Category: Knowledge

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Considering Chickens? Q&A Just for You!

By Jennifer Murtoff, Home to Roost LLC

This article provides answers to some common questions asked by people who are considering getting chickens.

Q: What breed of chicken should I get?

A: Consider the right birds for your climate! For cold climates, choose cold-hardy, dual-purpose birds, such as the Barred Rock, Buff Orpginton, and Wyandotte. Their smaller combs and wattles prevent heat loss. For warm climates, consider Mediterranean breeds like the Leghorn, Minorca, and Andalusian. Their bodies are slimmer, and they have large combs and wattles. A first-time owner may have better success with all the same breed or a flock made up of all large fowl, rather than a flock that includes bantams. See Henderson’s Breed Chart for more detailed info on breeds.

Plymouth Rocks are good cold-hardy breeds and Leghorns are great for warm climates.

Q: Do I need a rooster to get eggs?

A: Nope! Your hens will lay on their own. If you want to hatch chicks, you’ll need a rooster. A rooster also helps protect the flock and keeps peace among the hens.

Nutrena NatureWise provides optimal nutrition for your birds.

Q: Can I feed them table scraps?

A: Fruit and veggie scraps are fine, but make sure that 85% or more of their diet comes from a quality, balanced layer ration. A properly formulated layer feed like Nutrena® NatureWise® supports the immune system, provides important nutrients for great eggs, and supports healthy and effective digestion.

Q: Will I get eggs all the time, and how many?

A: Different breeds lay different numbers of eggs. You can get a rough idea of how many eggs per breed on Henderson’s Breed Chart. Your girls will lay the most during their first 2 to 3 years of life but will likely continue to lay for several years afterwards. They generally stop laying during the winter, but with a few tricks like supplemental lighting, you can maximize your winter eggs. Your hens will start to lay again in the spring. Female birds also stop laying when they’re molting (losing and regrowing their feathers). Sometimes a hen will go broody and want to hatch eggs. When this happens, she’ll stop laying. Following some simple tips can help your hens lay their best.

Your hens will lay different numbers of eggs based on several factors.

 

Q: How do I know when my chicken is sick, and what do I do about it?

It’s important to develop a relationship with a vet who can care for your birds.

A: Chickens are very good at hiding signs of illness, so try to pick up your birds on a regular basis to know what is normal for their bodies and weight. Also know what behaviors are normal. Weight loss and changes from routine can indicate something is wrong. Establish a relationship with an avian or poultry vet in your area, and have an emergency fund for veterinary services. Your state’s agricultural extension office may be a good resource as well. Put together a chicken first-aid kit, including a hospital cage. Get your birds used to being handled in case they have to be treated.

Pullets at point of lay have small, pink combs and wattles, which become larger and more red as they mature.

Q: Should I get chicks or older birds?

A: Chicks are great because they become tame the more you handle them. But they are messy and should be kept in a brooder box (often in the house!). You can also get pullets at point of lay (female birds that are about 20 weeks old). If they were not handled a lot, they may be skittish and wary of humans, but they will lay eggs sooner. You may also adopt a flock of older birds.

Q: Can I add new birds to my flock?

A: Yes! Chicken math is a thing: once you start getting chickens, you’ll want more! But adding new birds to an existing flock can be tricky, so be sure to follow these tips. Also consider the source of the birds and observe proper biosecurity to prevent illness in your flock.

Q: Can I leave my chickens for a few days when I’m out of town?

A: Consider your birds to be a 24/7 commitment. You should have someone plan to look in on them twice a day while you’re away. Morning care should include letting them out of the coop, feeding, and watering. In the evening, around dusk, have your sitter put them back in the coop and collect eggs. The sitter should also monitor for any signs of predators or injury. If you have a veterinarian, provide his or her contact information. Read this post for additional tips.

Q: What kind of housing do I need?

A: Chickens don’t need a fancy home, but they do have a few basic requirements. The coop should be well ventilated but draft free; there should be some air circulation, but, in winter especially, cold air should not come rushing through cracks. Keep the coop and run as dry as possible to prevent illness and frostbite. You’ll also need to have enough space for your birds to prevent them from pecking one another: 4 square feet per bird in the coop; 6–8 square feet per bird in the run.  

Q: How do I convince my neighbors that chickens are a good idea?

