Sept. 30, 2024

Bresse with Mandelyn Royal-Part 2

Show Notes
Transcript

In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, co-hosts Rip Stalvey, Mandelyn Royal, Jeff Mattocks, and Carey Blackmon provide expert advice on maintaining a productive and healthy Bresse poultry flock.

They discuss the importance of planting and maintaining a diverse pasture mix for free-ranging chickens, including grains and legumes like rye, wheat, and clover. The hosts also highlight methods like rotational grazing and suggest optimal space requirements per bird to keep pastures sustainable. Nutrition is a focal point, with recommendations on feed composition and strategies for fat development in Bresse chickens.

Additional topics include dealing with frostbite, the importance of proper feeding routines, and traditional breeding practices to ensure genetic consistency. The podcast ends with tips on managing forage crops and sourcing quality Bresse in different regions.

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WEBVTT

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Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast.

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I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock.

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Some people who preemptively dub the comb, so they don't even have to worry about it.

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We're getting a lot of really good questions and comments tonight.

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And I, folks, I really appreciate you doing that.

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That's what makes a show very helpful to other people is when you ask good questions like we're getting tonight.

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And speaking of questions, Bonnie Wagner wants to know if you plant anything specific in the pastures for the chickens to free range.

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So we do a grass mix with a lot of rye and some wheat that I'll throw out there.

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Red Clover, I like that a lot, cause it's pretty.

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And then we have some native weeds, like Chickweed is prolific here, and they love it.

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And it comes up all by itself, I don't have to do anything.

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Purple Dead Nettle is another one that they like a lot, that grows, On its own.

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I have, I don't have to go seed that.

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So I keep the beneficial weeds.

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I try to remove stuff that they won't eat.

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Like sometimes our pasture will get an invasion of dock and that stuff is terrible and they don't eat it either.

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So I'll kill those plants and then reseed over that with a little blend.

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And I think.

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Jeff has a couple recipes for flock pasture building.

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I do.

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It just depends, it depends on your zone and your region, you hit on probably the best.

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So poultry, my observation over the years, poultry prefer a succulent legume.

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Like a young clover, young alfalfa, that's their go to first.

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If people are in a hurry, they can use this, what we call a cereal grain, like a wheat, barley, oats, something like that, which germinates really quickly, right?

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And as long as they get them out there while it's young, but it's pretty much, a one time grazing.

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It's not going to come back.

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When chickens dig into something green that they like.

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Nothing's going to come back because they eat it all the way to the ground and it disappears, right?

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So you almost want to think about, your chicken pastures as an annual crop and be willing to reseed it every year because they're just going to annihilate it.

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And, what they don't eat, they're going to scratch up.

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They're going to scratch loose.

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And I prefer people considering an annual planting or two annual plantings a year for their poultry.

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And I think they get a lot further ahead that way.

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Hey Jeff, I got a question for you.

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Okay.

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What about rotational grazing?

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Works for

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cows.

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It does.

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Works for chickens too.

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It works really good for chickens.

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As long as people don't leave them on the yard too long.

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Okay.

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Now in a trap door set up, Mandy mentioned trap doors.

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So right outside the doors, that first two to three feet is going to get so denuded with manure and traffic, with their feet that nothing's going to grow there, right?

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You're going to have to do something in that region.

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There's no reason why you can't rotationally graze chickens.

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Or any poultry, for that matter the key is you have to know when it's time to quit and move on.

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And if you look at it and say, oh, it's still green out there, and you keep going, It won't come back.

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They're it.

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Yeah, if it goes shorter than an inch or so and then the next bird behind them takes it down the rest of the way to the dirt.

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Yep.

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Excuse me, they're after that fresh greenery too, so when it starts to regrow, they're on it faster than what's already established and it'll thin out pretty quickly.

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You know what, it's something like, it takes a minimum of 50 square foot per chicken to even have a hope of keeping grass around.

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And that's a lot of room.

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50 square foot per bird is a lot of space.

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And in France for the Bresse, they have government regulated minimums of 10 square meters per bird per pasture.

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And when people ask me like Carrie's question about rotationally grazing, I tell them they need.

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Four square feet per bird per day.

