grabbed that mouse and her beak, beat it against a stone step three times and swallowed it whole.
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I was like, wow.
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Nature's
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a cruel.
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Yeah, nature's mean.
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I had a buff coaching cockerel one time that grabbed about a half grown rat and swallowed him whole.
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That's when I learned real quick that they don't need really fine food particles.
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They can swallow a whole rat.
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But they need to summarize
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because
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they have vanoms with higher nutrient density without the fillers in the feed.
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And then you don't have to do anything special.
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Feed them exactly like you would your large bow.
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So long as the feed formula is appropriate and true to what it should be.
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And honestly.
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The large fowl would benefit from being raised that way.
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If you have a well balanced, age appropriate, nutritionally dense feed, they're going to do better on it.
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And they're not going to require as much protein as you It used to horrify me, because I went down this road myself, because I would add in catfish chow, I would add in cat food, I would add in dog food.
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It was costing me a fortune to buy all those different feeds and combine them into one ration.
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When didn't know it then, but if I had bothered to do a little studying about it and realize the importance of amino acids, oh, wow, that would have saved me a ton of money over the years.
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Now, when it comes to their cold hardiness, I don't remember ever doing anything special for mine in the wintertime until it got consistently below freezing and my parents were generous enough to give up a basement room of our old, old house.
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So it was.
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like a, a cellar room, but they let me set it all up so I can bring my delicate little birds down there and winter them over for two months.
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And then I'd put them all back outside again for spring, but for January and February.
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I did put them up because my coop was not really a proper coop in the insulated wood built thing.
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It was like a glorified rabbit hutch that was giant.
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I, I never did anything unusual for bantams that I didn't do for my large fallow birds.
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And they handle cold weather.
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Remarkably well.
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Now with that said, I'm in Florida.
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You guys are much further north than I am, and I don't have to contend with the temperatures you folks do.
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I knew they weren't gonna survive winter in February with nothing but hardware cloth
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probably.
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That's pretty close.
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Yeah, because you gotta have,
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I'd love to give them another try, but I had predator problems.
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Just going through the research for this episode makes me want bantams again.
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Mm-hmm.
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I miss them.
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They're so fun.
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They have really cool
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personalities, too.
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They do.
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I've tried three times.
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I just They just seem a little bit more finicky to me.
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They're more vulnerable to predators, I've found.
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Oh yeah, they're definitely Because the
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smaller predator will go for the smaller Bird.
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Yeah, they're chicken nuggets.
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Perfect.
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So, predators that would not even bother with normal chickens will go after a bantam just because it's smaller inherently.
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Yeah, even little little kestrels.
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Mm hmm.
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Mm hmm.
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I think, in a sense, bantams can be a little bit more finicky to feed and manage than a large fowl.
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But, they're certainly not extremely finicky.
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They're not very needy.
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But as long as you meet their needs and you're using a good quality feed, you've got them in a good coop, they'll be fat and happy.
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I would say generally speaking, if you're in an extremely cold environment, like zone three or less that a Bantam may be a better choice for you than the large fowl equivalent.
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Just in that environment, it's inherently a little bit tougher and more resilient and just designed for that environment a little better.
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Well, and the space they need is so small that you can build better on a smaller footprint to protect them.
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Mm hmm.
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As long as you protect them.
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From a sustainability perspective, that's, I think they're pretty awesome.
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And you know, we talked about saving money on feed and all this kind of stuff, but another big savings to me is they don't have Unless you're going to raise a lot of them, you don't need really big pins and really big runs.
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I had a lot of four by eight foot pins that I could put five, six manoms in easily.
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And they did great in that size.
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Where with large fallow, you could put about two in that.
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And unlike quail, which their eggs are a pain to break, if you're looking for egg production, you can put twice as, well, more than twice as many hens in the same amount of space and maintain the same production.
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So, yeah I don't really see a downside at all.
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Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I'm like, can I find a lady petal?
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Given the temperament
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One of my favorites was the sea brides.
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I had silver and gold both.
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And the two males I had, I named them Jibbers and Jabbers because all they did was jibber and jabber all day.
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Mm hmm.
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Mm
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hmm.
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Here's a challenge for you, Mandlin.
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You ought to get some white rock bands.
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Oh.
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Are you going where I think you're going?
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I probably am.
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I know you like your project.
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And you get a male and cross him onto some small sized breast females.
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Like the really round bowling ball ones that I won't use in the purebred pens because they're just too round.
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Do they have a
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rose
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comb
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version?
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I don't think there's a rose comb breast, is there Madeline?
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No, in the, in the white rock.
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No, it's a single comb.
