What is the ACBA with Bre Patz

The American Coturnix Breeder’s Association is the first of its kind for quail. The founder, Bre tells us all about it.

The ACBA with Bre

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  Tony: 0:05

  Welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast, where feathers meet fun. Your podcast hosts are Carey Blackmon and Jennifer Bryant. Together, they work hard to bring you the latest news and information from the world of poultry. So get ready for eggciting interviews, foul facts, and more. Now here's Carey and Jennifer.

  0:22

  Mhm. So welcome to Poultry Nerds Podcast. And we're here with Bree Pats from the American Coturnix Breeders Association. Hey Bre, how you doing? Hi, I'm doing pretty good. Yeah, so I am up in Northern Wisconsin. Used to transport between Wisconsin and Michigan, but it looks like I'll stay in Wisconsin for quite a bit. I run Pips and Chicks, so I'm on Facebook and then I've got my website the https://ourpipsnchicks.wixsite.Com. So I do a lot with the I'm the president of the, and then I also run the pips and chicks website. So we, we do a virtual show. Do a lot of genetic work, genetics work on there. I do a lot with the virtual poultry show. So I put a Big virtual show together judged by APA and ABA judges every year. And then I also started the ACBA last year. So I'm the current President of it and have helped grow the organization. You started the ACBA. So what was your thought process when you decided to start it? Yeah. So I started in Quail. I started with chickens before I got into quail, and I've been raising chickens since 2017, 2018, since I was in high school and always loved showing birds at the fair, started with market birds, got into exhibition poultry, and then I quickly got into quail in 2020 COVID time, lockdown, we started hatching eggs, and we hatched quail, and I fell in love with them. They're adorable. They're by far my favorite animal. Knock on wood. I love my chickens, but my quail are my animal. And they didn't have anything that the chickens really had as far as structure. So I was in the APA shows. I did a lot of like county fairs, things like that. And seeing how all of these are taking place, the standard of perfection that they had that tells you exactly how to breed these birds, what you're breeding for. The quail didn't have any of that. They didn't have quail shows. They, when I was starting out, there was one in Australia and there was some talk of German shows but that was, There was no standard. These shows were just judged by really well known quail breeders. But they just were judging on experience and we, we couldn't see comments or things like that. And it was abroad, so there was nothing. anywhere like that. So when we got started, when I put the ACBA together it started with that virtual show. We, I decided the first year I was going to include Quail on it, just out the window, why not? And so that first year we put a draft standard based on some graphics and different things that the AC the Australian show put forward. It was not well reviewed. It was just something I haphazardly wrote and gave to our judge to look through it. And we had a group of three to four judges and it just was discombobulated all over the place. The next year was spent, how can we refine this? And talking with a few different poultry breeders, talking With different clubs and organizations on the chicken side of it. It was like, okay, I think we need to come up with a quail club. And so we did that in May of last year. So I think it was 2023. We got a group together and it was just open to everyone. We narrowed it down. We picked our officers. We started meeting regularly. We put together some bylaws and started working on the standard. And then. From there, we decided we started charging membership dues. So we've narrowed into our membership and our we started the club officially, all of the fun paperwork and tax things and all of that, that goes with it. And put the standard together and we published the standard a year later. So may have this year. It's our official draft standard. So it's open to all of our members to see and view. And we're working with the APA right now. As to what our next steps are to keep getting into some of those chicken shows with quail. That's awesome. So in the essence of full disclosure, so Brie is the president of ACBA and I'm the secretary and Carrie is involved with the newsletter. In the essence of a full disclosure here but we want to make sure everybody is aware of the existence of the ACBA. So tell us about the proposed standard, like what's the status of it? And how does that process work getting it put into the APA? Yeah, so that's where we're at right now. We've got the draft outline for the type. So we deep dived we talked with a whole bunch of poultry breeders from all over the world. Professors, Coil geneticists, zoologists to make sure it was accurate and just really well put together. Then from there, our next step became talking with the APA about it, because they obviously have a very well established standard. So right now we've got, I think it's seven or eight pages, it might be five, five to ten pages based on the history, The