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So each day, they need to have a fresh four square feet per bird.

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So a flock of 50 would need 200 new, 200 square feet of new space every day.

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And, there you would have an opportunity to come in, maybe put down some lime, reseed it, and you definitely can do it but they like the legumes the best even peas, like immature field peas yeah, they're going to tear that up, they're just, they're going to love it they're not as crazy about grasses, they'll eat them, But if you ever turn a batch of chickens loose on something that's well mixed forage, you're gonna watch and their go to is the alfalfas first, or the legumes first.

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They'll eat the grass, it's not really what they want.

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It's not

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the best.

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Yeah, they'll

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save

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it

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for later.

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Yeah, they're like kids.

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They want the candy.

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I

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grow this trailing sedum, which is pretty much a succulent, and it's like chicken candy, and it grows over top of mulch and rock, and everywhere I have a bare spot in my landscape, I plant it.

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I just stick some of that on the surface and it takes over.

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And then when I go, Oh, I have too much of that.

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I can grab it out by the handful and it's like little chicken treats.

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So it's starting to act like a mulch and I don't have to replace that mulch.

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And then whenever that greenery gets out of control, I just grab it by the handful and throw it to the birds.

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I didn't know.

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It's juicy.

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It's thick.

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It's it's

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nice.

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I didn't know they liked that.

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Mary needs to watch out for hers.

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I guess I might have to get into it.

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It grows back quick enough.

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She'll never miss it.

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Oh, it's

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super fast.

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They cleared out like a three by three area when I wasn't looking.

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Just gone, decimated, but the roots came back a couple weeks later after a rain.

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It's already coming right back.

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Oh, here's a good question.

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Sarah Enoch wants to know, do you also cull the parents of the birds with yellow feet?

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Yes.

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You have to confirm which specific ones had it.

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And so I just bought a pile of hatching baskets so I can pair hatch by the hen and keep the eggs separate for hatching, just to make sure that if I ever have that question, I know the answer.

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Because if you see it and you clan mated, You don't know who it was.

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So if I was going to do anything different now that I've been at it this long, I would have paramedic from the beginning because it would have prevented a whole lot of questions that came up later after you get, three, four generations in, you're like, wait, that's a little weird.

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Where'd that come from?

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Which bird threw that?

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If I was paramedic, I would have known.

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See, we're getting some, man, some good questions here.

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Austin says that they're in Birmingham.

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It's just a matter of keeping them well shaded in the summer to feed them out.

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Carrie, that's for you.

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You're down there.

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For me all of mine are in the shade.

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Even the pens that I have that are not shaded, in the summertime, I put a shade cloth over to keep them shaded, and I also have fans that I hang in the tops of my pens, so they constantly have wind blowing, but I can have dinner fresh year round.

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They, they do, my birds do really well, the Bresse that I've got from you.

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They stay cooler than some of my game birds because they have the bigger cones and wattles in the summertime.

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And I did not get any that had frostbite this past winter.

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Which, I do give them, if they stay low they will stay out of the wind.

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Now, I've got some knuckleheads that they're getting on their roost, no matter how cold it is.

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It's always that one

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word.

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No matter if the rain is, if the rain is horizontal, they're still gonna get up on the roost at night.

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But, yeah, they, mine, the ones that I got from you, Mandy, are pretty daggum hardy.

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It's sink or swim here,

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and they're also tasty.

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So you did eat one.

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You didn't tell me.

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You've been really busy lately, and I haven't had a chance to talk to you, but.

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Still gonna send

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me a carcass picture.

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Okay, this is true.

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I'm sorry I'll do that next time, but I have I have chunked it, cooked it in the oven, chunked it and deep fried it put the whole thing in the crock pot, and I I can't even go to a restaurant and order chicken anymore.

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Me neither.

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I'm ruined.

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I feel like a snob, but, and I've got some, I've got some turkeys.

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You'll like those.

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And then, I've got, You're going to become

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a turkey snob too.

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I've got Thanksgiving and Christmas already, they're already on their diet.

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And.

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It's, even the family noticed a difference.

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And I'm just like, I know what that thing ate all of its life.

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And I know what I just put in my body.

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And I can't say that when I go to a restaurant.