A: Sometimes chickens are a hard sell, but they often end up being a fun neighborhood-building activity. Find out what your neighbors’ main concerns are, and then research solutions. Demonstrate that you are following best practices. For example, if rodents are a concern, you can run ¼” hardware cloth underneath the coop and run and keep food stored in metal cans. Provide your neighbors with resources that address their concerns, such as this article by a well-known chicken author. Invite them to go on a tour of well-kept coops in your area. Be prepared to make some compromises!

Most neighbors will come to love your chickens!

 

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What To Know Before Building Your Own Chicken Coop

backyard chicken on grass

Are you looking to build a coop for your first flock of backyard chickens? This article has everything you need to know about building a safe coop for a happy flock.

The perfect chicken coop protects your birds from heat, cold, weather, predators, and diseases, while also being comfortable for them and accessible for you.

I’ve had chickens in my backyard for decades, and in that time, we’ve gone through at least three chicken coops. Every time we build, there are new lessons to be learned, but the fundamental principles always stay the same. The perfect chicken coop is big enough to house the whole flock, sturdy enough to withstand the worst weather, and safe enough to keep out the most determined predators. Perhaps most importantly, it is easy for you, the owner, to clean, maintain, and keep in the best possible shape. This keeps your hens safe and healthy as long as possible. In this article, we’ll break down the things you need to know before building such a perfect coop.

  1. Choose a plan that meets all your needs. There is no one-size-fits-all perfect chicken coop plan or design that will work for every flock owner, but there are a number of universal concerns everyone should consider before picking a coop plan. One of the big ones is capacity: How many and what kind of chickens is the coop able to safely hold? How much space your birds will need will depend on a number of factors. Free-ranging birds or birds with a run will need significantly less space than birds that will be confined all day; roosters generally need a bit more space than hens; and bantam breeds can usually get by with less floor space but need more vertical space. Your personal accessibility needs – how well you can get into the coop to clean and collect eggs – is another major concern people often overlook.
  2. Pick a location that will keep your girls safe and cool. As with plans, there is no hard and fast rule about what makes the perfect location, only a series of concerns to balance against your own needs and preferences. Shade is a big one; placing the coop out of direct sunlight can help keep your flock from overheating. However, building your coop directly under the trees can run afoul of another concern, which is accessibility to predators. Hawks will see a flock that lives directly under a sturdy tree as easy prey, and ground-based predators will more easily access your coop if it is surrounded by good hiding places. Finally, human accessibility is key. Building a chicken coop can take anywhere from a weekend to about two weeks, and maintaining a flock in one more than five years. Consider how far you want to schlep building materials, tools, chicken feed, and eggs to and from the coop. As you may be doing this every day for half a decade, reconsider before picking the spot furthest away from the house.
  3. Add enough ventilation for all seasons. It’s hard to think of a few wall vents as a lifesaving design feature, but for a chicken coop, having proper ventilation is absolutely crucial. In fact, it’s one of the best things you can do to keep your girls safe and healthy. A well-ventilated coop will bring in lots of clean air, which will help stop potentially fatal respiratory diseases like Newcastle and bird flu from spreading in your flock. In addition, ventilation will help keep your birds cool in hot weather. Even though modern-day chickens are descended from tropical junglefowl, they are much more susceptible to overheating than freezing. However, both heat waves and cold snaps can be dangerous to chickens. The solution is to have a lot of vents at all heights throughout the coop, which will blow cooling drafts over your birds on hot days, but to have those vents be closeable. In the winter, closing all but two vents at the very top of the coop (above the roosts) will help keep your flock both warm and disease-free.   
  4. Use hardware mesh to keep out predators. When it comes to keeping predators out of the coop, hardware mesh (also called hardware cloth) really can’t be beat. Its small holes (much smaller than those in chicken wire) keep out all manner of ground-based predators, and you can’t use too much of the stuff. Use it to reinforce your walls, your floor, your outer fence, and then bury some more at least six inches into the ground around your perimeter. The one place chicken wire is a better choice is for the upper parts of the run fencing, to keep chickens in and other birds out.   
  5. Customize your nesting boxes and roosts for maximum safety and comfort. Nesting boxes (for egg-laying) and roosts (for sleeping) are the two parts of the coop your hens will use most often. They aren’t fussed about what they look like, as long as your nesting boxes are filled with something soft (like wood shavings or straw) and your roosts are the highest available sitting place in the coop. Have 10 inches of space per bird in your roosts, and one nesting box for every three hens, plus one more than you need for if a hen goes broody or picks a favorite box.

