First let me say I don’t believe myself to be an ex-pert in breeding Barred Rocks. There’s others with many more years experience than me, but I’ll share with you my system of breeding and if it helps someone with their birds, then the entire better.

My Dad, Mike Michael, taught this system to me and we have used it successfully in breeding both rabbits and poultry for my years. It is similar to the "Simple Plan" article written by Matt Lhamon, but with a few differences. I find the nicest male I can acquire in type and color. Then instead of using two female lines, I prefer to work with three female lies. One line of females is related to the male I chose to breed to, and then the other two lines are different. I use two fe-males from each line and I band them a different color to keep them separate. I then mate them to the male, being sure to mark eggs and toe punch chicks to the corresponding mating, out of the first cross I keep the two nicest pullets in type and color from each female line and mate back to their Sire, now the cockerels from the first mating I don’t keep ex-cept ma ybe for show or as backups in case some-thing happens to the original sire. From the second mating, which is now 75% of the original sire’s blood, I again keep the two best pullets from each female line, and I also keep the best cockerel from each female line. Here’s where I usually stop breeding the daughters back to the original sire for a third time, and instead I start crossing between the three female lines. As I said before I not only toe punch, but I also use color bands to distinguish my female line. "For Example," I may use a blue, red or green band for the different lines. At this point, I look at which cockerels compliment which pullets as far as strengths versus weaknesses. I may take a Blue banded cockerel and mate him across Red Banded Pullets or a Green Banded cock-erel across Blue Banded Pullets, etc. But no matter how I cross I only mark the eggs and keep track of what female line they are coming from since the male side is the same in all three lines. I’ve done this system for the last eight years with our Barred Rocks and White Cochins. I’ve culled hard and have seen improvements every year.

Now as far as color and barring goes this is my per-sonal preference in what I like to keep for breeding and what I look for the cull out. On both males and females I want the barring to be, as the standard calls for, nice and even and straight as I can get. I like to check out the wings and look at the primary=2 0feathers when I’m looking at the barring on a bird. It’s easier to get nice even bars in secondary than primaries, but I’ve noticed at least with my birds that the straighter the bars on the primary feathers, the bet-ter the barring are on the bird as a whole. Another thing I look at when comparing my birds is the shade of color of the whole bird. When I put them in the show coops and take a couple steps back and look at them, I want to see an even shade of what I call a "Bluish Steel Gray," Color. It doesn’t really matter to me if the color is lighter or darker than my personal prefer-ence but it has to be even from head to tail. I don’t like to see two or three different tones on one bird. Keep in mind that the females will most always look darker In color than the males because of them having wide bars than the males. Another thing I look for is any rust or brassiness in the feathers. I cull anything that has that, as well as solid black feathers in the wings or tail. I don’t mind a few solid black feathers in the body of the female as long as it’s not extreme and the bird is otherwise nice. I will not keep a male with solid black feath-ers anywhere as I feel that the male has more to do with color and barring than the females.

Well that’s all for now I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this, and if anyone has any feedback or just want to talk "ROCKS" feel free to contact20me.