March 11, 2024

Mandelyn Makes A Flock Visit-Part 2

Show Notes
Transcript

In this podcast episode, Mandelyn, John, and Rip discuss the challenges and considerations involved in breeding and selecting quality birds. Some of the topics covered include the selection process, market traits, dealing with setbacks, and the importance of sustainability in raising standardbred poultry.

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WEBVTT

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Hi, I'm Mandelyn Royal and I would like to welcome you to another episode of the Poultry Keepers podcast.

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Joining me in the studio are John Gunterman and Rip Stalvey, the rest of our podcast team and we're looking forward to visiting with you and talking poultry from feathers to function.

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I explained to her, I was like, don't worry about how many actual females we find, because remember, each of these females is going to produce X number of eggs, so we really need to focus on Looking at the season as a whole over multiple months and stagger hatching from just the better females instead of trying to rush through and use bulk and use females that are not actually going to do any breeding favors to the program.

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So only the best moves forward.

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So how many females does she have now that are good enough?

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Like six.

00:01:03.237 --> 00:01:20.161
Okay, which just falls in line with that rule of tens, yeah, the only thing we don't have, if there was, following the rules of tens, I would expect at about six really good females, and two or three really good males, from that starting number, the only thing you didn't get was any outstanding males.

00:01:20.771 --> 00:01:29.081
Yeah, and that was really unfortunate, and based on the picture, she did have some promising ones that just fizzled out before it was their time to shine.

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Which is okay.

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You can call that self culling because you do have to keep an eye on overall vigor and health and all of those things.

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If a bird takes himself out of the program, more power to him.

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I think if a bird doesn't appeal to the breeder, It's certainly not going to appeal to the consumer.

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Because it's the breeder that is their own best filter.

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And just the way you're describing your birds to your potential customers or your customers, they're going to feel the energy and excitement in your voice, or if it's not there, if they're customer service is an art form, you've worked retail, I think we all have yeah, even in doing technical support, I used to tell my people on the phone, smile, the customer can hear it on the other side of the phone, they really can.

00:02:19.526 --> 00:02:22.126
So if you're down on your birds, they're not going to sell well.

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I just had a thought occurred to me.

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Looking at this from a marketing perspective.

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That if you can somehow figure out a way to weave all the selection process that you have to go through.

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To get those really good marketable birds.

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That should be part of your sales story.

00:02:39.941 --> 00:02:40.534
Yeah.

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It's a story that sells things.

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It's not so much the product.

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Most of the time.

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At farmer's market, I would be sitting there with pictures of, the three birds.

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So I had this.

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Person, Mandy, drive all the way up here and help me sort through.

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And these are the birds that we pared down to last year.

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And this is what I'm producing this year.

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And that's just going to help drive sales and customer enthusiasm.

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And it's just, it's a cycle that feeds into itself.

00:03:05.965 --> 00:03:09.074
Where you get excited about your birds, you take better care of them.

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It all just feeds back into the loop.

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That's really true.

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And you have to have confidence in what you're producing.

00:03:15.935 --> 00:03:16.615
Oh, sure.

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And it can be heartbreaking to make this kind of investment and be, at the end of your first year and go, wow, I spent all this time and money on all these birds and all I have left is this, but I look at it as, we're phenohunting.

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We're looking for the phenotypical expression that's going to do great in our environment.

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And to walk away the first year with even that many birds, I think is pretty darn good.

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So the struggle to avoid doing a bloodline cross, because I know I was able to supply her with a spare and that's going to, fertilize some eggs and fill the incubator for the freezer.

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And it'll also help to ask the question, how quickly could we change the underbody of the bird with this one line cross if he's with a couple of those chosen females, but also to keep that original line pure, we need to go back to where she got them from and ask, do you have some males?

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Cause she has another three pens that don't even have a male in them.

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And ideally they should come from that source to keep that line pure.

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Yes, absolutely.