Building your own chicken coop can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. There are only a few crucial elements to keep in mind when building that, if planned for correctly, will result in a sturdy coop and a safe, happy, healthy, productive flock.

 

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The Chicken Digestive System and Immune System: An Important Partnership

By Jennifer Murtoff, Home to Roost LLC 

How are your chickens’ diet and their overall health connected?

Overview of Immune System

As humans, we rely on our immune systems every day to protect us from viruses, bacteria, toxins, and fungi. When this network of organs, cells, and proteins defeats a threat to our body, it makes a record of how to defend against the invader. The next time the body is faced with this particular attacker, the immune system can defeat it swiftly and efficiently.  

The chicken’s immune system functions in a similar way. It is also complex. Its main defenses are lymphoid organs, which produce, store, and carry cells that fight infection. The primary lymphoid organs in a chicken are the thymus and the bursa of Fabricius:

  • Thymus: This series of lymphatic lobes runs almost the whole length of the neck. It is similar to the thymus in humans.
  • Bursa of Fabricius: This organ is unique to birds and is located on top of the rectum. It forms a kind of pocket (the word bursa means “purse”) that contains folds of lymphoid tissue.

These two organs produce immune cells: the thymus produces T-cells and the bursa of Fabricius produces B-cells. These immune cells migrate to other areas in the body, including the Harderian gland, spleen, and bone marrow. However, more than 60% of these immune cells migrate to and reside in the various places in the digestive tract, including the cecal tonsils and Peyer’s patches. From these locations, they defend the body against invaders.  

In addition to hosting immune cells, the digestive system also contains other important components that support the chicken’s immune system. Beneficial microflora (bacteria and yeast) live in throughout the digestive tract. They provide important services, such as protecting the walls of the intestine from colonization by harmful bacteria. Scientists also think that the friendly microflora help keep the bird’s body on high alert for disease-causing organisms.

So, the immune system of a chicken includes both immune cells and beneficial microflora that are located in the digestive tract.

Benefits of a Diet That Supports the Immune System

You can help keep your chickens healthy by providing a high-quality, commercially formulated feed containing elements that are necessary for gut health. These include probiotics, prebiotics, yeast culture, and essential oils. These ingredients populate the gut with good microflora and can boost the immune system. Studies have shown that feeds formulated to boost the immune and digestive systems can result in better health and quality of life and improved egg production and quality. In addition, healthy chickens are less likely to harbor harmful bacteria in their reproductive tract, meaning safer eggs for you.

Finally, a diet that supports the immune system can increase absorption of nutrients from food by increasing the surface area of the intestine, meaning your birds will use their feed more efficiently. It also aids in digestion of calcium, which is important for strong eggshells and healthy bones.

In short, a chicken with a diet that supports a healthy immune system is a chicken that is both happy and productive, living her best life.

Support Your Chickens’ Immune Systems

Nutrena® NatureWise® Poultry feeds with FlockShield® and essential oils are specially formulated to support both the digestive system and the immune system for birds at every stage of life. They contain probiotics, prebiotics, yeast cultures, and essential oils that contribute to gut and immune system health. Choosing Nutrena NatureWise with Flockshield will help your birds live their best lives by improving their health, digestion, and productivity.

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Top 3 Poultry Myths – HENS

Let’s bust some myths on laying hens. The internet is filled with lots of information on hens, some are true some are opinions. In this video Twain Lockhart, Nutrena’s Poultry Expert, debunks the top three myths on hens.

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How to Choose the Right Chicken for Your Family

Right chicken for your family

As more and more suburbanites join the ranks of would-be homesteaders raising flocks of chickens in their backyards, it only makes sense that more and more children are being exposed to chickens. While many folks remember fondly having a little incubator in the corner of a kindergarten classroom, having chickens in the backyard gives children the opportunity to not only experience the joys of raising an animal, but also learn about responsibility, caring for animals, and where their food comes from.