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Oh, okay.
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If you
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want a rose comb version, get a white wind up, but they are, they're much rounder.
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The body conformation is much different than a breast.
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What about replicating my big project
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in the miniature version?
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Yeah,
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we
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gotta get rid of those ridiculous combs and waddles for the northern
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climate.
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You could, you know, you could go another 10 or 15 years getting all that straightened out.
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You'd be good to go.
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Keep you occupied.
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But I could raise three times as many birds if they were bantam.
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I know.
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I
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like your optimism.
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So overall feed conversion ratio, right on point.
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I'd say they're more economical.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Oh, yeah.
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Oh, yeah.
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Hands down.
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You just need more of them.
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And that's okay because that's the fun of it.
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For a bunch of
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large fowl breeders, we're talking ourselves out of a job.
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Large fowl, talking about feed conversion, three and a half to four ounces of feed per day.
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Yeah.
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Phantoms, most of those breeds you're talking about may be an ounce, maybe ounce and a half of feed per day.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, it's easier to switch over to grams and
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Their growth rate?
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When do they hit their adult size?
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About the same as largefowl five, six months.
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Some of the breeds like the Asiatics are just like largefowl.
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They're slower to come around to develop.
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Well, some of the largefowl types like Jersey giant and Brahma and stuff like that, you're feeding them eight, nine, 10, 11 months before you get to that advertised weight.
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But the phantom version, five, six months.
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Pretty much.
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No, no, it'll take you longer than that on the, You're going to follow the same basic.
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Trans and bantam breed as you will in the comparable large fowl breed.
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Now, did you ever mix your bantams with your large fowl or did you keep them all separate?
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No, I kept them separate.
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I always had either or I never really mixed them.
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I found that I wouldn't even do it at day old because a large fowl would bully the bantams and they weren't eating and drinking like they should.
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So I gave them their own brooder and that kind of followed through.
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And of course the Bantam doesn't realize he's a Bantam, so he's going to try to take on the large fowl carpels, and that doesn't end well.
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No, I'd imagine it wouldn't.
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But you know, Bantams, as long as you treat them like chickens and feed them like you should, the only difference is the size when it comes right down to it.
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Now I have in the past, for the sake of brooding space and efficiency, if I had two week old Bantam chicks, It wasn't unheard of for me to drop a couple large foul chicks that were much younger in with them.
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'cause the younger ones almost respected the older ones, even though they were smaller.
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You can get by with that.
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Mm-hmm But if you do it the other way,
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oh, they're gonna get trampled.
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You're asking
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trampled.
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Yeah.
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If you're gonna mix your sizes.
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You get the little ones going first so that they automatically have some clout just by age and not necessarily size.
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I was staggering my quail to be about a week older than my large fowl chicks if I was going to brood them together.
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And that worked out pretty good.
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And if you wanted to, you could do the same sort of sex link crosses with Bantams that you can with large fowl.
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Like I said, my friend that across the New Hampshires and the Rhode Island Red Banffs got astounding production out of those birds, and they're a little bit bigger, so there was more of a carcass there than just a purebred bird.
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Well, that F1 generation is always going to have that heterosis.
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I guess the one thing that I would like to leave with people out of this, Is it if you like large fowl or you like bantams, I would give the advantage to being easier to care for and less costly to feed the bantams.
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But other than that, they're pretty much the same type birds, just the size is different.
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That's it.
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And showing, I think bantams have a larger.
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There's a lot more bantams at shows than there are in large fowl.
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Showing.
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And with the last show I was at, it was said that the bantams are going to keep growing and growing because they are more efficient to raise.
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They are cheaper per bird to raise out.
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And I would hazard a guess, gosh, probably 70 percent of the show was bantam.
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Yeah.
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And we're always talking about this rule of 10 that you need to even maintain decent bantam.
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Yeah.
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Genetic direction in your flock, so if, if you're having to hatch out a hundred eggs a year, it's going to be much more cost effective and easier to manage all the way down the line if they're bantams than large fowls.
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Well, since I started with bantams, they were my crash course, and if I had started with large fowl probably would have been more intimidating because you just can't do the numbers and scale and experimenting that you can do with the smaller ones.
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Talk about my little science projects.
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Now you should have seen my seabrights crossed into this and that and this and that.
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Well,
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I know where I can go for some nice Chanticleer bantams.
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Where?
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Oh.
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Tripp has
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me curious now on replicating my other project in the miniature form.
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Well, these are Chanticleer bantams.
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You're going to need.
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No, they're yours doesn't exist yet, so you should be used to make them.
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Oh, we're such enablers.
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Be honest
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with you.