Hi Marco
My name is Dr Gil Stokes, developer of the Quamby – let me respond to your queries:
From the late 1890s through to the mid 1900s when the hybrids were introduced, the typical farm bird was a ‘dual-purpose’ or ‘utility’ fowl. These birds served the farmer and family with eggs and meat, the surplus being sold. During that time, commercial egg producers mostly farmed white Leghorns, and by the 1920s, they were recording an increasing number of ‘300 eggers’ – exceptional birds that laid 300+ eggs over a full year. My data is from birds that are not given artificial lighting to increase day length in winter, and down here in Tasmania we are at a latitude similar to Oregon.
Developing utility breeds was far more involved that improving either egg layers or meat birds, since both qualities must be included in the selection criteria. And breeding for meat is far easier than for eggs since the heritability of live weight gain is over 40% whereas for eggs production, heritability is less than 20%. This means that gains from generation to generation is rapidly achieved for improved meat production by selecting the fastest growers. No gains in egg production were achieved by breeding from the best layers until the trap nest was invented around 1911. This innovation was in response to the recognition that lasting improvement comes from selecting for productive genes, and with low heritability, improvement had to be based on the average performance of full-sister families. Now each egg had to be attributed to the bird that laid it so that each chick hatched, and hence each pullet, could be assigned its family affiliation in order to calculate family averages. The best birds from the best families were then selected into the breeding pens. Cockerels for breeding were also selected from the superior families, with their live weight gains also considered to improve growth rates each generation.
My 5th generation Quamby boys weighed 3 kg at 22 weeks, the pullets weighed 2.3 kg on average. The boys were not aggressive toward us as I had culled those boys in previous years. The girls start laying around 22 weeks, do not go broody, and lay an average 280 eggs in a year (my best pullet laid 310 eggs).
I have retained birds from the first cross, and they appear indistinguishable from later generations. Birds tend to lay 15% fewer eggs each year, but egg mass increases. Birds in a flock that lay the most eggs tend to lay the smallest eggs, so selecting for egg number will inevitably lead to decreasing egg weight in the flock. In my selection criteria for the Quamby, I compensate for this by giving a weighting for egg mass.
Dressed weight of the Quamby is around 2/3rds of live weight, so at 22 weeks of age, the dressed weight of boys is around 2 kg.
Quambys have been raised on deep litter from hatch, have never been given antibiotics (eg, against coccidiosis) or been vaccinated. They free range and are always very busy in the field, and are retained by 3 foot wire netting fencing.
I trust that this answers your questions, which I thank you for posing. Unfortunately the Quamby is only available in Australia at present, though that may change with demand – the Australorp was bred in Australia and is now appreciated around the world.