            Families with young children have a few more things to take into account when choosing a chicken breed then other chicken owners. As one example, personality becomes much more important when looking for a breed that will bond with children. There are a number of useful tools online to help folks pick the best breed for their level of experience and space, production, and interaction needs. Here, we’ll focus on families with young kids looking for their first flock of hens.

Universal Concerns

            First, it should be noted that there are some things all chicken owners need to take into account, children or no. These are largely logistical considerations, like how much space the flock will need and how many eggs you’ll want each week. Chickens are more energetic than many people assume, and they need their exercise just as much as anyone else; folks planning to keep their birds in the coop all day should plan for a commensurately larger coop to compensate for the lack of outdoor exercise. Those looking to raise chickens for eggs should also plan for a flock that will give them a reasonable number of eggs for their consumption – different breeds can lay anywhere between two and six eggs a week, which obviously makes a huge difference across a typical starter flock of five or six hens.

Chickens for Children

            For future chicken keepers raising their own future chicken keepers, there are a couple of other factors to take into account. The big one, as mentioned above, is personality. While chickens, like people, are all individuals with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, certain breeds tend toward certain personalities – gentle or aggressive, sociable or loners, cuddly or standoffish. There are tradeoffs to getting the most people-friendly chickens, though; they’re mostly breeds like the cochin or the silkie, historically cultivated as pet or ornamental birds – beautiful feathers, docile personalities, but generally poor layers. Both the cochin and the silkie only lay about two eggs per week.

            The good news is that even production breeds inclined to be less friendly and cuddly can still be brought up to be gentle and even affectionate with their owners. The key to raising docile hens, more important even than their breed, is to bring them up from chicks, so they learn early on to trust their humans. This is especially good for children, as they get an opportunity not just to observe the undeniable cuteness of baby chicks, but also to form a bond with the animals and learn how to interact with them in a low-stakes environment where the animals are unlikely to hurt or scare them. 

Top Tips for Raising Chickens and Children

  1. Establish ground rules early. Children, even more than most people, like to know what’s going on; they thrive on structure and routine. Giving them a clear picture of what life with the chickens will look like – maybe designating a certain time of day or area of the house for ‘fun chicken time’ and another time/place for the chickens to be ‘working’ – will help the kids adjust to the chickens and build an appropriate relationship with them as animals that are both pets and livestock.
  2. Practice good hen hygiene. Chickens are carriers for a number of dangerous bacteria, most notably salmonella, and the kinds of behaviors children are most likely to enjoy – petting and cuddling – are also the ones most likely to spread an infection. Washing hands before and after any interaction with the birds, as well as taking care while collecting and preparing eggs, is the best way to prevent transmission of an at best unpleasant and at worst very dangerous illness.
  3. Keep the kids involved. Kids, especially small children, love to feel important and have the autonomy to make decisions. Keeping them actively involved in the decision-making process around the birds – the littlest ones might get to name the hens, while their older siblings have a voice in the breed selection process – will help them feel emotionally invested in the flock as a collective, family project.
  4. Supervision is key. Children should never be left alone with the birds, especially when they’re both strangers to each other. Remember that both parties here – the children and the chickens – have the potential to hurt one another. When the kids play with the hens or help with chicken-related chores, there should always be a chicken-literate adult nearby to monitor the kids and watch out for potential accidents. 
  5. Chickens aren’t toys. This is one of the hardest things for children (and some adults) to understand, but just because the chickens are pets doesn’t mean they’re required to meet every whim of their owners. There are times where the birds won’t be interested in interacting, and they have a tendency to express this with their beaks. Helping the kids understand this ahead of time will hopefully keep them from having to learn the hard way.
  6. Establish emotional boundaries where appropriate. If you have any intention of ever killing one of your birds for meat, draw a clear line between the chickens and pets – especially if you have a dog, cat, or other full pet. Otherwise, it will be easy for small children to get the idea that the family might one day kill and eat Fido. This is another place where establishing expectations and boundaries ahead of time is crucial.

Raising chickens in a family with kids can be hugely rewarding for everyone involved, but it does mean the adults have to take on a few more responsibilities in regard to safeguarding both the kids and the hens from one another. Luckily, a few precautions – like picking a child-friendly breed and establishing expectations with the kids beforehand – will go long way in making sure the backyard flock is a happy, healthy addition to the family.   