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Or as closely related as possible.

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So we're not just muddying up the genetics.

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Because that's a whole other breeding plan if we're going to start line crossing and that's a whole other time commitment on getting it right.

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Starting just from, is it going to be a male or female based line cross?

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And technically the female is better, but she doesn't even have the male.

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And so how do you back out of that?

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There is no back out

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plan.

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And then based off of what we were seeing, as far as them still wanting to do that feather picking and stuff.

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When I got back, I did jump on the phone with Jeff Maddox, because he's, our local feed expert.

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And we were on the phone for over an hour, talking about what I saw and which recipes she was using.

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And I was like you formulated it.

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And he was like who was doing the mixing?

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We have some more irons in the fire on what to figure out to get this flock up and going better, but.

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And it sounds like they have a pretty big operation and they're not ready to take on mixing their own feed.

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Not just yet, but it might become a thing that has to happen for the sake of the birds.

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Any other surprises in these other pens?

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You went through three pens, we talked about the first one a lot.

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Were the other two pretty much the same, or any surprises?

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The second pen, I think I only found one bird.

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And each pen had eight or nine birds in it.

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All female, when I got there, because the last male standing was off in his own area to protect him from getting henpecked.

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And he was also with one female who herself had been dramatically henpecked, like she was bloody on the backside where they had ripped her open even, and so we saved those two birds for last, but the second pen was similar to the first and disappointingly consistent.

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How old were these birds now?

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They ranged all of them were old enough to be laying.

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All of them were at point of lay or past it.

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So probably five and a half, six months old, all the way up to seven, eight, nine months.

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I was wondering if this female might have been a peck out in the nesting box or something, if she was injured.

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I thought of a follow up question that I need to ask her still on, when they go to bed, are the bald butt females the ones on the top rung of the roost?

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Because the way the roosts were designed put faces to butts.

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I'm not a fan of the ladder roosts anymore.

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I like the way they look in a pen, but having seen a pen side by side of the ladder style roost and everybody on the same horizontal, there's a lot less competition and It's just calmer in the flat roost style, versus having everybody on a ladder, because they're not constantly jockeying for position, yes.

00:07:18.555 --> 00:07:23.615
Everybody's on the same plane, literally, and that makes for so much more of a harmonious pen.

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Yeah, so I am still, a week and a half after the fact, thinking of follow up questions.

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That's good.

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For me, I love just, going, I don't know, this is new.

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Because it means it's a learning opportunity for me as well.

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Mandy, I'm curious you went over all her birds with her, and y'all found what you found.

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What's your advice for her next step?

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How does she go forward?

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How does she move forward from here?

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Keeping track of those females that sorted out as the best and taking their traits into consideration, When she does reach out to the original breeder so that she has almost like a shopping list of traits that the boys should hopefully have.

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And she was like what if I have to start out with a whole other batch of chicks?

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And I'm like the same selection parameters are going to apply.

00:08:16.324 --> 00:08:31.365
And if you bring in another group of 30, then we still need to be just as picky and just as hard, but with some tolerance on the males, just to avoid this scenario from happening again, where they might have been a little bit over culled.

00:08:31.435 --> 00:08:35.634
For the first year, she might have been a little too hard on them.

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I would much rather see her do that, though, than I would be just grab them at random and say you'll do.

00:08:42.965 --> 00:08:45.355
Correct, because that doesn't do anybody any favors.

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That'll make more chicken, but what kind of chicken?

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Maybe not even.

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You start regressing.

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Unless you're I found this trap in the chicken world.

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Unless you're constantly pushing forward, you're going to slide back.

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There is no coast.

00:09:03.195 --> 00:09:10.070
Right, and then if you start doing that extreme mating of taking the absolute biggest, that'll set you back too in the future.

00:09:10.129 --> 00:09:18.980
As closely complimentary as possible with a lean towards the direction that you want to go, is the way that I like to do my pairing.

