Heritage Breed Update with the Livestock Conservancy

Sponsored by Brinsea.

By Podcast Team and Jeannette Beranger
Updated on August 1, 2024
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Adobe Stock/slowmotiongli
Crèvecœur chicken.

In Episode 223 of Mother Earth News and Friends, Jeannette Beranger of The Livestock Conservancy joins us for our annual heritage breed update. Jeannette shares more about the importance of breed conservation, a deep dive of the Livestock Conservancy list, and we discuss rare chicken breed and duck breed updates.

Scroll down for our episode transcript, and scroll to the bottom for our show-note resources!

Heritage Breed Update with the Livestock Conservancy Transcript

Kenny Coogan: [00:00:00] Why do you think turkey breeders are in decline?

Jeannette Beranger: They can fly and then they get outside and then they forget they can fly and they run the fence line for hours and hours trying to figure out how to get back in. They’re not the cheapest poultry to keep, and so I think, , the reason you see so many bantams in shows is because they’re, they’re little, they don’t eat a lot, and they’re a heck of a lot easier to house than a turkey.

And, and interestingly, some of the rarest animals are also some of the biggest. And I think it’s all for the same reason.

Jessica Anderson: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you [00:01:00] are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.

[00:01:03] Brinsea Pre-Roll Ad

Jessica Anderson: We’d like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Brinsea. That’s B R I N S E A, chick incubation specialists. They’ve been focusing on egg incubator design continuously since 1976, resulting in egg incubators, chick brooders, and incubation accessories. They offer unparalleled practicality, reliability, superior hatch rates, and healthy chicks. Innovation you can trust.

Kenny Coogan: Good day, everyone. I’m Kenny Coogan and joining me today is Jeannette Beranger, the Senior Program Manager for the Livestock Conservancy. Jeannette has been with the Livestock Conservancy since 2005 and uses her knowledge to plan and implement conservation programs, conduct field research, and advise farmers in their endeavors with rare breeds.

She is the co author of the best selling book, An Introduction to Heritage Breeds. At home, she [00:02:00] maintains a heritage breeds farm with a focus on rare breed chickens. In today’s episode, we are having our annual checkup with the Livestock Conservancy on poultry breeds and their conservation status.

Welcome back to the podcast, Jeannette.

Jeannette Beranger: Oh, happy to be here.

[00:02:16] The Livestock Conservancy List

Kenny Coogan: With the Livestock Conservancy, you focus on lots of different domestic taxa, including cattle, donkeys, horses, pigs, rabbits, and sheep. But in today’s episode, we’re going to be focusing on poultry. How does the Livestock Conservancy determine what breeds they are going to give conservation labels to? Because there’s hundreds of breeds of chickens alone.

Jeannette Beranger: Yeah, , it’s actually pretty methodical. We put a lot of thought into what kind of animals we’re going to conserve. I mean, it really boils down to genetic uniqueness and the breeds that we work with. Should they go away, there’s [00:03:00] no recreating them genetically because the foundation from which they were developed no longer exists.

So you can create a bird that maybe looks like a breed, but genetically it’s not the same anymore. Like the chickens in my background are my CrèvecÅ”urs. They’ve been around since the 12th century, and you can create birds that look like CrèvecÅ”urs, but they have certain qualities, especially culinary, that lookalikes just can’t cut it.

So , we are primarily looking at large fowl and the bantams that we look at, and this is in the chicken category, of course, largefowl and bantams that have no largefowl counterpart. Because typically if a bantam has a largefowl counterpart, it’s just a bird that’s been created to look like a smaller version of of that.

But we do have some bantams that have [00:04:00] always been bantams and don’t have largefowl equivalent like the Nankin or the Sebright. There are no largefowl versions of that. And they’re old. We also look at how long a breed’s been around, and we have a rough cutoff point of breeds that have around, been around since before the 1920s, 25, typically before the emergence of commercial production in agriculture.

We look at the numbers of birds, and we can talk about this later, poultry censusing is, is not for the faint of heart. It’s really hard. And , it, it can take upwards of a year to get the numbers that we need to start making decisions.

