The American Bresse w/Mandelyn Royal Part 1
The American Bresse Chicken is the new meat bird. It naturally reproduces and lays super well. Growth rate is phenomenal and will replace the Cornish X for many homesteaders.
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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. All right, so here we are. We're here with Mandelyn Royal and my co host Jennifer Bryant, and we're going to talk a little bit today about the Bresse Chicken and what it does and what the benefits are. So fire away, Mandy. The American Bresse is a relatively recent addition to the United States. Their first import was Back in, was it 2011 or 2013? I'll have to confirm that since Greenfire changed some of their verbiage on their website. Greenfire Farms was the original importer. They ended up bringing in three different batches of imported birds. And then the rest of us got to thinking that they tasted pretty good. And we all got rolling on breeding them and now they're a lot more accessible than what they used to be. But what I see in my flock is harvestable table birds at 16 weeks with an average of a four pound carcass. And the females follow right behind them by starting their active laying anywheres from 18 weeks to 22 weeks old. And then of course there's sometimes outliers who begin a little later or even a little earlier and the growth rate depending on the breeding program that can be in a lot of different places, but If you come up with a strategized breeding program, you can pretty well reign them in and get them doing what you want. And sometimes there's a propensity for them to be broody. Technically, they're not supposed to be broody. But that's still floating around in the flock, so they're genetically viable enough to steer them and select them the way that you want them to be. Which is actually neat. So you said Sorry. Go ahead, Jennifer. So they originated in France, right? Yeah, they originated in France, and the white variety was a later addition in the Later 1800s, and then it was almost lost to the world wars and they had to go into some salvage breeding work in the 1920s and they decided to do a more table focused end retail table bird result from those flocks. And so they refined it into specifically the Bresse region. And technically in France, you only call them Bresse if they're coming from the Bresse region. Everything else is called a Galloway. And there's a couple of different varieties in other color patterns. And those each have their own distinct name over there, over here in the U S we have blue, black splash whites, and we call them American Bresse to put that distinction. On there in the U S and they're not in the Bresse region of France. So we like to keep it simple with our names. Yeah. We like to keep it simple. You said it's 16 weeks of four pound carcass. Is that right? Yeah. That's what I like to see. Some will do it. Some will do better. Some will do worse. It's a varied. gene pool right now. Now, what are, what's some of the unique characteristics? Why would someone want the Bresse versus A Cornish, or a Delaware, or a Red. All of those are very different from each other. And for us, what did it was we tried a long list of dual purpose birds and I needed a really solid cockerel management program. Cause as when you hatch eggs, you're going to get about half male. But you don't need to keep half of them going forward. You only need one for about every 10 hens. So what do you do with the other nine boys that hatched with those girls? And a lot of what we tried needed 20 weeks, 24 weeks going all the way towards nine months of grow time to get them to be like a reasonable table size with enough fleshing to make processing worth it. And we weren't seeing earlier harvest times, but then on the flip side of that, you have your commercial hybrids and you can bring those into the freezer at six, seven, eight weeks old for the Cornish cross. But you can't breed those. They're a hybrid. You have to buy new ones every time and I needed a breeding solution where it was something I could breed at home but then still have that benefit of a reasonable time into the freezer. So for flock management, out of everything we tried, the American Bresse were the first ones that did everything reasonably. See for me that's one thing that made it real appealing to the Bresse and a couple of other, or the American Bresse. Sorry, I'll be correct. And some of the other breeds is, Jennifer and I talked about on one of their previous shows, what makes up the Cornish Cross. And that seems to be the biggest kept secret in poultry. Poultry people will tell you how they do everything. Except for how they make a Cornish Cross. The four way terminal hybrid. It's complicated. Yeah, it is. And for me, I like that. It produces chicken every two months or less. But, I don't want to have to pay somebody two, three dollars every time I get one. I want something that's self sustainable. That's why, me personally, that's why I like the Bresse. Because, I had a chance to come to your farm