Today, I attended a talk from Frank R. Reese Jr. of Good Sheppard Poultry Ranch He's been breeding standard or heritage blood lines of chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese for decades. Here's a quick summary of what I learned:
Virtually all poultry has been bred over a very short 40 year span to produce meat from corn and soy beans. Just like seeds, they are selected for aesthetic performance at market rather than overall quality. The current birds at hatcheries are distant hybrids of standard or heritage poultry varieties that do not live well or have the capability to reproduce on their own. Often they are mislabled as heritage which confuses matters even further. The handfull of companies that own the genes make their money off of volume, and have a stake in keeping reproduction out of individual farmers hands.
It was shocking to me to find out that 9 out of 10 poultry birds in the country are all owned by one corporation from Germany. Slowly companies consolidated as genetic traits were continually selected. Through economic pressure small farmers lost the infrastructure (butchers, drivers, farmers) to keep standard blood lines of chickens available to most of the country. Concurrently, poultry breeding and medicine became obsolete to the world outside industrial production.
Heritage Poultry varieties are like heirloom seeds. They have a full set of genetics which makes them capable of living and surviving disease as well as the ability to reproduce and socialize themselves. The downside for farmers is that they take longer to mature and require different cooking methods.
For more on Heritage Poultry check out Good Sheppard Poultry. and http://www.poultrypress.com
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