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And, that's the best way that I've thought to describe it.

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Maybe somebody else could describe it a little better

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for other people, incremental improvements without going to the extreme.

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Mandy, I'm curious.

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Do you and this reader have any follow up activities planned?

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We're going to wait and see what the access is like for additional males, and then we'll figure out how best to salvage the hatch season because the hatch season is what's going to fill the freezer.

00:09:50.725 --> 00:09:56.254
That's the entire absolute goal is decent looking freezer birds.

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So worst case scenario, we see what my one male does.

00:10:01.475 --> 00:10:04.715
And how that's going to change that freezer result.

00:10:04.725 --> 00:10:12.794
And if she even gets to have second year sellable table birds, because she didn't sell any birds in a shrink bag at all.

00:10:13.534 --> 00:10:19.595
Between the keel issues and everything else she was seeing, this was a$0 net season for her.

00:10:20.394 --> 00:10:22.355
Did she track feed conversion ratio?

00:10:22.914 --> 00:10:27.808
Either along the way, because that to me, that's like the end of the year check.

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Okay does she have a bead on how much feed did she buy this year?

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And we'll compare that to next year.

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And how much meat did she make with that feed this year?

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Compare that to next year.

00:10:39.578 --> 00:10:41.028
That's a good thing to bring up though.

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To me it's all about, how efficiently are we converting my hard earned money that I buy feed with into meat to put in the freezer.

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And inefficient birds have no place on the farm.

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So I had, this is a little bit unrelated, but at the end of the year, I went to our feed mill and I said, Hey, do you have a printout you could do that shows what I bought this season because I didn't keep all of my receipts and I'm curious, and I hadn't, oh, that hurts.

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I hadn't shopped anywhere else.

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I got my food store has one of those old line printers, and I asked for that report and it went for a long time.

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The good news was.

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When I compared that printout from the feed mill to my spreadsheet of what I sold, which wasn't much because I'm not big on the whole selling side of things.

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I'm about to fill in my freezer too.

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And I had a solid break even.

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They didn't cost me anything to keep.

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There was also zero profit, but break even is perfect.

00:11:51.599 --> 00:11:53.168
Yeah, you can't beat that.

00:11:53.619 --> 00:11:56.568
And you didn't go to the grocery store to buy meat.

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I didn't go to the grocery store for eggs.

00:11:59.938 --> 00:12:06.958
I didn't go for meat, and the poultry, because we also get our pork feed from them too, the chickens paid for the pigs.

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Oh, heck yeah.

00:12:09.818 --> 00:12:11.168
Yeah, so the pork was free.

00:12:11.879 --> 00:12:15.259
In essence, you did make a profit, in a sense.

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If you look at what you saved off of your grocery bill, and what you've put in fertility back into the land that you live on, and there's a whole bunch of intangibles there.

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Oh, our tomato row getting supplemented with peat moss with some chicken poo.

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Our tomatoes next season are going to be incredible.

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Especially when I take the ground up shells and add that calcium back into the soil.

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I want to turn you on to the idea of a hugelkultur now.

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It's super easy to build and it's a great way to mound up a big pile of manure.

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And use it up.

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We do a little bit of that because of how sloppy our ground is and how high our water table is.

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All of our gardening is above ground level, even after we install drainage.

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But having that bunk of logs basically down below everything just acts as a beautiful sponge.

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Chicken poop is a beautiful thing.

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Don't waste it.

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Don't waste it and give it time to age because it can be a little bit hot and toasty.

00:13:16.024 --> 00:13:38.504
One thing I think we need to mention to our listeners is that I don't want folks to take away from what we've been talking about that we're trying to focus on the adverse things that this person experienced because if you're going to breed chickens, you're going to have to be able to deal With adversity and setbacks.

00:13:39.303 --> 00:13:39.984
Oh yeah.

00:13:40.384 --> 00:13:43.673
And these are completely normal numbers to be looking at.

