Results vary quite widely in the breed as a whole and there's vast differences between them, depending on the amount of breeding work behind them. Ours produce quite well and our meat buyers are quite happy with them. We see a high rate of lay and excellent looking carcasses, plus they breed true. We have tried stock from several different places, some were pretty pathetic in growth and fleshing, others riddled with flaws. The hype didn't help them get better and they're very much "buyer beware". With proper breeding selection, they beat every other bird I've ever had, especially once the fat melts down during cooking and they're extra juicy. We are now processing at 14-15 weeks and see a meaningful carcass, after breeding away from the tall/leggy style a lot can have to their structure.

@@arcadianorchard good the hear. Leaders of the breed need a tough standard and an adoption of an attitude that any lines that fail to reach the bare minimums are not bona fide Bresse. A marketable carcass is the bare minimum for any meat breed to be considered "self sufficient". Without a marketable carcass, it's hard to recover input costs.

@@OmegaBlueFarms The most annoying thing is how many "producers" sold out to quantity, before ever having their stock right to do so. Riding the fad. I guess they don't want to be in business for long. Most will jump onto the next fad? I'm going to keep eating our way into better chicken, to keep a great thing going. I wish I could post a carcass photo in the comments, but they're in other videos.

@@arcadianorchard good for you, lead by example and set the standard. I've seen alot of fads come and go in the poultry world. I have learned to watch for 2 things. 1) overpriced chicks, eggs, etc. An economically viable genepool should not need to be supported by excessively high prices. I don't sell hatching eggs and rarely sell chicks, (only when I have a surplus). I will sell breeding stock for the cost of the bird's meat value. 2) chick and egg vendors that don't sell meat are a red flag. It's pretty hard to have a sound and sustainable breeding program without extremely hard culling. In my case, my business plan is to hatch and process about 50 birds a week, 50 weeks/year. Each week, I pick out up to 3 elite birds to redirect into a breeding pen. Overall, it works out to a cull rate north of 95%. So far it's working.

Porter's Heritage Turkeys. Ordered in the Winter for a Spring ship date.

@@arcadianorchard Thank you.

Porter's Rare Breed Heritage Turkeys- you can order poults, but count on some dying because they are fragile babies.

A salt brine will help a lot to change the flavor of older birds. We've gotten partial to processing at 14-16 weeks old, now that our Bresse growth rate and fleshing is better we still see decent sizes at those ages. We tried Biels and JG and the growth rate was much slower, with a lean period of leggy bone growth during our preferred harvest ages. So they would weigh in ok (I look for 6lb+ live weight before processing) but then be mostly bone, with a poor meat to bone ratio. We've gotten away from birds advertised as reaching 10lbs+ because it may very well take them over a year to achieve those weights. American Bresse, Dorking, Lamona, the ones that are a solid "medium" size topping out at 8lbs seem to be the better table birds with the earlier harvest potential. If the breeding effort in them was table and egg focused.

I have some loose sheets of groups but I didn't wing band the birds and really dig in. I'm excited to do the next round on different feeds with the same genetics! The more important difference was the Lysine and Methionine levels, combined with the lack of filler ingredients to reduce the consumption.

Hey Papaw.. got my plucker just about done.. kinda looks like yours :)

You're gonna love it. When I was building mine, I thought it was a lot work but now I'm happy I built instead of buying one.

@@GunClingingPalin I'd love to know what plans you are using for the plucker. I just don't have the money to buy a scalder and a plucker and I've seen that a certain brand of plucker is super flimsy and always comes damaged.

I tried a Bresse/Chantecler cross, using female Bresse, in hopes of gaining the carcass with the cushion comb. F1 was a lot like the Chantecler with their slower growth. Your fastest solution is to dub the males until the future generations are acclimated with smaller combs, while ensuring that your coop is properly ventilated, insulated and free of drafts. The #1 cause of frostbite is humidity build-up inside the coop, or constant drafts of a wet cold.

The Bresse grow faster. Sasso are a hybrid and may lay better annually, but they won't breed true.

Our Bresse lay 5/6 eggs per week when in active lay. They are prone to getting too fat and that will reduce rate of lay after 1 year old. That can be fixed through diet or managing their molt.

