Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
6
Heritage Breeds
THE CONCEPT OF “HERITAGE POULTRY”
is relatively new. The term surfaced in the last 20
years along with a resurgence of interest in traditional types of poultry. Folks reminisced
about birds they remembered seeing as a child or on Grandma's farm, found a few rem-
nant flocks of these birds from which to buy stock, and began to refer to them as heritage
breeds as a way to group and separate them from the modern hybrid layers, meat-cross
chickens, and large broad-breasted turkeys.
Once the trend grew, a few folks found it lucrative to sell anything that wasn't obvi-
ously a modern hybrid layer, broiler chicken, or broad-breasted turkey. The heritage bird
concept was born. Some raisers were using any crossbred bird or modern broiler cross
and calling it a heritage bird; it became apparent that a clear-cut definition and guidelines
were needed.
Much the way the
APA Standard
defines and lists traits of all poultry, a board of highly
qualified poultry raisers from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC)
worked for several years to arrive at a standard definition of heritage poultry.
Heritage Turkeys
The first definition for heritage poultry focused on the turkey. It couldn't have come at a
more important time and for a better reason. You could look in poultry publications from
the 1940s and 1950s and see ad after ad for one farm or another bragging about its par-
ticular strain of some naturally mating turkey like Bronze, Narragansett, Bourbon Red, or
Black Spanish, to name a few. A great number of these breeds and several others were in
large supply. One such publication indicated that there were more than 50,000 breeding
birds of Jersey Buff turkeys in this country — and those were just the birds being coun-
ted! No one ever thought they would come close to extinction in a few decades.