and to see some of the birds that you have. And, the, these things are huge and I know I, I saw your feed barrels. I know what you're feeding them and it's not antibiotics and it's not steroids. In fact, if I remember you saying correctly, that's an absolute no for you. That kind of resonated because that talks about a bird's vigor. And how they are on the ground and a natural forager as well. I like that aspect of it too, but for me to be able to not have to depend on somebody else. To send me birds is a huge thing. I'd like to just stick some trays in my incubator and call it a day. I'm a hatch addict. I have a problem where if I see eggs, I want to put them in the incubator. That's where they need to go. Useful. We're here to enable you. Oh, I appreciate that. I'm sorry, Jennifer, how many incubators do you have? I have, I only have four cabinets. I have two. So definitely that's a huge thing. There's, hatching is an addiction and I understand that. And I'm in tune with that, but my family agrees that there could be worse addictions. So one thing that I would like to hear from you is let's say. Here we go. This is, this would be a good example. In the state of Alabama, you can process a thousand birds a year and sell them to people. No questions asked, no permits, no nothing. In Ohio, we're at 999. They don't give us that extra one. You they say anything over 1, 000 for us. I have also heard that poor record keeping could play a factor in it as well. So in the State of Alabama, it's a thousand birds. In Ohio, it's 999. And by all means, I highly encourage all of our listeners to stay within the laws and verify for themselves what the laws are, because if you start asking people, you will get different answers from everybody. This is true. One of the first things we did when we moved in was read painstakingly through all of our local ordinances and we're within a foot of all of our parameters on where and how we can keep livestock. We had a visit our first week here from the township guys, and they were like, what do you guys build and what are you up to? And we explained everything and we explained our knowledge of the regulations and they were like, cool. We'll see you if we ever have a problem. And I haven't seen him since. Yep. That's the best way to handle it. But my question is whether it's 999 or 1,000, let's say that I want to sustainably breed Bresse to process my 999 or whatever the legal limit is. You know what that means, right? You know what that means for your flock development and how you could manage that? That's what I need you to tell me. Okay. So if you're allowed to process and sell 1000, that's going to be 1000 cockerels that didn't make the breeding cut. So that means in theory, you could be producing 2000 chicks a season because you need to be looking for females as your replacement layers and maybe some supplemental layers to go elsewhere. So of the 1, 000 that end up in a shrink bag, that's another 1, 000 that hatched with them that are serviceable for eggs. All right. How big of a breeding flock do I need to get that? Oh, I'm not doing math right now. But Supposing that a good laying Bresse female, she's putting out five or six eggs a week through her first year of active lay. Yeah. Eggs come up in size that can vary by bloodline, but I like to personally wait until the birds are about a year old before I start really seriously hatching from them. Let's look at her weekly output and then all of her sisters too. You can just do some math and work out what you could expect and then maybe add 10 percent of what might candle as infertile or what might start and quit. I always set more than I need, obviously. All right, let's stop right there for just a second because people always don't understand why we don't set pullet eggs. So if you set pullet eggs. Over time, your flock will reduce in size. We want to set mature hen eggs. in order to keep our birds going bigger. Now, Mandy, I believe at one point, I can't remember where it was, I heard you talk about the size eggs that you like to set. Sixty grams. It's what I'm looking for. 60 grams. So anything 60 grams are better. That's what you're putting in your incubator. 60 grams are lower. That's what you're putting on your table? Correct. Or pig snacks. Yeah, Jennifer knows all about pig snacks with eggs. By bucketfuls of eggs going to the pigs. And they love it. They do. Now, have you figured out the weight? Where, say, your average double yoker is on the Bresse? Usually 80 grams or more. Okay, so between 60 and how many grams of an egg would you set in order to maintain that large bird? I have to give some tolerance to my older hens because once they get past 2 years old, I might be seeing their average egg size be 74, 78 grams. because the eggs do get bigger as the birds mature. And in my younger birds that are a year and a half, I want to see 60 grams, not really exceeding 70 grams. Cause if the eggs get too big, then you can see some hatching ramifications there, but it doesn't seem to affect the older ladies making the bigger eggs. And