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You're right.

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Mandy, Austin wants to know if you use mobile houses or do you keep them in one stationary house with access to pasture?

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So the picture behind me is young males that are in rooster coop and rooster coop is a nine by 13 stationary coop, and it's got about an eighth of an acre.

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And then I can open up into another about eighth of an acre, and then I can open up into another area on the other side in case they eat it all down, which they're, they don't, I usually put what, like 20, 25 birds in that building at a time, so they never run it down to the dirt.

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This year is weird because we're in a drought, so everything is crispy.

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So I've been doing a couple of fodder trays for them to supplement a little bit.

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Don't do that.

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Don't do that.

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Just for greens.

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I know, Jeff.

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Don't do that.

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They still get their regular feed.

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And they camp out inside when it's hot anyways.

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If you were tracking the numbers right now?

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This is no lie.

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Poultry grow faster on range on a drought year than they do on a lush year.

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Really?

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Yes, because they can find more bugs, more spiders.

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More slugs.

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Oh, our

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spiders are hot and heavy too.

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We've got some intense spiders.

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Yes they will do by far better on a drought crispy year on range than they do on a wet year.

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Oh, we've

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got giant grasshoppers.

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What do they call them when they start flying?

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Aren't those locusts?

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Get them.

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Get the birds there.

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I'll walk through and see if any jump up or if they're all gone.

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Okay.

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I didn't know that.

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I learned something tonight, Jeff.

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There you go.

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And Rebecca Cahill, like Austin said, fodder is too much work.

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It ain't worth the work.

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That's for sure.

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It is not worth the work.

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Rebecca said she never thought about the water source as a contributing issue of frostbite.

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Oh yeah, it's putting humidity in.

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Anytime you have surface area of water, it's releasing humidity.

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And if you heat it, it's going to release a little more humidity if the air is cold.

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That's true.

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All that steam coming off of it when you first set it down or if you refill it.

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So I, I rotate my water drinkers in the wintertime and I'll put them in the hatch room to thaw and then bring out the other ones that are filled.

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And so it's room temperature water, not hot water, not heated water.

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And then once it freezes solid again, I just swap it out.

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So that way I know at minimum, like if it's zero degrees, it's probably frozen again in three or four hours, I'm going to swap it.

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But.

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So long as I know they get fresh water two or three times a day in the cold, then I feel okay about not heating it.

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It adds to my work, but it's better for the birds that way.

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So

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far.

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I see.

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Here we go.

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Julie wants to say that she planted a forage crop for her birds.

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They keep trying to get at it while she's growing it out so they can have at it.

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Keep it watered.

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Oh man, we've been getting the rain down here this year, jeez.

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Austin wants to know, can you raise good quality breasts with not much access to pasture?

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You can, but the flavor's not going to be as intense without that forage.

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But you're still going to get some pretty decent fat development, hopefully.

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Hopefully that gene is in there.

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I like to see the crock rolls have a half inch fat pad.

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on the bat when they're like 16 weeks old.

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If it's earlier, they're not going to be as developed as that.

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But when that fat's in there and you put them in the smoker at 225 degrees, it's so juicy.

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It's the juiciest chicken.

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Just when all that fat, it's like a self buttering bird.

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And you can do that just with regular feed with no grass at all.

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You're just not going to have that complexity to the flavor profile that the pasture brings to the meat.

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Next question.

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Next question.

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Our friend Ingrid wants to know if you know of a reliable breeder in Canada.

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No, not offhand.

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Like I've heard that they're tricky to find up there.

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And some of them are prone to being on the small side is what I've heard.

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And getting anything across the borders next to impossible through the proper channels.

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And you should only ever consider the proper channels.

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Don't try to sneak anything.

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That's a no.

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That'll get you in big trouble.

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Oh yeah, that's not worth the trouble that would bring.

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Don't even think about it.

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Just, eventually, maybe, someone will Maybe someone's up there working in secret and they're going to debut their flock next spring and Canada can finally get some big, good growing birds up there in that breed.

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They have other chickens that grow good up there.

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I understand live birds, but what's the deal with sending hatching eggs across?

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There's not really a disease transmission issue through the hatching eggs that's going to matter.