size, the type general descriptions, all of that, and we're talking with the APA about What are the steps to get into the APA standard of perfection? And it'll start with we need a public vote from APA members. So that'll be the very first step. It sounds like they'll be able to put it into a newsletter when we're, we've got everything together for the draft. We do need to, one of the things of the ACBA is still working on is putting together a color standard. We have our type standard pretty well down. We need to get a color established because the APA won't accept it without a color standard. But once we get that in and all of our members agree and it's pretty solid, we'll be putting that out in an APA newsletter at some point. We're working with the standards committee to make sure that's on a good timeline. We make sure we line it up with shows and things like that. And then from there. the real work to get them accepted begins. Jennifer, I don't know if you've done a whole lot with getting different breeds or varieties or things accepted, but it's a pretty big process. No, I'm pretty boring there. I picked, monocolor chickens to deal with and for showing. It's pretty easy that way. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little, it's a little more intensive when you're getting started, but understandably, yeah, the APA wants it to be very rigorous it is not new in the chicken world. And they, most of the people that have been in quail have not been in the chicken world or any much other livestock to see how all their livestock is done. And just about every other poultry breeders group, breeders clubs, organizations, APA, ACBA, like your Cochins breeders, your Orpington breeders, all of that, they have dues. They have membership fees. And when we started the ACBA, There is, there was no big organization in Quail that charged dues. There's, the biggest thing we had was Facebook groups, which are free. And so everyone always had gotten their information from free places. They would they might have a group of friends and they would go, they would talk with them for free, or they'd talk with them online, and so the idea of having to pay to be in this group was very new, so there was a lot of pushback from it but it's not new to the poultry world or the livestock world at all, our dues are not ridiculous for anyone wondering or anyone that hasn't been in the ACBA or involved with it. Like it's$5 for a junior membership$25 for your basic membership. And then if you wanted listing on our readers list, so like our public directory, that's a 50 membership for the professional one. But all of our. Like our basic and professional members can vote and get a say in our Facebook group and our meetings, things like that. And really what that membership does is it's paying for the information that we're getting. So it's paying for our websites to maintain an update that it's paying, we're working on getting drawings into the standard it's going to pay for the APA fees because to even. Apply for this process to get accepted into the standard. You have to put a big fee up in the beginning And it's paying for different things We had talked about bringing people in like professors or other Very knowledgeable people to talk about different subjects. So a lot of The information that we're giving out to people and putting together, it's really paying to upkeep everything and prepare for as we keep going. So if we ever get into in person shows, things like our cage fees or renting out areas, all of those fees. Are things that instead of having one person individually pay for or one farm, take all of that weights. We're taking it out of the picture and everyone's paying a small fee into it. And we've been completely open from the beginning about this is what our finances are. We publish an annual report. Every year that's open to everyone inside the organization and out. And everyone in the organization knows where our money is going to. Our officers aren't, our officers aren't paid. I'm not paid. Jennifer's not paid. You're not paid. No one is off of this at all. So let's just start at like the top then. And we heard this from Sarah last week with the Orpington club. The APA owns the. copyright to the standards and no breed club can publish the standard because the APA owns it and they want you to buy that book in order to get that information. And we're going to follow the same process once we're accepted into the APA. And that's something we still are working on and still are, have to figure out how we're going to work with it. It's possible we do something more similar towards the ABA where we've got, we work together as two separate breed organizations. It's possible we do just join with. The APA and let our copyright go up and let them take that copyright from us. But the APA as a whole is a really big asset. It's a huge group of breeders, a network of very experienced poultry breeders that know what they're doing, that know how shows run, that get people interested. They get these shows up and going all over the United States. So even if we did, Let go of that copyright to give it to the APA. We're still as the, as an organization, we're getting a lot more interested members and