I'm not sure why, just. My own experience tells me something you can't find in a book usually. And you want properly shaped eggs, too. I look at egg shape. Do you? Oh, absolutely. Because they have to have enough room inside to be able to turn, to be able to pip and zip and get all the way out on their own. Anything that's too narrow, too long, too pointy, too short, too outside of a Because when you look at a day chick that has just hatched from that egg picture what that little baby had to go through being inside of that egg And based on egg shape, sometimes you can tell if they have problems yeah, I probably shouldn't set that egg because it's not shaped well enough to help them get out on their own Okay so How would it look, let's say I was working up to getting those 2000 birds. What kind of infrastructure would I need? How would somebody get started? What would you recommend them do? Jennifer and I have talked about. The birds that we have, but what would you do if you were starting, if you were recommending to somebody to start out with their birds? So I always recommend to start out slow and watch them grow and really get into measuring their growth rate, especially in those earlier weeks, because I've noticed that there is genetic variation to how they grow and when they fill in. And you want to avoid retaining birds that. Go through that almost heritage turkey like growth rate where they get real long leggy and they lean out and then they flesh back in later on because you miss those earlier harvest windows if they grow that way. So I always looked for medium sized birds with a medium leg length because those tended to hang onto their fleshing for the duration of growth. And for the table side of it and when you want to be able to process that proof to be really important, but to also don't be so rigid on them that you cull yourself out of a flock and pay attention to what you're bringing in and what you want your retention rate to be because like, for example, if you bring in 20 chicks. Chances are you're going to come out of that with a pretty decent trio to breed from because you've got to be hard on your breeders and really pick good birds because any weakness they have, they're going to pass forward and it's going to complicate things later on down the line and you want your strongest, best growing, healthiest, most vigorous contenders to be the ones that end up in the breeding pen. So if you order in 20, don't bank on keeping all 20 for breeding. Are you saying don't medicate and don't hospitalize? I didn't say it, but maybe I implied it and it's a good implication to put in there to whatever you do to pamper them. Remember that you're saving your weakest, and do you really even want to be doing that? Oh, I'm not going to, I'm not going to mince words. I'll just be blunt. Y'all need to quit medicating and hospitalizing. I don't use madicated to feed. I don't use cord. I don't worm them on a blanket schedule. I don't, if they have to go in a hospital pen they're better off in the freezer. For me my, I do have a hospital pen. Oh, dear Lord. Oh, why? Hang on. It's not for sick birds. If I take a bird, if I get a bird from a show when he comes back, he's not going to get, yeah, it's a quarantine chickening. It's not a sick bay. Then it's not a hospital. Yeah, that's a quarantine pen. That's a quarantine pen. I have a quarantine pen. I just ordered me a few of them. I got a couple of 5x6 pens coming that I plan on putting in the front yard. road. That's risky. My road's too busy to do that. I wouldn't find my birds there the next day. I'm gonna put birds in there that I don't think people would get. And these pens actually have a way to padlock the door. It's gonna be for some purpose, I don't know. Alright, so what's different about the Bresse meat than, say my Orpington meat? Intramuscular fat. Really? Marbling? It's not marbling in the sense that beef is. You can't, it's not visible, but it's notable if your taste buds are open for the eating experience to notice. Various levels of juiciness to the meat and their genetic propensity to layer on fat while not 100 percent consistent within the available us stock. It is floating around out there and I have processed 16 week old carcasses of cockerels that had every bit as much fat as A two year old hen, and then that translates to a self buttering bird when you go and you cook it, especially if you put it in the smoker on level with the back down so that all of those juices stay inside the bird and keep the meat lubricated during the cooking process, it's. It's incredible. When it's right, it's really right. And if it's wrong, you don't notice any difference between them and any other bird. So what kind of feed do they require? So for the finishing, some folks do it for two weeks, some people do it for four weeks. I've dabbled all the way into six weeks and that put on too much fat, which you can actually, you can cut out the fat and cook with that separately. If you have so much on the bird that it's excessive, you can cut it out and use it elsewhere. But