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And I would much rather personally deal with the setbacks and the abnormalities sooner rather than later, because the sooner you get them cleared up, the faster you can begin to have really good birds after that.

00:13:58.053 --> 00:13:58.464
Definitely.

00:13:58.504 --> 00:14:07.153
I'd prefer to start with 120 eggs and finish my first season with a rooster and two or three outstanding hens.

00:14:07.803 --> 00:14:14.634
And sometimes I've started off with 25 chicks only to have zero at the end.

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It can be heartbreaking.

00:14:16.923 --> 00:14:17.173
Yeah.

00:14:17.173 --> 00:14:18.803
No, I've been through some heartbreak.

00:14:19.604 --> 00:14:35.573
And I think folks need to go into it, realizing that with the right expectations you're not going to buy a dozen fancy hatching eggs from even a top quality breeder and the very next season sell your hatching eggs for the exact same amount of money.

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The expectation is to source the best stock that you can.

00:14:40.548 --> 00:14:52.423
Develop that flock, sort, select, figure out what those genetics are breeding forward because you want to make sure that what you retained is going to reproduce a predictable result.

00:14:52.423 --> 00:15:03.234
And so you need to get one, two, three generations into them to confirm what it is you think you have before you can even think about putting a big old price tag on them.

00:15:03.563 --> 00:15:12.604
If you think you can get expensive birds and be in business that next season, you're already making mistakes on your long term reputation.

00:15:13.063 --> 00:15:16.094
Because those prices are from reputation.

00:15:16.094 --> 00:15:21.933
And if people ask me for my eggs right now, I refer them to the breeder I got my chickens from.

00:15:22.734 --> 00:15:27.953
Which is really smart and that helps cover down too, because that's going to protect your future reputation.

00:15:28.504 --> 00:15:40.283
Yes, and it's going to, if we get into a situation where he has a catastrophe and I have a catastrophe, I know somebody who might have some closely related genetics that I could reach out to.

00:15:40.683 --> 00:15:52.969
The more seed flocks available, the better, especially if you have some regional coverage going on too, because then you can really all rely on each other and it's not competitive.

00:15:53.168 --> 00:15:55.568
It doesn't have to be a cutthroat thing.

00:15:55.568 --> 00:16:00.798
It should be a cohesive team effort that focuses on the bird.

00:16:01.208 --> 00:16:09.839
There's a breeder over, there's an island called Hero Island on Lake Champlain who does some really nice Chanticleers, but they're localized to that area.

00:16:09.839 --> 00:16:16.359
They wouldn't do good 1500 feet higher in elevation with the, negative 38s that I get here.

00:16:16.359 --> 00:16:19.609
And and she's only, 60 miles away.

00:16:20.408 --> 00:16:23.958
Even though they have the same conformation, I, they would not do as well.

00:16:23.958 --> 00:16:27.298
If somebody says, Hey, I'm from Burlington area and I want some Chanticleer.

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I'm going to send you to the person who's, five minutes away.

00:16:31.239 --> 00:16:49.448
And by keeping a smaller scale sort of flock to where, on the best days you can't keep up with demand and you can instead share that demand with where it needs to go, especially when you account for those environmental variances, then you can say I don't have any right now.

00:16:49.619 --> 00:16:55.458
And honestly, the better birds for your situation are probably going to come from XYZ farm.

00:16:55.458 --> 00:17:02.448
Conversely, I'll get referrals from other people who said, Hey, I was talking to so and so about getting some of their birds.

00:17:02.448 --> 00:17:07.818
And they said that yours are more acclimated to, my elevation and my wind chills.

00:17:08.618 --> 00:17:13.999
Sharing the flock results and helping people get that genuine good start.

00:17:14.338 --> 00:17:15.729
Because that's what.

00:17:16.219 --> 00:17:17.979
My buddy up North, I guess I'll call her.