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Backyard Chickens Launch Careers

Many parents build a backyard coop and stock it with a few hens as an interesting way to help their children learn responsibility by caring for animals and where food really comes from.

These are important lessons, but chickens offer children much more.  A small flock can spark curiosity and imagination that gels into a rewarding career or lifelong hobby. 

That may sound far-fetched but ask successful people what sparked their interest and led toward a career or meaningful hobbies and often they’ll say: “When I was only four or five years old Dad and I made a birdhouse and ever since I’ve been fascinated with building things…..so I became an engineer.” Or, “When I was only a few years old I spotted a brilliant red bird out our kitchen window. Mom and I looked in her bird book and identified a Scarlet Tanager. Birding’s been my passion ever since.”

Parents never know what might ignite a child’s interest, so even brief exposure to a diversity of positive experiences can spark a lifelong passion. Master teachers recognize that curiosity is a powerful precursor to learning. Rather than doling out facts, gifted teachers create an environment that stimulates curiosity. Students eagerly take it from there.

Jane Goodall, famous for observing and documenting chimpanzee behavior in Africa, began her naturalist career as a young child carefully watching how chickens lay eggs in her grandmother’s chicken coop.

Chickens are fascinating creatures, and a small flock can begin a child’s adventure in science. A few hen’s ability to teach out values the eggs they might contribute to the family. Children who joyfully interact with their chickens are poised for a satisfying career in animal care and agriculture. 

According to Dr. Susan Lamont, Distinguished Professor of Agriculture at Iowa State University, many career opportunities are open in poultry and other areas of agriculture. More will be available when today’s youth hit the job market in 10 – 15 years. “Even children growing up in urban or suburban neighborhoods can find a rewarding career in agriculture.  Lessons learned caring for a chicken flock can nudge a youngster in that direction,” Lamont says.  

“There are many careers of various types open for students at all levels of education. Some have PhD degrees but others work as research associates or lab technicians with lesser degrees. Some openings require a high school diploma and further technical training in robotics, electronics, and other areas if they are doing maintenance or facility services on larger farms. Some farms hire engineering graduates. It depends on the situation. Then there are jobs in food safety that may require a certification. There certainly are jobs open in poultry and salaries are competitive,” says Lesa Vold, Communications Specialist at the Egg Industry Center. 

Do some experimenting

Parents can help pique kids’ curiosity by encouraging simple chicken experiments. These help kids learn the scientific method while letting the hens be teachers. Here are a few simple examples:

Do chickens prefer sleeping with certain flock mates?

It helps to have five or six hens that are easy to identify as individuals. Perhaps they have different feather colors, patterns or physiques. Each evening take the child to the coop and photograph roosting birds. This is data collection. After taking photos for a week analyze them. Is there a pattern?  Does the Rhode Island Red always or usually sleep next to the Black Australorp? This is data analysis. If a clear pattern emerges then the child has learned that hens like sleeping by a certain flock mate……or not.    This is drawing conclusions based on observation and analysis.

 Do chickens have food preferences?

Put a cup or two of chicken scratch or wild bird seed mix in a bowl. Take a picture of the contents. Let the chickens access it. They’ll usually crowd right in and start pecking. Observe carefully. Do hens prefer certain seeds over others?  If yes, which ones?  Do they shun some seeds? What does this mean? Can chickens distinguish one type of seed from another? How do they do this?

These are basic and simple experiments that can be done with very young children. They sharpen observation skill, spark curiosity, and introduce kids to the scientific method used by researchers in dozens of areas to advance human knowledge.

A fulfilling career just might be hatched in the backyard coop. 

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Chicken Breeds, Hybrids, Crossbreeds…Just What Are They?

chicken breeds. What are they?Anyone who enjoys keeping backyard chickens is truly fortunate but may be confused about chicken breeds.

Never before has such a diversity of chicken types been available from hatcheries that produce chicks for small backyard flocks.

Catalogs feature chickens ranging from tiny bantams to massive Jersey Giants. Birds come in an amazing assortment of feather colors and patterns.

Egg shells may be dark or light brown, white, tinted, green, or even blue. Various bird types are described as flighty, calm, broody, winter hardy, or heat tolerant.

Choosing which chicks to order is fun, but with so many choices it can be perplexing.

To add confusion are common terms used by hatcheries. Often a particular bird is called a “breed”, “crossbreed”, or hybrid. There isn’t always consistent use of these terms from hatchery to hatchery.