I prefer a four week finish. And I prefer to process between 16 and 18 weeks old. So I can start figuring out who's going into the finishing pens. around 12 14 weeks old. And that helps save on the feed bill because I'm not growing them a whole other month, or two, or three. I'm figuring out pretty quick who's viable and who's not. So what's a finishing ration look like for you? I'm still experimenting, and I've done the milk soaked corn, I've Added a little bit of wheat. I've done one third cracked corn, one third wheat, one third of their regular ration. And I haven't honed in on my exact favorite yet. But I think I prefer the timeline of four weeks. And it takes about that long anyways for dietary changes to be apparent in the flock. I don't know that the two week finish really does a whole lot for them. Does the milk really do anything? It seems to soften the fat and make it melt easier. None of it's, have you ever had a Cornish Cross with that globby fat on either end that never melts and never does anything, just sits there being chewy and terrible? They never get that. And it seems like the milk finishing helps ensure that. Do you have fresh milk on your property? I wish. We have a Jersey, we have a Jersey farm two miles up the road, though. Oh, okay, got it. I love it when she needs me to empty her tanks out for her. Some people are using goat milk. In France, they're not using cow milk. They're actually using mare milk. So the next closest substitute to mare milk would be goat's milk. Do we milk horses here in the country, in this country? Only for estrogen. I feel like it's a whole other rabbit hole that we don't even need to go in. I feel like some group would have an issue with that. Yeah. Some people here would have an issue with that. I have a herd share, but I also have milk cows here on the property. But I usually give the way to the baby pigs for them. Yeah, the pigs enjoy it too. And I heard from some people that they were starting chicks with some milk. And I've never heard of that. And I don't know where it's coming from. I've not, I give my milk to little baby chicks. Yeah. Oh yeah. They love it. I'll give mine anything. If it looks like it might work, man, I'll try it and just see what happens. But they grow good on it. So my slogan for that is for science. Yeah, there you go. It would be interesting though. You should try like a batch of your Bresse with some fresh milk and see what happens. I actually found a good use for yogurt. I mix yogurt with starter and feed it to my baby chicks every couple of days. Yeah, that's for coccidiosis and luckily that's something I don't have a problem with. I don't either because Resistance. I don't either because I keep stuff pretty clean But I have found that number one. They like it number two. It rapidly increases their growth like I had I grew some Bresse I hatched them out and I had a 520 gram bird at four weeks old. You put probiotics in there and gave them some good gut bacteria to give them a good start in order to process all of that nutrition. The genetics were available for that to happen. Yeah, I know a lady that has done an extensive amount of work with the Bresse. And she has a good set of genetics. I heard she likes to hide and that she never has anything available. Good things come to those who wait, sometimes you have really good genetics. And I see this a lot in the show world. If you have really good genetics, you really don't want to just give them to anybody because you don't know what they're going to do with them. Yeah. And a lot of people, for whatever reason, tend to think they need to jump out and line cross it. And before they know it, that really good line they had got wrecked by the line they introduced them to. Yep. And I have heard several people talk about crossing and bringing in new blood and how often you need to do that. And there's a bloodline of Reds that has not had new blood introduced in well over 70 years. And those, when they hatch out, they pretty much look like clones. They You get just what they look like every single time it's the genetics are there. They're solid. They don't mess up There's nothing hidden. It's there and it's that tighter breeding that can help you eliminate those Variables and to get that sort of cookie cutter consistency and that takes nothing but time and effective culling And strategize breeding selection to even hope for results like that. There's a friend of mine who lives out in the Pacific Northwest. He has pigeon genetics that haven't been out crossing over 250 years. Like these are legacy birds that get passed down. And they're not readily available and they are exact replicas of each other. Every generation exact as their parents and their parents before them for hundreds of years at this point. So I'm guessing that's one of the things that makes poultry different than a lot of other animals out there is that, a lot of people think, Oh let's, we can't have inbreeding. We've got to bring in new, we've got to bring in new. But I'm hearing that's not the case with poultry.
