The Livestock Conservancy

The noble mission to protect America’s endangered livestock and poultry breeds from extinction. This group find some interesting items and organizes historical documents plus tons of educational materials on their website at www.livestockconservancy.org

The Livestock Conservancy

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  Carey: 0:00

  Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co host for the show, Jennifer Bryant, and we're here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest, and highest quality birds possible.

  0:16

  Mhm.

  Jennifer: 0:23

  We are here with the biggest nerd, maybe of all time, poultry nerd, Jeanette from the Livestock Conservancy. So we were just chatting and forgot to hit record. So we're starting over again. But Jeanette, welcome to our show.

  Jeannette: 0:41

  Oh, happy to talk chicken anytime.

  Jennifer: 0:44

  Oh we can do that all day. It's like the premise of the show. Tell us about the Livestock Conservancy. It's been around for what, 35 years now?

  Jeannette: 0:53

  Almost 50.

  Jennifer: 0:56

  We're

  Jeannette: 0:56

  actually going to have our 50th anniversary in 2027 and we're a national non profit and we actually got started because of the bicentennial when a bunch of living history museums came together. Wanted to showcase breeds that were around during the times of founding fathers and they couldn't find any of them and You know when they did finally You know track down a few it was a big red flag for American agriculture that these Breeds that had once been the backbone of the country were disappearing really quick in 1977, the Livestock Conservancy was formed and we've been around ever since and we work with all common livestock and poultry breeds that are found on farms and we have about 150 breeds that we Oversee conservation efforts with,

  Carey: 1:56

  I believe Jennifer might have had a little bit of a technical difficulty because she disappeared.

  Jeannette: 2:03

  Yep.

  Carey: 2:04

  Make myself a note. So with all that, what type of programs do y'all have to help continue breeds? I know that a lot of what y'all do is to help with awareness of the rarity of some of them. So tell us a little bit about some of that type stuff.

  Jeannette: 2:25

  Yeah we have a three pronged approach. And the first is it's, we call it discover, secure, and sustain. In the discovery phase, this is when we find animals that are potentially genetic resources that are in danger of disappearing, like old breeds or old flocks just recently we came across a flock of Jersey Buffs that have been around for over 30 years. 30 years and they're like the last of the Sandhill line of Jersey, buff Turkeys. And we were able to work with the owner who was having illness issues and get them placed in the hands of some a. Experienced turkey breeder that knew what to do with these animals. And, as a turkey breeder yourself, you don't just put any old male with any old female and think you're going to get a great animal, and getting animals like that into the. right hands is really important. As part of the discovery, we'll document, where the animals came from the history of the flock of the herd. The biology, what does it take to grow them out and breed them and make sure that they're well documented. And then the secure part is where for breeds that don't have stud books, we'll start stud books for them. We'll make sure that we do our best to make sure that owners of the breeds are connected with each other and start to develop a support network. We help people form breed associations. Every breed that has a strong breed club and a breed association, their breed's going to do well. So breed clubs are really important for the long term stability of a breed. And other things we'll do is research into their DNA, how they're linked to other breeds. Are there any differences with them? We're currently doing a DNA project on the part of the DNA that represents immune function. And the really interesting thing is our Rare breeds have things in their going on with their immune systems that are completely absent and commercial animals. Some really interesting things coming up in that. And then the sustained part of it is helping people connect with each other. Further help people with marketing the part where most owners fail with their endeavors with their animals is not being able to market them properly so that they, they don't become a money pit as everybody that's listening to this knows. Animals can become a money pit really quick. And so we help people to understand, what are the markets that you could tap into to sell animals or sell product. We have ongoing courses for breed associations to understand how to form a breed club, how to come up with bylaws how to serve your membership, how to put a board together, everything you could say. conceivably need to know about running a breed club or breed association. We've got those resources in our cultivating leadership series of webinars. And matter of fact, they're having a live webinar tonight, a Q and a for people that are have pressing questions about their associations and how they need help. And we do a couple of, two or three of those live webinars every year just to check in with folks to see, how their groups are going. And we do all kinds of work. We don't have animals at the office, but some of us like myself have farms and animals, but the Conservancy itself doesn't own any animals. It's our members. And our membership of the ones that have the animals another important thing about the sustain aspect is we have an online products and breeders directory, plus online classifieds. So they're rare breeds. They're hard to find, but this is the place to go. to go to find them. And that's all on our website livestockconservancy. org. Lots and lots to do. We're kept busy all the time. We do programming, sometimes live this year at the Dixie Classic. poultry show in Knoxville, actually in two weeks, we're holding a heritage turkey workshop and we brought experts in from all over the country that are some of the top people in turkeys. And we're going to talk about everything from just raising them for the holidays to breeding them, showing them, hatching them. And we also brought in a marketing expert to help people understand how to market their turkeys.