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So there still, so for you to ship hatching eggs out of country like that Legally.

00:14:55.466 --> 00:15:04.566
You have to have your flock vet checked and they have to do several different things and sign off on it.

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When they do that, you're good to go for 30 days and that's it.

00:15:10.635 --> 00:15:18.755
And you have to have a vet come back out and check your flock and then you can renew it for another 30 days.

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But it's a 30 day export ticket.

00:15:22.535 --> 00:15:25.005
And it can be tricky just to get the vet to come by.

00:15:25.015 --> 00:15:30.985
Like we have to almost have a crisis, life or death, and maybe the vet will be by tomorrow.

00:15:31.735 --> 00:15:44.645
There's a lot of, there's a lot of vets that won't even do it because They're liable for what they signed when they sign and say it's clean and they don't want to be responsible for it.

00:15:45.446 --> 00:15:46.956
Here's a couple of good questions here.

00:15:47.446 --> 00:15:50.035
Samantha Greig wants to know, can you raise breasts?

00:15:50.436 --> 00:15:56.645
As a Cornish game hen processing sooner and younger for the two to two and a half pound weights.

00:15:57.015 --> 00:15:58.115
Absolutely.

00:15:58.916 --> 00:16:00.125
I think I don't look great though.

00:16:00.235 --> 00:16:01.046
Wait, are they?

00:16:01.196 --> 00:16:01.625
Okay.

00:16:01.806 --> 00:16:02.975
What does that look like?

00:16:03.426 --> 00:16:03.905
Okay.

00:16:04.505 --> 00:16:14.676
Like a Cornish hen where you're talking about a Cornish cross harvested at four weeks or three and a half weeks, it still looks somewhat plump.

00:16:14.916 --> 00:16:16.457
The bone length

00:16:16.457 --> 00:16:17.486
is different.

00:16:17.486 --> 00:16:18.000
Huh?

00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:18.515
Yeah.

00:16:18.515 --> 00:16:19.543
The bone

00:16:19.543 --> 00:16:21.086
length is different.

00:16:21.086 --> 00:16:21.600
Yeah.

00:16:21.650 --> 00:16:26.671
Yes, you can do it, but what is the, what is the appearance of that going to be?

00:16:27.471 --> 00:16:29.760
Is it still going to look okay to do that?

00:16:30.561 --> 00:16:34.941
Or, okay, so some fowl, the bones grow out.

00:16:35.556 --> 00:16:38.375
And then the meat catches up, the fleshing catches up.

00:16:38.655 --> 00:16:40.716
So turkeys do that, right?

00:16:40.865 --> 00:16:53.905
Because turkeys go through that ugly stage between week 8 and week 11 and then all of a sudden once the structure or the frame is built, the bones are in place, then they start fleshing out rapidly.

00:16:54.706 --> 00:16:59.145
Jack, you're making me want to go find a volunteer out of my seven week old cockerels just for science.

00:16:59.225 --> 00:17:00.005
You should do that.

00:17:00.806 --> 00:17:01.395
You should do that.

00:17:01.895 --> 00:17:03.666
It's been a cockerel heavy season.

00:17:03.666 --> 00:17:05.986
I've got extra for boys.

00:17:06.226 --> 00:17:07.576
I'm really curious what they look like.

00:17:08.165 --> 00:17:09.395
Yeah, now I am too.

00:17:09.546 --> 00:17:13.435
We'll expect a carcass post, on Facebook in the next few days.

00:17:13.786 --> 00:17:14.661
You better give me a week.

00:17:15.461 --> 00:17:21.560
And this is for Mandy and Jeff Austin wants to know the best feeding recommendations for Bresse.

00:17:22.361 --> 00:17:22.490
Go ahead

00:17:22.490 --> 00:17:22.830
Mandy.

00:17:23.631 --> 00:17:34.300
You're going to have to correct me, but the program you set me up with the 23 percent starter and then by four weeks, switching them over to What was the grow or 19%?

00:17:35.101 --> 00:17:36.601
23, 19 and 17.

00:17:36.641 --> 00:17:37.131
And then do

00:17:37.131 --> 00:17:39.101
that up until about week 12.

