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COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • DECEMBER 2016 Poultry farmers in 1958 wouldn’t recognize today’s birds
by DAVID SCHMIDT ABBOTSFORD – In February 1958, Country Life in
BC ran an ad (at right) for Rump & Sendall, then a prominent Fraser Valley chick hatchery, advertising the Ames In-Cross layer as being 58 years ahead of its time. In a hyperbole common to advertising at the time, the ad proclaimed the Ames In-Cross would put poultry producers into 2016! Informed of the ad, George Gray of Pacific Pride Chicks in Abbotsford could only laugh. “Where are they now?” he asked rhetorically, noting the Ames layer hasn’t existed for decades, and probably for good reason.
Just five years after this ad appeared, Ames In-cross was swallowed up by DeKalb, another prominent line of layers at the time. Although DeKalb outlasted Ames, they too exited the poultry (and hog) genetics business in the mid-1990s and their stock is now part of Hendrix Genetics of the Netherlands.
Although the Ames name has disappeared, the DeKalb, Shaver and H&N Chicks names, all from prominent North American layer poultry breeding companies in the mid 20th century, remain but their ownership now rests in Europe. “There are no longer any Shaver or DeKalb breeders in North America,” Gray says. He notes Hendrix (DeKalb, Shaver & ISA), the Erich Wesjohann Group in Germany (Hyline-Lohman & H&N) and Groupe Grimaud in France (Novogen) are now the three primary sources of layer product in the world. “When I started selling chicks in the 1970s, Shaver
came out with the Shaver 288. Their goal was to produce 288 eggs in a cycle but farmers were lucky to get 270 eggs,” Gray recalls. “Today, if a producer isn’t getting 340 eggs, they wonder what’s wrong with their flock. Birds today are more efficient. They have been bred for persistence, shell
quality and livability. Now producers expect 2.5% mortality for the life of the flock but back then, a mortality rate of 12% was commonplace. “The French and German product is almost beyond belief,” Gray says, claiming farmers from 1958 wouldn’t recognize today’s layers and certainly wouldn’t believe the rates of production and mortality producers now enjoy. When he started, hatcheries gave trophies to producers who could get their flocks to produce at 90% for 12 weeks.
“Now, if you aren’t getting 97% until well past week 50, you’re doing something wrong. I have one producer who’s shipping his birds out in two weeks who’s still getting 90% production from his flock.” Pacific Pride was selling H&N Chicks until two years ago but have now switched to the Novogen bird, Gray calling Novogen “the latest poultry genetics in Europe.”
Both he and his boss, Marvin Friesen, note Novogen has been proactively breeding birds for aviaries, free range and free run systems, saying that is the direction the industry is going. Friesen notes their main competitor in BC, Hyline International, “is struggling now because their genetics has been focused on cage production. All of us in the layer chick business have to look for traits which birds bred for cages have lost over the years.”
Gray says breeders are also breeding for more longevity in their flocks. Although BC poultry producers expect 52 to 56 weeks of production from their flocks (since birds start to lay at 18 to 20
weeks of age, that translates to a flock age of 70 to 76 weeks), he says that will increase.
“The primary breeder manuals have gone from 72 to 90 weeks. That’s now considered a single flock.”
“To the consumer, our story doesn’t exist until we tell it.”
Andrew Campbell, Agvocate Dairy Producer
Learn more at
AgMoreThanEver.ca. Be somebody who does something.
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