Tracking Breeding Process

With several hundreds of actively bred dragoturkeys creating some kind of tracking system is inevitable.

There are several possible solutions of this problem:

1. Tracking every single bird and all its matings and chickens;

2. Tracking the number of birds of given breed (and/or capacity);

3. Tracking breeds and their condition.

The first approach requires a lot of paperwork but gives more information than any other. However, for those who are not interested in researching breeding mechanisms this information is redundant and the effort needed to maintain the system is enormous, not to mention that it includes tedious and monotonous everyday routine of writing down all the changes. Also pregnant dragoturkeys whose delivery time is close should not be left in the shed as it’s impossible to find out about chicken’s parents once it’s born.  Still, for someone seeking for a reliable data tracking systems of this type are, probably, the only choice.

The second type is useful for so-called mass-breeders. Usually they don’t need detailed statistics, but it’s much easier to work with a huge flock if you know how many birds of each type are in the flock. The huge plus of this tracking system is low maintenance cost due to the simplicity.

The third type of solution is aimed for the breeders who work on purifying the lines and breeding specific capacities. The shortcoming of this system is lack of information about the output of matings, therefore it’s not possible based on these data to calculate probabilities for passing a colour or a capacity, but, of course, not many breeders need this.  Tracking system organised this way is simple enough to require minimum effort to maintain and at the same time it’s complex and accurate enough to give an adequate picture of the given flock.

After a long time of doubts, trials and mistakes, experimenting with formats, types of data, and so on we chose the third type of tracking system (while still hoping to create a first type system for statistical research). So far it works pretty well (our flock numbers about 700 mounts).

The full preview of the Dragoturkeys template.

Excel format

Open Document format

Of course, this system is not perfect and we constantly work on improving it, but at the moment it’s the easiest to use tracking tool at our disposal.