​@@arcadianorchardOh ok" So 1 year olds must pay attention to food patterns. Don't let chickens get too fat because it affects fertility

For the hatch room brooders, I switched over to a super fine chopped shaving, but the jury is still out on breakdown time. It mixes well with the Peat Moss though once we get it piled. At some point I want to get the adults into the sort cage for more trait breakdown videos, especially the girls.

Yes! Exactly! I'm starting to get past the hump of "soupy", transitioning over to better consistency. I always say "3 more years" and this time I think it's true. My line has gotten pretty reliable in picking up a bit of a "bowling ball" shape between 6-8 weeks, when compared to other breeds or lines.

@@arcadianorchard I have two lines that I keep to support my main line with genes I might think they need, or down the road to add some fresh blood because they are getting too tightly bred. But I am wondering if I should just cross those two lines, get a sizeable hatch, and do a hard selection, after all, every year of selection improves a line, and then I have one line out of two, but hopefully have kept the best genetics, just to keep my flocks manageable! I have too many birds!

@@pseudopetrus I always "keep too many" and select hard as they mature towards 2 years old. From there, rather than known relation/pen, I spend much more time aligning who the better birds are for each. So for a given male, I will select out the best match in females and most of his girls will end up looking pretty similar. I'm very much "survival of the fittest" and keep a firm grip on vigor/health. There's been some pretty nice birds in type/color that we ate for not being as strong as they should be. I'm hoping that keeps me out of the corner of infertility or line breeding suppression. I never, ever keep a male that was picked on or submissive but I also don't retain the heathen aggressors who don't know when to stop. An old timer once told me that he keeps the wildest males but I prefer to look for the sanest and most active. The ones that give off the impression of intelligence and who actually manage a flock well. I try to keep a male in each pen and back ups with growouts, but sometimes I'll find a reason to cull one and will use another over 2 pens, escorting him back and forth. I haven't yet had a male who wouldn't willingly walk himself back and forth between pens, once he knew what I was asking of him. 😂 As they start coming of age is when I go through the older pens and sort/select/merge or cull, back filling the pens with young stock that sorted out as "promising, grow longer" I started with a pretty soupy mess of genetics, so it's taken a systematic approach to tease out traits, cull through junk, breed past flaws... Just to get them cleaned up. Over the years I've seen a lot of folks complain that the Bresse have weak genetics and a shallow gene pool. I disagree. I think they were sloppily bred when first brought over and not even the original importer did their due diligence of scrubbing the genetics, leaving them riddled with recessive traits and flaws. Then spiral/clan breeding to keep that mess going. All they need is proper breeding work, hard selection and ruthless culling to get past the 3rd generation "hump", to breed onward into better and more predictable birds. THEN split those better/clean birds into lines and THEN spiral/clan breed once they're ready. Another old timer explained to me that if you want to see what faults/flaws are in a line/genetic pool, breed known siblings together. That'll show you every problem they carry. Look for the unaffected birds to move forward with. I haven't tried it directly but have worked through half siblings, which showed that he might be onto something. He had been breeding for quite awhile and is a bit of a geneticist. Here soon I need to start pair hatching, to really amp the quantity from the best of the best. Then I can do the sibling test which ought to show what progress I have made over the last several years, in terms of undesired trait elimination. It took a LONG time to hatch myself into having males that were worth breeding back to. Some folks start off by breeding daughters back to sires and then wonder why they have such stubborn flock problems further on down the line. I did the reverse and would use sons/grandsons back into the female line, with decent results.

@@arcadianorchard Crossing half sibs has worked for me, always one side on my best line, and the variety comes from my other lines. I do it both ways, relatedness through the males or the females, as long as each bird is quality! I hope your followers are reading these posts, you give such good insights!

@@pseudopetrus I hope so too, there's some good ones on other videos from Kerby Jackson, he makes me feel like I don't know much when he starts up with his knowledge. 😅 I have noticed a direct correlation of the females throwing their structure stronger than the males, or their "prettier" details. I've used some fairly fugly looking males because they were extra meaty and it was the female choice that cleaned up the offspring in looks, so long as they were just as meaty.

Maybe? What changed? What don't you like? For me, it was the grey hue to the store bought meat, the flavor of chemicals, too much brine solution and not knowing where it came from.

I have yet to meet a meaty, fast growing Buckeye. Across many dual purpose types, the table trait side of breeding selection just hasn't been done that well.

@@arcadianorchard there are a few people that breed that are getting there Sarah Ann DePew is one of them up north of Columbus. But there flavor is great