00:17:18.348 --> 00:17:21.138
She was looking for that genuine start.

00:17:21.169 --> 00:17:25.209
And at the time I couldn't help her and I was so buried in what I was doing.

00:17:25.209 --> 00:17:26.729
So I referred someone.

00:17:26.729 --> 00:17:35.239
So she brings in those birds from the referral and they're not the same, they're different, which was very educational for me.

00:17:35.828 --> 00:17:38.749
They came from a different breeder than your birds came from and you've put.

00:17:39.548 --> 00:17:42.348
Five plus years into your selection.

00:17:42.358 --> 00:17:44.878
I'm starting into season eight now.

00:17:45.348 --> 00:17:46.219
Wow, that's good.

00:17:47.019 --> 00:17:51.439
But, we'll get it figured out and we'll get her up and going where she needs to be.

00:17:51.479 --> 00:17:54.459
And we're going to make it work without forcing it.

00:17:54.459 --> 00:17:56.909
We're going to let the birds tell us what we need to do.

00:17:57.709 --> 00:17:59.578
You're not going to tell those birds what they're doing.

00:17:59.578 --> 00:18:00.898
Those birds are going to tell you.

00:18:01.699 --> 00:18:07.949
And they're going to respond or not to, their husbandry practices, their environment, their feed their everything.

00:18:08.659 --> 00:18:14.574
And once, once you get the right combination of genetics and everybody finds their groove, it's just going to go.

00:18:14.574 --> 00:18:16.784
Smooth sailing until the next catastrophe.

00:18:16.784 --> 00:18:20.294
Until the next raccoon or ermine or whatever.

00:18:20.443 --> 00:18:23.064
Being down to one male is scary.

00:18:23.213 --> 00:18:24.104
I feel for her.

00:18:24.903 --> 00:18:32.003
I, as I, I do recommend people when they get in this situation, start keeping a two week rolling backup of eggs to set just in case.

00:18:32.804 --> 00:18:37.253
Yeah, and in her situation, she didn't have that egg supply just yet either.

00:18:37.923 --> 00:18:39.223
With the age of the birds.

00:18:39.273 --> 00:18:49.874
Yeah, they don't try to, base anything at all on pullet eggs and pullet hatches, but if that's the only chance you have to dig yourself out of a predation event, set it.

00:18:50.463 --> 00:18:56.884
Thankfully she has horses and goats and sheep and pigs and everything is fenced again, and fenced on top of that.

00:18:57.534 --> 00:18:57.913
Yeah.

00:18:58.203 --> 00:19:04.084
Have I mentioned Weasels, ermine, things like that.

00:19:04.364 --> 00:19:07.263
She's got a really great dog though, that dog and I bonded.

00:19:08.064 --> 00:19:10.413
I might be better friends with a dog at this point.

00:19:11.213 --> 00:19:12.284
So what's their next step?

00:19:13.084 --> 00:19:13.874
What are they gonna do?

00:19:14.673 --> 00:19:19.884
She's gonna reach back out to the source and see if she can figure out a boy and then we're gonna go from there.

00:19:20.473 --> 00:19:22.794
And this is a breeder of, good enough.

00:19:23.594 --> 00:19:24.693
Yeah, good enough.

00:19:24.894 --> 00:19:27.124
They've got scale and options going

00:19:27.124 --> 00:19:27.534
for them.

00:19:28.144 --> 00:19:37.624
The other thing is when they reach back and explain what's going on, they're going to be able to speak intelligently and go, yeah, I've got a male line that could help here.

00:19:37.624 --> 00:19:39.804
Let me collect some eggs from this pen.

00:19:40.604 --> 00:19:47.554
It would really only take one, one good solid male to keep that line pure.

00:19:47.923 --> 00:19:53.483
But if that original breeder isn't willing to work with that, then that kind of gives us some answers too.

00:19:54.284 --> 00:19:59.314
And if we're hoping to get one good male, I would say that's 36 eggs to start with.