interested people that want to raise quail and may have never seen it before, whether it's the first time at an APA show or the first time they opened their APA standard. So it's not something. worried about yet. It is something that we're going to bring, hopefully bring up and start addressing at meetings and talking with people to see if that's the route we want to go. And if that's something we're going to be worried about and then taking that to the standards committee and being like, okay, how can we work with you on this? So that we both walk out with things that we want. So once you become a member of ACBA, how are the points tracked? How can someone maximize that? And get to where they're considered a master breeder. Yeah, so that's one of the really big perks of the ACBA is we keep track of most of that. It comes from shows for the most part. You go to a show, you exhibit some quail. It needs to be quail because we're the quail organization. But you get points for entering birds. You get points for the better your birds do at a show, the more points you get is basically what it comes down to. And you can start as young as as young as you are showing, you can start in getting youth points. And then as soon as you turn 18, those can roll over into adult points. So things like county fair, when you're under 18 can also count for points. It's a little bit easier as a youth to get points. And then when they roll over, we took that into account. But the biggest thing is just show up and bring birds and learn, and you will get points. And the more you do, the more you bring, you show, you get points. That also gives the. the recognition and they need in order to meet part of the qualifications to be recognized by the APA. Correct? Absolutely. Yeah. There's a couple different breed groups. I'm a part of process of getting that particular breed accepted, and I've seen a lot of people ask questions about this and about that, and some of, there's. We're there and some weren't, so I actually looked at the APA's documentation on getting a breed I gotta say, it's not an overnight thing, it's a three to five year, five year, I believe, minimum. And that is a lot of work. It's not easy and we're not walking into it thinking we're going to just do it overnight because we've got some gung ho people for it. It's, and it's set up that way for a reason. The showroom is not the place for fads. We don't want trends coming and standard of perfection filled with book or filled with a whole bunch of descriptions of. Breeds that no one's breeding anymore. It's meant to be rigorous. They want to make sure you know what you're talking about. When you put this together, you've got enough people interested that it's not a one year, two year thing. They're committed to it and they actually want to make something that's going to last and outlast us. It's a give and take. It's going to take a while. I think originally, when we put this together, we said five to ten years was the outline of what we had put together and if it takes less than that, great, but setting that expectation of it, it's going to take a lot of work. It's going to be hard, but we're gonna, we're going to do everything we can to make sure we still get through it. And we still can do everything properly in order and have something solid to show for it. Awesome. And I would just like to add that if you have kids like 4-H kids or younger kids that want to get involved in showing. The quail are easily handlable, handleable. Is that right? Handleable. And and their growth rate is so quickly, it would keep a child's attention. And, it might be a good intro for them to handle such a small bird. Of times for younger people they want to see what they're doing quicker and that's, that's why I got into quail is because I can try out stuff from a genetic standpoint or from a nutrition standpoint and see long term results in two, three generations of the bird within a year. With a chicken, you're going to be three years doing that. Think it was, there's a lot of different ways. I think it would benefit young people messing with the Coturnix. Oh, yeah. And everyone's very worried about if you're not familiar with quail, they have the rep of being flighty they're really not if you care for them properly, and you you give them, there's, you've got the proper setup for them, they're not any flightier than chickens, they're not going to come up to you, and they may not they may not like to be you. Snuggled, like a, you can train a chicken to do, but as far as a show, the quail you bring to shows are calmer than they're gonna, than most of the chickens there. Oh, gosh, yeah. Yeah. My quail, if they get out of their cage, they're like, fall on the floor, and then they just look around like My thing is with the quail, like when mine get out, they just look around what do we do? So they're easy to catch. They're easy to manage. So for, even for younger people, to me that's a more appealing thing, if that makes sense. Yes. Bree, we appreciate you being on today. Is there anything else you would like to add? No, I think that's all I've got, unless you've got more questions for me.

  Carey: 17:48

  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.