  Carey: 7:25

  See, when I saw that thank y'all posted it, I don't know, maybe a month or so ago, I was like, Oh, what am I doing? And I went, I looked at my calendar and I was like, Ooh, there's nothing on there. So I went back and I hurried up and registered for it so I could get my spot and I was all excited. Jennifer and I was talking about it the other day and she, and I was like I don't know if I'm going to come up like the morning of. Or the night before or what? And she said, it's Eastern time. And I was like, yeah, I'll be going up Friday night because I'm in central time. And yeah, no, I'm not a morning person. So I'm excited about that.

  Jeannette: 8:08

  Yeah, we got a really great collection of people there. And then Frank Reese is coming in from Kansas to serve as the judge for the Turkey show. And we'll have the turkey judging in the same room and it'll be an old fashioned table judging. And I'm hoping to mic him up so people can listen to him as he's evaluating each animal.

  Carey: 8:34

  That just made me even more exciting.

  Jeannette: 8:37

  Yeah it's gonna be great and I hope we get a good turnout because the instructors are really working their keisters off to make sure that we have a good class and pull it. I got to give snaps to Dixie. Um, poultry club, Tennessee Valley Poultry Club they've been amazing to help put this together and gave us the space and just rolled out the red carpet for turkeys. I give them a lot of credit for making the process easy.

  Jennifer: 9:07

  Do you work with the APA quite a bit?

  Jeannette: 9:10

  Yeah, we do. Matter of fact, we just successfully started a new committee within the APA dedicated to censusing. So we've got an official committee official census committee now. And what I'm doing is pulling together people from the different people that work with birds from different classes to come in to help with the census work. And we do a major national census every five years. And you want to talk about a beast of a project, trying to count chickens in the U. S. is An enormous task. And I know we don't find every single one, but we can see important trends with the breeds every time we reach out to folks and that helps guide our work in understanding what breeds need help, for instance, something like the booted Bantam, if you know anything about raising those animals, they're hard. They're really hard, if you're going to show them to have their leg feathers and good condition you need bigger doorways, you need specialized perching and, they're rare cause they're hard to show and and we had no idea they were that rare until we had a suggestion from APA about checking into some of the older Bantam breeds. And typically we don't do Bantams but we do the ones we do work with are ones with no large fowl counterpart. And APA had asked us to take a look at the numbers of several particular. Bantams like that. And the booted did come up as one that was particularly rare.

  Jennifer: 11:02

  Okay. I saw on there that you had the Cochins on the list. Are they moderately watched?

  Jeannette: 11:10

  They actually recently came off the list because with the backyard hobbyists. Their popularity's really skyrocketed, so they were just graduated from the list. But we'll still census them, because people are fickle. Some things are in, some things are out see, you never know, so they're included in the census. We count all the APA recognized people. Breeds that are in standard of perfection, so we'll keep an eye on them, but they're off the conservation priority list now.

  Jennifer: 11:42

  Gotcha. So before we started recording, you were talking about the crevs, which we've done a podcast on them before, but you got to go actually visit the castle where they originated from. You want to tell us about that?