00:19:59.614 --> 00:20:02.034
If they're being shipped, you're going to lose half.

00:20:02.834 --> 00:20:05.324
It's the worst time of year to need a male.

00:20:05.913 --> 00:20:12.023
Yeah, everybody wants one and everybody's in breeding season right now, or coming into it within the next two to three weeks.

00:20:12.023 --> 00:20:15.534
And we did our culling back in August, September, October.

00:20:16.114 --> 00:20:20.443
Those extra ones are already long into the freezer, if not already in our bellies.

00:20:21.243 --> 00:20:21.993
So we'll see.

00:20:22.794 --> 00:20:23.134
See.

00:20:23.213 --> 00:20:34.503
So when you were selecting, how critical were you on differentiating between what you would consider market quality and the standard.

00:20:34.854 --> 00:20:43.794
I was looking at those market traits because first and foremost, that's what the market's going to hinge on and then looking at the standard traits.

00:20:44.163 --> 00:20:49.773
So I would say though, and when I look at the body shape.

00:20:50.554 --> 00:20:54.983
They may actually lean towards being a little longer of body.

00:20:55.723 --> 00:21:06.273
And I was trying to look for that balance between standard and market and to find that little extra piece of width in there that looks better in the shrink bag.

00:21:06.554 --> 00:21:06.834
Yeah.

00:21:07.634 --> 00:21:18.104
I was trying to balance it and it was still just a little bit of a struggle to find the best of both worlds, I guess you'd say.

00:21:18.903 --> 00:21:23.324
Cause I know my most market pretty birds.

00:21:24.124 --> 00:21:38.374
It's where once those feathers are off and they're in the bag, that's ever so slightly outside of breed standard, technically, unless you break down that standard and you get into what specific words mean.

00:21:38.614 --> 00:21:43.693
So like when it says broad of chest how broad is too broad?

00:21:44.493 --> 00:21:46.003
How broad is just right?

00:21:46.804 --> 00:21:48.584
And it's that's where it's open for the interpretation.

00:21:48.584 --> 00:21:52.183
That's a mutual decision based on the customer and the farmer.

00:21:52.183 --> 00:21:54.144
The farmer's going to produce what's going to sell.

00:21:54.153 --> 00:22:05.163
The customer's going to ultimately dictate what they're going to, if they're looking at a table with four birds, and they're like, they keep buying the bird that's the widest, hopefully the farmer's going to pick on it.

00:22:05.173 --> 00:22:10.344
And how much of that is the consumer psyche of what they've been trained on with the Cornish Cross?

00:22:10.844 --> 00:22:21.044
It's subjective, it depends, it's nuanced, it's all in the eye of the beholder, but ultimately the market's gonna decide, I guess you'd say.

00:22:21.844 --> 00:22:25.683
As long as the structure is proper, and it's consistent, and it breeds true.

00:22:25.683 --> 00:22:32.854
As long as they can get out there and chicken good, and then still have a good result, but ideally Are they out there ranging?

00:22:32.864 --> 00:22:35.614
Do they have the wherewithal and the health and the vigor?

00:22:35.963 --> 00:22:46.943
Can they get in there and lay as often as they should in a healthy manner without being overly productive and without being stingy?

00:22:47.249 --> 00:22:49.969
The whole thing is a balancing act.

00:22:50.378 --> 00:22:55.239
It is, and I'm guilty of this myself, is putting, too many birds on not enough property.

00:22:55.608 --> 00:23:03.943
I like to do what I call day ranging, where, they have access to a half an acre behind electric during the day, but at night, everybody's locked up tight.

00:23:04.534 --> 00:23:11.534
That's not always an option for people who have to keep birds in tractors or in even smaller pens.

00:23:12.334 --> 00:23:19.074
I'm excited for the episode we were talking about with Rip, talking about how is all of this possible with a much smaller flock?