00:17:39.691 --> 00:17:40.611
At least that's what I did.

00:17:41.381 --> 00:17:41.971
And then put them

00:17:41.971 --> 00:17:44.570
on the 17 percent finishing formula.

00:17:45.101 --> 00:17:50.770
And I was having them processed four weeks after being on the finishing formula.

00:17:51.070 --> 00:17:54.790
And I feel like maybe there could have been some more corn in it, a little more corn heavy for, or.

00:17:55.260 --> 00:17:57.621
Whatever puts more fat on.

00:17:57.701 --> 00:18:02.510
They were a little leaner on the finishing by keeping nutrition in it.

00:18:02.520 --> 00:18:08.191
Cause with the finishing I was doing it was essentially milk, corn and wheat.

00:18:08.990 --> 00:18:10.560
And that was it for 2 3 weeks.

00:18:11.111 --> 00:18:18.121
But what you provided with that formula was full nutrition, but they just didn't put the fat on exactly the same.

00:18:18.891 --> 00:18:19.230
No.

00:18:19.621 --> 00:18:20.510
But the starter was

00:18:20.820 --> 00:18:21.391
fantastic.

00:18:21.391 --> 00:18:23.861
Those were chunky monkeys at 4 days old.

00:18:24.040 --> 00:18:24.211
Yeah.

00:18:25.010 --> 00:18:32.020
And we can change the finisher feed based on what you want, out of the gate, formulating a finisher feed for people.

00:18:32.641 --> 00:18:48.621
That was, a little bit more uniform for everybody, but, yeah, it's 2319 at 17 was the protein profiles, but, we jacked up the amino acids to get those growth rates in the early first eight weeks.

00:18:49.266 --> 00:18:53.705
That you were seeing cause earlier you were talking about harvesting at like 15 or 16 weeks.

00:18:53.705 --> 00:18:54.556
And I thought, yeah, it used to

00:18:54.615 --> 00:18:56.695
be 16 to 18 weeks.

00:18:56.695 --> 00:18:57.425
Now I'm at 14

00:18:58.226 --> 00:18:58.246
to

00:18:58.536 --> 00:19:00.945
16 for a similar result.

00:19:01.576 --> 00:19:02.536
It's all in the feed.

00:19:03.195 --> 00:19:13.605
Yeah, that was definitely, cause I didn't change my genetics in a year, like the same flock, but just by changing the feed, bumped me up like an average of three weeks, which was pretty cool.

00:19:13.945 --> 00:19:15.496
Now I just started saying that's very cool.

00:19:16.296 --> 00:19:24.415
Hey, we've got some photos that Mandy sent us and we've been getting so many questions, this is great, man.

00:19:25.215 --> 00:19:26.276
Let's pull these up.

00:19:27.076 --> 00:19:32.405
So that's a historical image of the white and the black, and I wish the U.

00:19:32.405 --> 00:19:32.596
S.

00:19:32.605 --> 00:19:38.316
flock had that if you look at those birds right there, they are the exact same shape, just different colors.

00:19:39.115 --> 00:20:12.111
But the black bresse and blue bresse, the colored ones that are in the US, tend to be smaller than the white bresse, and that's just a difference of lineage, and that difference can be anywhere from a pound difference all the way towards two and a half, three pound different weights, they're not identical between the colors, so that's a big thing that'll have to be worked on over time is getting the different colors To be more similar to each other in their structure and shape, to meet standard universally, no matter what color it is.

00:20:12.911 --> 00:20:13.721
That'll be tricky.

00:20:13.730 --> 00:20:15.201
That's gonna take a while.

00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:25.131
That's the grey, that's the, from my understanding, that's the oldest, and, I'm talking like 500 years these birds were going on in France.

00:20:25.151 --> 00:20:28.721
That's the first mention of them is 500 years ago.

00:20:29.520 --> 00:20:30.971
And they've been through a lot since then.

00:20:31.770 --> 00:20:33.330
And I love this color pattern.

00:20:33.381 --> 00:20:38.671
It reminds me very much of silver penciled hamburgs.

00:20:38.671 --> 00:20:40.310
It's a mouthful, but,

00:20:40.330 --> 00:20:43.810
now that color did sneak through in some genetics in the U.

