Chocolate Chicken History

Once upon a time there was a farmer (or two, or three...) who loved chocolate....

Some years back, a friend rented space at Pinwheel to carry out her longtime chicken breeding projects. As things got busier for her, I got more involved in the day-to-day work of R.'s Chicken World. But I never got the marketing end figured out, and she was too busy to market, and we had some predator problems, and so eventually she sold the flock.

Her projects included breeding chocolate-colored chickens...English Orpingtons and Barred Rocks. We joked about how cool it would be to have chocolate chickens that laid green eggs.

At some point, we sold a chocolate-colored rooster to J.

By the time J. came to Pinwheel, she had been breeding from that rooster for several years, and she wanted to expand her program with her birds at Pinwheel. This included hatching some eggs to sell chicks. She was out of town the weekend they hatch, so I ended up in charge. We had agreed to sell them straight run, but with a promise to buy back any roosters since we were selling to city people.

That turned out to be a true God-send. J. chose to abruptly leave the farm, cutting off all ties. Her chickens went, too. But meanwhile, I had placed a couple of orders for hatchery chicks that we wanted to raise, some broilers to butcher and some Whitings True Greens (WTG) to which we would breed her chocolate rooster. Suddenly I was raising 50 chicks by myself, in addition to everything else! A bit overwhelming, but the broilers would finish in 8 weeks and be gone, and I could always sell some of the WTGs.

Then customers called me to return roosters. J. wanted nothing to do with making good on our guarantee, so I took the money out of pocket to make good on the guarantee. Then I realized...R's breeding program had come full circle, and returned to the farm...and I had the chocolate roosters and green-egg-laying hens to carry on the plan that R and I had imagined long ago. Additionally, J. had sold some hatching eggs to my Mom some years back, and she had a rooster and two lovely hens out of that hatch.

So, I started hatching chicks, buying feed, and building chicken facilities, and here is where I am:

I have a breeding flock of what I am calling ChocoMint chickens descended from R's, J's, and Mom's flocks. Some are solid chocolate (light or dark); some are barred (light or dark), some are solid dark chocolate, some are white with chocolate filigree or Columbian markings. Some lay brown, some lay green...I'll be selecting for the green ones.

The ChocoMint flock will produce terminal sires for creating ChocoLinks...sex link hybrids with laying breeds to create chocolate hens that (hopefully) will lay green eggs. The chocolate color gene is passed on by the rooster, but his male chicks from non-chocolate hens will not be chocolate. Daughter chicks from non-chocolate hens will be chocolate...or at least have traces of chocolate. This allows the chicks' sex to be determined at hatching, non-invasively.

For the ChocoLink hybrids, I have a laying flock of 15 WTG hens that lay green eggs, and 6 Pearl White Leghorns that will lay white eggs. My first cohort of ChocoLink WTG hybrids should be laying sometime in May...I can barely wait!