  Jeannette: 11:56

  Yeah, that, that was a lot of fun. I've been trying to do it for years. My in laws live in France and not all that far from the Creve Coeur Anoche, and that's where the Creve Coeur breed originated was from that area and there's a great castle there, very well preserved castle, and finally got a chance to visit it and talk with the folks there. And it was very surprising. They knew very little about the history of the breed. And I'm trying to backtrack to get all my French references so that I can pass them on because they don't speak English. So I'm hoping I find my French references so I don't have to re Translate everything that I've got, but I've built a, an extensive history on the breed that's taken years and years to pull together because it's a breed that, there just wasn't a lot of solid documentation. There were mentions of it and one, one thing that was crystal clear is they were the top table bird in France for centuries. They were it. The first poultry show they had in Paris, there was a class for creve course and a class for every other chicken breed. They were very well thought of. And you had to pay a lot of money to have one on your table. And I I calculated with one of those, what was your dollar worth in 1902 or whatever. And back around 1900, it would have cost you in today's dollars, a hundred bucks to put a craft core in your table. It was they were very expensive. People would pay their leases or their rent with finished craft cores to the landlord. And And then the funny one I found out last year was in the first untethered balloon flight, the Monier brothers had three animals on the balloon. They had a sheep, a chi a duck, and a CREF Corps chicken So a Kreft Corps was in the first unmanned flight first maned flight in a balloon, a hot air balloon. I thought it was pretty cool. And when I go back to France, I find creve course pop up in the coolest places in, in art and, um, even in a church bell. I was at a big cathedral and the bell that they ring for mass I forget what you call the bell technically, but on the top of their bell was a crev core. Clara's day, so they just popped up all over the place and Normandy and Brittany and, um, I'm a history geek on top of loving poultry and when I can pull both together pulling history together on, on a breed is really what grabs people really grabs their attention when you know, there's so much more to that cow or this chicken and it's one of the real joys I have in learning things like that.

  Jennifer: 15:03

  So do you, all this research that you do, is that on your website or is that somewhere where we can access it to really get nerdy with it?

  Jeannette: 15:12

  Yeah, if you go to the breed pages I think the Crevcore history is in a PDF on the breed page. And if we so that one's out there and Another fun one to read is with the Sebastopol Goose. If you go to the Sebastopol page there was a really great article pulled together on that from a British counterpart who raised Sebastopols for many years. And We're slowly we've just got a new communications person in, so we're slowly putting more of that kind of information out there, but a few of the breeds have some great profiles on the page.

  Jennifer: 15:51

  That's great. So if somebody wanted to get involved with the Livestock Conservancy, what could they do?

  Jeannette: 15:58

  You could certainly join as a member. It's forty five dollars, and it's The best 45 you're going to spend, it's all a vast majority of it's going in directly to pull, livestock and poultry conservation and the programmatic work. We work really lean and we don't like to waste money. We want to put into conservation and so joining as a member all of the staff are members. That's how much we care about the organization. You could do the 45 a year or five bucks a month. And that gets you a basic membership, but different kind of levels to the membership. So you can get involved that way. If things are too tight and you can't be a member, then, use some of the products that our farmers are growing, visit the products, breeders and products directory and, buy from somebody maybe is that's local that has eggs from a rare breed or meat or, feathers, whatever. Um, if you can't afford to join them, make an effort to try and use some of the products that our people are raising.

  Jennifer: 17:05

  So the Turkey thing that you're doing at the Knoxville show, which is December 3rd, I think. Do you do those often around the country?

  Carey: 17:15

  It's on

  Jennifer: 17:15

  7th. Okay. Yeah.

  Jeannette: 17:16

  It's on the

  Jennifer: 17:16

  7th. Do you do those kinds of things?

  Jeannette: 17:19

  Not as often as we used to since COVID, a lot of the stuff has gone virtual and I think people still aren't traveling the way they did beforehand. But we do a lot of virtual webinars. We have a, if you go to our website. All of our webinars are on Teachable and you can access them that way. And we've got a wide variety of stuff on our social media pages. We've got one for the Livestock Conservancy. If you happen to be interested in sheep, we have the Shave Them to Save Them pages, and there's lots of educational material there. And we have a very quaint. Page two. And so lots of stuff on our social media as well. And YouTube. We have YouTube videos. We actually have a chick survey. Yeah. Yeah. We actually have a chicks in the classroom series which is, um, we were working with 4 H with their embryology curriculum that was for grades. I think we're on grade four. That's a requirement for the kids and rather than hatching commercial chickens, we connect local schools with farmers that can provide a heritage breed eggs. And so they're not only learning about embryology, but they're learning about the breed it's history. About why, conservation and the teachers love it, so that's another really fun thing we do.