00:20:43.810 --> 00:20:44.020
S.

00:20:44.030 --> 00:20:44.500
flock.

00:20:44.615 --> 00:20:50.326
Cause as the longer you line breed and tighten in your genetics, new stuff will come up.

00:20:50.326 --> 00:20:55.685
And one of the new things that came up was this color pattern from one of the first import lines.

00:20:56.395 --> 00:20:59.236
And it started with one bird and then a couple more birds.

00:20:59.256 --> 00:21:04.905
And so the two people were first trying to figure out what it was and what it meant.

00:21:05.016 --> 00:21:11.105
And then they were speaking to some breeders in France and they were like, Oh, they carry the gray pattern in there.

00:21:11.346 --> 00:21:12.895
You should keep reading that, see what happens.

00:21:13.355 --> 00:21:14.346
So that's what they're doing.

00:21:14.615 --> 00:21:21.486
It's going to be a while before they have the pattern but the fact that it was in there already and it didn't have to get imported, that's pretty cool.

00:21:21.715 --> 00:21:22.986
And now I want to play with those.

00:21:22.986 --> 00:21:26.226
But any pattern

00:21:26.236 --> 00:21:28.125
bird is a challenge to breed.

00:21:28.145 --> 00:21:28.685
Oh yeah.

00:21:29.226 --> 00:21:30.006
Tricky.

00:21:30.806 --> 00:21:48.586
The picture on the left side, that was in England in 1913, at a show there, and then that's just one of my growouts, I think she's from last year, and I wanted to put them side by side to see what was different and what was similar in that amount of time.

00:21:49.066 --> 00:21:51.546
of birds that are the same breed.

00:21:51.546 --> 00:21:57.415
I thought that was a neat comparison of the tail angles are different.

00:21:57.425 --> 00:21:59.266
The slope is like that.

00:21:59.385 --> 00:22:02.715
There's a lot different there, but there's still some similarities too.

00:22:02.965 --> 00:22:03.306
Yes.

00:22:04.105 --> 00:22:11.846
I think if your bird didn't have quite the feather length that she does, she would look much more like that bird on the left.

00:22:12.645 --> 00:22:13.796
Yeah, I could see that.

00:22:14.596 --> 00:22:25.226
And you were the one teaching me about fluff and feather makeup and explaining more of those finer points that I never had a reason to think about before.

00:22:25.226 --> 00:22:26.111
It

00:22:26.111 --> 00:22:27.566
sure changes your look.

00:22:27.566 --> 00:22:28.566
It really does.

00:22:28.736 --> 00:22:29.516
Yeah.

00:22:30.316 --> 00:22:33.076
And that's an example of the French standard.

00:22:33.875 --> 00:22:35.266
You cleaned that up real good.

00:22:35.296 --> 00:22:36.796
I feel like I can read that now.

00:22:37.596 --> 00:22:39.816
It was a little bit of a challenge to read it, wasn't it?

00:22:40.236 --> 00:22:41.046
It's old.

00:22:41.846 --> 00:22:42.506
So am I.

00:22:43.306 --> 00:22:47.165
So it's describing essentially what a dual purpose is.

00:22:47.185 --> 00:22:52.536
Like a dual purpose bird for the body and the breast and those descriptive words in there.

00:22:52.846 --> 00:23:00.816
You'll see some of that same word play in other breeds with their standard of it, that dual purpose category.

00:23:00.836 --> 00:23:03.915
There's just a certain structure that really brings that out better.

00:23:04.715 --> 00:23:07.056
So long as you're going for that overall balance.

00:23:07.415 --> 00:23:10.996
This range standard is very close to the one y'all have here in America.

00:23:11.796 --> 00:23:12.036
Yeah.

00:23:12.036 --> 00:23:18.566
The only thing we really changed was add an extra pound because a lot of the U S birds are that size.

00:23:19.066 --> 00:23:19.125
So it's

00:23:19.365 --> 00:23:20.756
not something we're breeding towards.

00:23:20.756 --> 00:23:22.806
It's something we're working with and it was already here.

00:23:23.056 --> 00:23:29.705
They were coming up heavier than standard, so the general consensus was, Alright let's just add another pound onto the standard.

