Java Breeding

If you have never gone to a poultry show to see for yourself the difference between birds that were bred to a standard, compared to the average backyard/feed store chicken, you would be shocked at the differences. Poultry that are bred with little attention to their breed standard start to look like a generic bird silhouette. These generic looking birds may have pretty colors and they may look nice when running around your yard, but stand them up next to a bird that was bred to the SOP, and they aren't very impressive looking. But until you see the difference for yourself, it's hard to believe that the difference is that significant. We were awed the first time we saw the difference.

When you're doing any kind of serious breeding, it is a somewhat slow process. Because Javas (and some other *heritage* fowl) continue to mature and grow even after they reach sexual maturity, it takes a year or more to hatch and raise a group to see how your breeding choices affected the birds appearance and productivity. And when you're breeding for both appearance and productivity, you have even more traits you need to look at which makes the going even slower to see improvements. It is easier to do barnyard breeding, but you will not have as much control over how the offpring turn out.

If you try to improve your flock's traits too quickly in one area, you may find yourself making other traits worse. It's better to take a more middle-of-the-road approach. Breeding is a balancing act. Ideally, you want to be at a place where most of the birds are uniformly good in appearance and production, so you can simply choose the birds with the best traits to *cement* those good traits into your flock. But most of the time, especially when you're first starting out, you are doing more to match mating birds together that have good traits to hopefully offset the flaws in the bird they are mated to.

Not every chicken that hatches will have all the best physical traits to be a "show bird". And not every chicken that hatches is going to have the best production of meat or eggs. (This also means that if you buy "show quality" eggs or chicks, you need to ask the seller what their definition of "show quality" is. There is no way to guarantee buying excellent specimens that conform closely to the SOP unless you buy fully mature adult chickens. And just because the parents of the birds/eggs you buy happened to win at a show, does NOT mean that their offspring that you raise will be "show quality" either.)

Genetics that you have no control over does play a part in what characteristics your flock will have. But your breeding selections, and husbandry, are also an important part of the equation in both production and appearance breeding.

Raising and breeding chickens is not an exact science and there are any number of different ways to do it. But since we have found that there seems to be similar problems and questions that come up routinely, we offer some information to help you on your journey with breeding Javas. We've learned some things about poultry raising & breeding through formal education and personal research. Other things we have learned the old fashioned way - through trial and error with our own flock and watching other people's mistakes and triumphs. Hopefully what we have learned can help others to improve their Java breeding without making too many errors.

If you have feel like you've made errors in your poultry breeding experience, don't give up. Remember that you're not the first person to have questions and feel like you're flying by the seat of your pants. Poultry keeping and breeding is a dynamic process and just when you feel like you've gotten a good routine going, something changes and you have to go back to the drawing board. Again. :)

There is more to breeding than just putting a rooster with some hens and hatching eggs if you have a goal in mind for either appearance traits or production traits in your poultry.

There are people that say that you cannot breed to the Standard and have a productive bird. And some folks don't place a high priority on production qualities because they simply want pretty birds to take to a poultry show or to run around their yard. But the current 2010 edition of the Standard of Perfection from the American Poultry Association says that birds should be bred for both their breed specific appearance traits and productivity. After all, what good is a pretty bird if it can't reproduce itself by laying fertile eggs, or if it can't provide much meat if it is a bird meant to be eaten?