  Carey: 18:55

  So last year At the beginning of each semester, I do this thing in my classroom where I talk about me and, just introduce myself. And so many of my students ask questions about chickens because they found out that I have a few, which, if you do a census you're going to get a lot of lies out of people that have chickens. because we're afraid our spouses will find out. But they asked me so many questions. So at one point I was going through some stuff in my barn and I found one of my older small tabletop style incubators that has like the clear dome. And I grabbed a bunch of eggs and I set them on my desk. And when Wednesday morning they started popping out and it was a huge disruption to the class. Everybody started having a cow. They were in amazement. Like the, our nursing program that we had down the hall, they were bringing students down there so they could watch it. It was one of the coolest experience, and a lot of kids really liked that, if any of our listeners are teachers, I would encourage them to tap into something like that because it's a really, it's a really good thing. It let me, as a high school teacher, teaching something totally unrelated to anything farm related or, It helps me teach them about responsibility and stuff because we took care of them in the classroom for a couple of days and the students got to take part in that and it was really cool.

  Jeannette: 20:29

  Yeah, typically our classrooms, they keep them for a couple of days and then they all the chicks go back to the farmers that donate donated the eggs. But what's. What was really gratifying was the extension followed up with gathering statistics from a survey of the teachers and the reduction in absence, improvement in science grades, improvement in interest in stem everything ran sky high throughout the entire chicks in the classroom program. And so we've got hard data to show that this really is an effective teaching tool where you can put some stats on it and say, the kids were engaged and, they wanted to come to school every day. Even if there was just the eggs in the incubator and not hatching. They still wanted to come in to check in, to see how the eggs were doing. Or to turn the eggs, a lot of them had incubators that didn't have automatic turners so that it could be more interactive with the kids. So you had an official turner every day. And that was a special reward for people and affected the hatchery a little bit. With a bunch of fourth graders messing around with the eggs, but that wasn't the point. And every classroom was able to hatch out stuff. They surprised me a couple of times. I was figuring I was only going to get maybe 50 chicks back and I ended up with like over a hundred, but Oh, I wasn't expecting that. So some years back,

  Carey: 22:07

  that one backfired on you.

  Jeannette: 22:10

  I can sell as many chicks as I raise, so I wasn't terribly worried, but it was unexpected I had to scramble and make a bigger brooder.

  Jennifer: 22:19

  It's not overly poultry related, but you started telling us about a project you were working on with the Choctaw Indians and pigs, so can you just give us a brief overview with that so people can see how nitty gritty, you do get,

  Jeannette: 22:35

  Yeah. Yeah. Actually I do have a chicken related archeology project. It's that's better with the San Diego Presidio and the Presidio is the original settlement by the military that was done during The time of the conquistadors, and they found chicken bones in the dig, and they, um, none of them were chicken people. And so they ended up, I don't know why, how they came to us, but they ended up coming to us and grilling us about chickens. And they said they thought they had discovered this weird dwarf chicken and they were scratching their heads. Why these chickens would be so itty bitty. And of course, as chicken people, those are called bantams. And one thing that they didn't know about the Spanish is the Spanish had specialized bantam breeds to serve as broodies. Because if you're having, as many of you might know, if you have a high volume egg layer, the likelihood of them brooding their own eggs is pretty slim. They just, they dump them and run. And in Spain, they had developed some broody breed breeds that were bandoms, which made sense. They have the high egg layers. And if you can get a little bird that eats very little feed to brood your eggs, then, you're That makes much more sense than bringing a big bird in, and you can have more of them in a smaller space. And what was really fascinating first of all they were, their minds were blown. They're like, what? They had no idea about that. So that's like a new chapter in the Presidio history. The other thing is that they have determined that if it were not for the chickens that the Presidio had, that settlement may never have survived because there were points where the supply chain coming up from Mexico was disrupted. And if it wasn't for the fact that they had a whole bunch of egg chickens there, they would People would have starved to death or become malnourished and and they've published these findings, which is really fascinating. Get to play with paleontologists every once in a while or archeologists And ancient DNA is now becoming of interest to archaeologists and the Choctaw thing you mentioned the current project we're working on is ancient DNA from Native American digs around the southeast. East and a lot of them had pig bones and we have a breed we work with called the Choctaw hog and we're comparing the DNA from the bones that have been found in the digs with the modern hogs to see if they are in fact genetically still the same animal that was being used by the Native Americans a couple hundred years ago. So that's That's writing history. It's not well documented what kind of pigs they had, everybody knew they had pigs, but knew nothing about them if, and certainly didn't know there's some still around a really exciting development is the Choctaw Nation now has the biggest herd of Choctaw hogs, but They had, they went from zero to the biggest herd just recently so it's very gratifying to reconnect the tribe with the animals that belong to their tribe. And they're, um, jumping into the project wholeheartedly. And I'm hoping that the Choctaw hog doesn't stay super rare and that, they get spread out to other parts of the tribe too.

