Since I’ve began selling chickens on a bit larger scale in the past few years, I’ve noticed there’s some confusion about heritage breed chicken and the hybrids. I used to breed and sell hybrids, as well as rare and heritage, but since I’ve gotten a bit tenderhearted toward those baby chicks, our farm is leaning more toward the conservation and reviving of rare breeds, and breeding of mostly Heritage breeds.

We started with some hybrid breeds like the Black Stars, ISA Browns, Rhode Island Red Industrial breeds among others, but found that mostly folks who wanted to harvest them for meat were becoming our regulars. Knowing the fate of those sweet little faces, we at our farm decided to slowly roll our sells over to the rare and heritage breed of chickens. So now most of the customers we get feel the same way as we do about our poultry. This makes letting go of those soft sweet chirps much easier for us, not to condemn anyone who harvest chickens for meat, that is not my intention.

The livestock Conservancy has a more extensive definition of what a Heritage breed is and the breed should meet all those standards to be called Heritage.

The Livestock Conservancy defines the Heritage breeds as the following:

https://livestockconservancy.org

“Definition: Heritage Chicken must adhere to all the following:

APA Standard Breed

Heritage Chicken must be from parent and grandparent stock of breeds reco