00:23:29.756 --> 00:23:31.726
They're American Bresse, it's bigger here, like

00:23:32.175 --> 00:23:32.685
There you go.

00:23:33.365 --> 00:23:33.625
Yeah.

00:23:34.425 --> 00:23:37.236
It seemed to be making the most sense.

00:23:37.266 --> 00:23:43.496
Now, this is an example of two different genetic pools, and mine is the one on the left.

00:23:44.026 --> 00:23:59.476
And the other one on the right is from elsewhere, but you can see there's differences in the skin texture, and the plumpness is similar, but the age, like I thought it was neat, because these were fed out on the identical feed.

00:23:59.855 --> 00:24:08.135
Identical housing, like they were raised together, just a two week stagger in age, but it was just neat to see the differences.

00:24:08.615 --> 00:24:11.086
But I think I got the scald water a little too warm on mine.

00:24:11.086 --> 00:24:17.175
I think it started cooking a little too soon and it changed the color of the skin because you have to watch your scald water.

00:24:17.306 --> 00:24:26.256
155 is too much and I try to aim for 150 degrees to 155 degrees for scalding, much warmer.

00:24:26.881 --> 00:24:31.000
And you run the risk of changing the texture of the skin by too much heat.

00:24:31.191 --> 00:24:33.830
Why not 145 like all other?

00:24:34.631 --> 00:24:36.250
I was always told 150.

00:24:36.381 --> 00:24:38.601
Yeah, ducks and waterfowl are 150 to 155.

00:24:39.401 --> 00:24:47.471
Now, if you catch them at the right time on feather cycle, you should be able to do them between 1.

00:24:47.471 --> 00:24:48.070
45 and 1.

00:24:48.070 --> 00:24:48.270
50.

00:24:49.070 --> 00:24:56.740
I do have to wrestle with pin feathers sometimes on those earlier ages, right in the middle of our own feathers.

00:24:57.161 --> 00:25:10.121
Yep, so before you actually even think about processing them, you should pull back the feathers and look at that, that, the pin feather development, and you're going to find a specific week timeframe.

00:25:10.546 --> 00:25:15.766
When everything will pluck clean and you need to write that down and share it with the rest of the world.

00:25:16.195 --> 00:25:18.976
It's, this is the nature of heritage poultry.

00:25:19.685 --> 00:25:29.486
And whether it's ducks, geese, heritage fowl, they will hit a specific window where there's no pin feathers cycling.

00:25:30.286 --> 00:25:32.165
So it'll reduce your hand plucking.

00:25:32.756 --> 00:25:33.925
Oh, that'd be nice.

00:25:34.096 --> 00:25:34.306
Yeah.

00:25:34.355 --> 00:25:35.026
Thanks for that tip.

00:25:35.205 --> 00:25:37.286
I'll try that on this next batch I have going.

00:25:37.326 --> 00:25:39.135
See, there's your another little experiment.

00:25:39.175 --> 00:25:39.355
Yeah.

00:25:39.355 --> 00:25:40.576
Another little nugget.

00:25:40.576 --> 00:25:42.405
Yeah.

00:25:42.486 --> 00:25:44.405
And when you find out, is it 14 weeks?

00:25:44.405 --> 00:25:47.826
Is it 16 weeks or, what, whatever that date is.

00:25:48.355 --> 00:25:54.066
You just need to record it and share it with everybody else especially anyone using similar genetics as yours.

00:25:54.645 --> 00:25:55.246
But yeah, that's true.

00:25:55.796 --> 00:26:01.846
Pretty much the breast should be uniform enough to say, okay, if you do them at 15 weeks, there's no pin feather plucking.

00:26:02.355 --> 00:26:03.576
It should be really close.

00:26:04.375 --> 00:26:07.976
I wonder what the difference is between the fast feathering genetics.

00:26:07.986 --> 00:26:13.006
And then if that window would be the same on the ones that have, there is some slow feathering going around.

00:26:13.806 --> 00:26:15.425
Wait, hold it stop, time out.

00:26:16.226 --> 00:26:20.076
No, that is piss poor feed program, okay?

00:26:20.695 --> 00:26:22.635