  Jennifer: 26:28

  It sounds like you lead an exciting life and you find out all this cool stuff that, that some of us just wish we knew.

  Jeannette: 26:37

  Yeah, it really is. It's hard to sum up everything I do because I never know day to day. So I don't know why I'm so washed out here. Is that better? Okay. It's hard to say what I do day to day because. It's always different and it's all, I find extremely fascinating and and meaningful. What we're doing is basically saving diversity for agriculture. And any school kid can tell you about, Biodiversity and why it's important in, jungles and in different, habitats and, but the same is true for agriculture, biodiversity is really important and we can't take it for granted. And once you lose it, that's it. Like the Krevkor, they've been around since the 12th century and the animals that we use to create that breed, they don't exist anymore. So once the Krevkor is gone, that's it. They actually, one thing I hadn't mentioned was we're hoping to start collecting cells from all the Foundational rare breed chickens because as AI has become a huge threat to American poultry we're trying to save what we can just in case so I'm hoping that's going to be something I'll be working on this coming year. So yeah, lots of exciting stuff.

  Jennifer: 28:08

  Yeah. You're going to have to come back like every year and tell us everything you've done this year.

  Jeannette: 28:14

  I'd be happy to.

  Carey: 28:16

  That would be really cool if I could somehow just preserve the line of reds that I have. That would be awesome.

  Jeannette: 28:23

  You talk to me when this is over and we're we're just starting to put together a plan. We're waiting to see what the, the funding comes through, but that takes time for approval. One other thing I wanted to mention is that we are a resource for folks. We do offer micro grants. Once a year they open up in May and you have till August to put in an application, but they're up to 2, 000 and it, they're aimed for people already doing good work, rare breeds. They're not gonna, they're not typically money that we give to people to get rare breeds. We want to reward people that are already doing good work with rare breeds. And I'll tell you, there are a lot of proposals in for incubators and building bigger coupes and if it can take your work with that breed to the next level it, it's amazing what 2000 bucks can do for a poultry project. We had one project with cotton patch geese and the owner had a real challenge cause cotton patch get really aggressive during breeding season and they'll, smash eggs from rivals or they crush babies because they're too busy fighting. She was able to get a grant and modify the coop structure so that the pairs weren't beating each other up. And she went from 50 percent survivability to almost 100 percent of every gosling that she, she raised because she was able to make modifications in the coop to prevent all this stuff from happening. And, um, yeah, I think that's it. 2, 000 can go a long way for folks, or if you have, a bloodline that you'd really like to add to your program, but you can't afford to, pay to have them shipped or for you to go get them we can fund stuff like that. We fund poultry Fencing, if people want to do a better job with predator protection, we get a lot of folks that want to get electronet fencing so it, it'll fund all kinds of stuff, but the next one will open up in May, and you'll see on our website the winners for this year we'll be announcing that in January. There are a few poultry projects there, and there's a youth category too. So not just for adults.

  Jennifer: 30:53

  Oh, good. That sounds well, it has been a joy having you here today. We thank you. Sorry for all of the digital issues we had there at the beginning. So tell me the farmers, we're not tech people.

  Carey: 31:08

  If someone wanted to get involved and like help take part in the stuff that y'all do, how would they get in touch with y'all to do that? What would they need to do?

  Jeannette: 31:21

  They could certainly join check out our website, our social media pages if they want to contact us directly, that would be info at livestock, conservancy. org. And Yeah we love hearing from folks and so that would be the best way to reach us.

  Jennifer: 31:40

  All right. We'll have to have you back next year so you can tell us about all your cool stuff that you did.

  Carey: 31:46

  Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg citing. This is Carey signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.

  32:14

  Mhm.