00:23:19.453 --> 00:23:19.933
Yes.

00:23:20.374 --> 00:23:27.953
That's going to be fun to get into because I've had small flocks before, and technically on scale, the flock I have is pretty tiny.

00:23:28.648 --> 00:23:37.368
What I have is so tiny compared to like meaningful scale, but small flocks can mean five birds.

00:23:38.169 --> 00:23:43.558
It can, and if they're well selected and you breed them properly, it's completely doable.

00:23:44.179 --> 00:23:49.148
I never want to go into carry more than 16 is my absolute limit over winter.

00:23:49.949 --> 00:23:50.378
Yeah.

00:23:50.659 --> 00:23:52.898
See that's going to be a good episode when we get to that one.

00:23:53.699 --> 00:23:57.318
But I don't need to produce, hundreds of birds anymore.

00:23:58.118 --> 00:24:01.298
We're not hatching out 400 at a time, filling a GQF cabinet.

00:24:01.798 --> 00:24:03.338
those days are over.

00:24:03.519 --> 00:24:06.588
It's time to step back a little and enjoy the gentleman farmer thing.

00:24:07.308 --> 00:24:08.398
Yeah, that's what I call it.

00:24:08.398 --> 00:24:09.469
A gentleman farmer.

00:24:10.269 --> 00:24:14.288
I guess technically rips a gentleman farmer as well down there in Florida.

00:24:15.009 --> 00:24:17.409
I don't even have enough to qualify for a gentleman farmer.

00:24:18.209 --> 00:24:18.709
Yeah.

00:24:19.509 --> 00:24:21.739
How many birds does it take to make a flock?

00:24:22.469 --> 00:24:24.989
Is that two or is that three, four, five?

00:24:25.788 --> 00:24:26.348
It's relative.

00:24:26.348 --> 00:24:29.098
You need a male and a female to start with.

00:24:29.838 --> 00:24:31.159
And they'll make their own flock.

00:24:31.743 --> 00:24:34.784
And if you manage it you could build up from there.

00:24:34.834 --> 00:24:36.713
That's a side project I'm doing with my quail.

00:24:36.723 --> 00:24:39.794
I took myself down to one female and two males.

00:24:40.544 --> 00:24:40.844
Total.

00:24:40.844 --> 00:24:41.834
That's scary.

00:24:42.094 --> 00:24:49.104
Yes, it's great, but I'm doing some genetics and quail are so fast and it's a great way to learn genetics, but.

00:24:49.469 --> 00:24:56.769
Yeah, I'm going to breed this male, he goes away, breed this male, he goes away, and then I got some plans.

00:24:56.769 --> 00:25:00.898
But I just do it because they're fast, and they taste great, and my dog loves them.

00:25:01.699 --> 00:25:02.499
The eggs sell.

00:25:03.298 --> 00:25:05.558
Yeah, and that all helps to cover the feed bill.

00:25:05.709 --> 00:25:09.429
And, at least personally, if I can have the feed bill covered, I'm good.

00:25:09.719 --> 00:25:19.713
And with me, sending all of my potential customers to fellow breeders and the breeder that I get my eggs from, I still, I need some way to, pay that feed bill and make it sustainable.

00:25:20.134 --> 00:25:21.503
We talk about sustainability.

00:25:21.503 --> 00:25:22.513
There's many levels of it.

00:25:22.534 --> 00:25:37.064
There's, physically, there's financially there's all sorts of responsibilities that come along with having these birds that we are responsible for giving the best possible food and care every day of their life until the last day.

00:25:37.864 --> 00:25:38.814
True story.

00:25:39.614 --> 00:25:44.884
This brings us to the close of another Poultry Keepers podcast, and we're very happy you chose to join us.

00:25:45.173 --> 00:25:51.064
Until next time, we'd appreciate it if you would drop us a note, letting us know your thoughts about our podcast.

00:25:51.354 --> 00:25:59.423
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