So, just what is a breed, crossbreed, and hybrid?

It was much simpler during most of the 6000 odd years that chickens have been domesticated. Until around two centuries ago most chickens roamed around cities, small towns, and farms.

They interbred at random, producing new generations with a hodgepodge of traits. These birds were mongrels but usually well adapted to the local environment. Diversity ruled.

Few chickens looked the same, although certain traits emerged in different parts of the world.

For example, small bodied active chickens that lay white eggs trace their ancestry to lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

This jumble of characteristics began changing in the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution enabled millions of people to leave the farm to labor in new urban factories.

Perhaps because their heart was still on the land, many families kept chickens, even in big cities. Their birds produced eggs and meat but also became a passionate hobby.

Before television and the Internet filled idle hours, millions of people attended poultry shows. Breeders developed show chickens in a way that produced standardized predictable appearances and traits.

Many of today’s breeds, like the ever-popular Rhode Island Red and Plymouth Rock were developed then, but dozens of other breeds have been created since to fulfill specific needs or catch eyes at poultry shows.

What Is a Breed?

According to Dr. Susan Lamont, C.F. Curtis Distinguished Professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Science at Iowa State University:

A breed is a population that breeds true and is defined by well described externally observed qualities.

Breeds are recognized by the American Poultry Association (APA) and published in their book, Standard of Perfection.

This simply means that all members of a breed will have similar characteristics, such as size, physique, feather color, and comb type.

Mate two members of a breed and their offspring will share their traits. Some breeds have several color variants.

For example, the Plymouth Rock is a breed, but within this breed are white, barred, buff, and other colors and feather patterns.  No matter their feather color or pattern, all varieties of Plymouth Rocks have a husky body, single comb, and are  good layers of brown shelled eggs.

Hybrids Fueled the Modern Poultry Industry

During the Twentieth Century scientific breeding revolutionized poultry. College educated geneticists created modern hybrids with the intent to create strains of birds especially efficient in converting feed into eggs or meat. Probably the best known is the Cornish Rock hybrid, developed from the Cornish and Rock breeds.

Prior to the development of hybrid meat strains, chicken was a relatively expensive meat produced by slow growing Light Brahmas, Jersey Giants, New Hampshires and other breeds.

It took much feed and time for these birds to grow to market size, thus making chicken an expensive meat enjoyed mostly on special occasions. The Cornish Rock changed it all.

This hybrid produces an eating size bird in half the time on much less feed than the old timers. Credit hybridization with precipitously dropping the price of chicken in the grocery store or on a restaurant menu.

Today the average American eats about 60 pounds of chicken meat a year.

Scientists also created hybrid egg layers capable of producing upwards of 300 eggs a year.  Among the best-known laying hybrids are California Whites, a Leghorn based white egg layer, and the ISA Brown, a complex hybrid that is an amazingly efficient producer of brown eggs.

Hybridization is often not as simple as crossing one breed with another.  Sometimes complex series of matings over multiple generations are required to develop sophisticated highly productive birds.

How About Crossbreeds of Chickens

According to Dr. Lamont, crossbreeding technically refers to mating two or more breeds. The intent to improve traits is usually not a defining factor. Crossbreeding results in chickens that do not breed true and are not registered by the APA.

“In the early days, around 200 years ago, cross breeding was used to introduce a visible trait, like barring (on the feathers) that helped identify sexes at hatching,” she said.

Today this is common with hybrid strains where females and males have different colored feathers or patterns. It’s a much faster way to separate the gender of baby chicks than vent sexing, which must be used with most chicken breeds.

In vent sexing a highly skilled and experienced hatchery worker gently squeezes the bird’s vent, revealing slight differences between males and females.

Few people enjoying a small flock of backyard chickens keep roosters or have any interest in breeding their birds. For them it doesn’t really matter if they own registered breeds, hybrids, or crossbreeds.

Families can pick and choose their chicks based on the traits they like the most. Hybrid layers often are the most efficient at producing the maximum number of eggs, but many true breeds also lay well and connect their owner with the glory days of poultry when attending chicken shows was a passion.

Many hatcheries allow customers to order a diversity of chicks, making it easy for a customer to order a diversity of breeds and hybrids.

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