If you have a number of breeding projects underway and your breeding pens are feeling a bit disorganized, I can help! My free printable PDF will help streamline your record keeping. Let’s organize and manage the chicken breeding pens…before the roosters get out of hand!
How to Organize and Manage Chicken Breeding Pens
You can only build so many pens and keep so many birds. How do you best maximize the number of purebreds and egg colors coming from each rooster’s efforts? I’ll share all my tips, tricks and a freebie printable PDF record keeping sheet to help!
Keeping Good Breeding Pen Records
I cannot emphasize how important record keeping is, especially when breeding colored egg layers. Making notes about which rooster is in which pen during which months can help enormously when you discover a new pullet who lays a jaw-dropping egg. Figuring out who her parents are so you can repeat the breeding is almost effortless…so long as you’ve got it written down!
What Should I Track?
At the very least you will need to know an individual bird’s hatch date, egg color laid (hen) and when she was put under a specific rooster. (Her eggs will be 100% fertilized by only his genetics after 3 weeks.) Roosters lose fertility as they age and many have become infertile by 4 years old…and some even sooner than that! You’ll need to make sure you have good fertility coming from each male and that all the hens under him have fertilized eggs.
The Best Egg Colors Come from Good Tracking!
You can toss birds together and see what you get – almost all of us begin our breeding journey doing just that! But then you realize that with a little bit of tracking and record keeping, you could literally paint the egg colors you want by selective breeding. Good record keeping can take you from a hobby breeder to a professional, bringing in real income from your flock.
Free Printable Breeding Pen Record Sheet
The free PDF below will help you track one rooster in a pen with up to 10 hens. It’s quick and easy to fill out. It serves as a great way to record what dates the birds were in the pen together and egg colors coming from that breeding pen. (Print one for each pen you need to track.)
> > > Download the PDF File for Free Here:
SilverHomestead_Breeding-Pen-Record-SheetDownload
I Need More Help!
If you have a larger setup or want an entire collection of helpful breeder tracking sheets all together in one low-cost PDF, head over to my shop where I have multiple breeder resources!
Maximizing Output from Each Pen
A young rooster under 2 years old can regularly fertilize 8-10 and up to 12 hens. You may be tempted to fill your pen with all purebreds but don’t! The ideal solution is to have each rooster producing both purebreds and colored egg layers in each pen. Why? This allows you to sell two different types/colors of hatching eggs. Since there are fewer of each hen, you won’t be stuck with dozens of eggs that don’t sell each week. Instead, you’ll easily be able to sell each dozen (or more!) of the two different eggs coming from the pen.
Here’s How It Works:
Let’s say you have a purebred true Ameraucana rooster in one pen. He’s a hom*ozygous blue egg gene purebred and his Blue (gray) feather coloring means he can produce purebred blue, black and splash offspring when mated to the Blue feathered Ameraucana hens in with him. But he could also produce F1 Olive Eggers if you had just a few dark chocolate egg laying Marans or Welsummers with him. Their dark brown eggs are a completely different color than the purebred Ameraucana blue eggs so there is zero risk of getting the hatching eggs mixed up.
Can You Add a Third Color?
Yes, breeding three different colored egg laying offspring from each pen is also possible under some roosters! Take the purebred Ameraucana rooster above. If you had one or two green and/or peach laying Easter Egger hens in the pen fertilized by that roo, the offspring would be guaranteed green laying Easter Eggers. Even if the chick hatched from a peach egg! Note: You could NOT have blue laying Easter Egger hens in the pen because their eggs would be confused with the purebred blue Ameraucana eggs. So from this example pen you would collect blue purebred Ameraucana eggs, dark brown eggs with F1 Olive Egger offspring inside and Peach or Green Easter Egger eggs with guaranteed green egg laying offspring inside. Three colored hatching eggs all fathered by one rooster!
Give It a Try!
A 1 inch notebook and my printable record sheets are all you need to get started to organize and manage your chicken breeding pens. If you’d like more free tracking sheets, my article on How to Breed Colored Egg Layers has lots of easy, clickable download links!
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