And then we also look at the number of people that are raising the animals. So say there are 500 CrèvecÅ”urs, which is a good number, but if they’re all in the hands of one person, that doesn’t secure [00:05:00] that breed. So there are a bunch of things that we look at in order to determine if they come on the conservation priority list. If we just put breeds on there because, just because they were rare every new import that comes to the U.S. would be considered rare, because it’s not a lot of them. Well, birds like the Ayam Cemani, they’re quite plentiful where they come from. They’re rare here. But where they come from, they’re quite plentiful. So we also look at global numbers. Again, going back to the example of the CrèvecÅ”ur in France, they’re still pretty rare. They’re, doing better than they had, but they’re still quite rare. So we probably have more over here in the U.S. than there are in France.

Kenny Coogan: And do you have a French ancestry?

Jeannette Beranger: Very much so actually. And I’m married to a Frenchman. So , it was just one of those things where, you know, , when we were talking about our next chicken project, we landed on the CrèvecÅ”ur. And, they were in pretty tough [00:06:00] shape when we first started working with them. But I’m happy to say they’ve made the move from “critical” to “threatened” because we worked really hard on getting their production traits back to where they should be and getting people excited about them. You know, If you want to free range them, because of those top knots, they can’t see predators coming. So, my birds are in a virtual Fort Knox, , hot wire on all sides, plus it’s got a canopy on top, and, and even then the dang black snakes managed to get in and try and get some of the chicks, but we, we have to protect them. Because where they come from, there’s not as many predators as, as there are here. So yeah, we, we kind of fell on the CrèvecÅ”urs, because it just seemed like all the stars were in alignment.

[00:06:51] Conservation Label Definitions

Kenny Coogan: Now, you just mentioned that they were downlisted from “critical” to “threatened,” and we’re kind of mentioning that [00:07:00] there’s these conservation labels. So can you tell us how many labels there are, and for poultry, how do you determine what breed goes to what status?

Jeannette Beranger: Yeah, so we’ve got “critical,” “threatened,” “watch,” “recovering,” and “study.” And, again, it’s a combination of numbers of birds and numbers of breeders. And, critical being the most severe, where you’ve got fewer than 500 breeding birds. And with the CrèvecÅ”urs, when we got started, if there were 200 breeding birds, we were lucky. Now we’re over a thousand.

With threatened, you’ve got fewer than a thousand breeding birds, seven or fewer primary breeding flocks, and we also look at global population, so global population less than five thousand. With the critical, it’s global population, less than a thousand.

And then if they continue to do better, then they can move into the watch, which is fewer than five thousand breeding birds [00:08:00] and estimated global population of less than ten thousand.

And, and then we’ve got recovering, where a breed might sit for a few years. They’re doing really, really well. But, , breeds are a fickle thing when it comes to popularity. And although the are doing really well now, who’s to say 10 years from now, they’re going to slip back to where they were? So we, we try to monitor the breeds and, and make sure that they don’t slip.

And then we’ve got a category called study, where it’s proposed to bring in a breed that people think fit the parameters, and so we’ll bring it into study and then that triggers us to start doing a little bit of research on the breed, see how many are out there, what’s their history, are they genetically the breed they say they are. Because we’ve had breeds proposed for the conservation priority list, but when we [00:09:00] investigate, we find out they’re just a modern recreation of the original breed.

Like Lamona chickens. All the evidence that we find the original breed is gone, but there’s some Lamonas out there right now that look exactly like the original, but they were created from a breeding program. And they very much look like Lamonas, but our point is genetic conservation. And so from a genetic point of view, they’re not the original breed. There’s nothing wrong with them. It’s just they don’t fit our criteria. And we have to stay kind of rigid about that because otherwise the list of breeds gets really out of control. And then, we can’t do effective conservation of the list is just not following really stringent guidelines.

So that’s basically where the list comes from. And it’s really the basis for our work that gives us a guideline on what animals we need to be paying [00:10:00] attention to.

[00:10:01] What Happens When a Breed Changes Status?

Kenny Coogan: So today’s episode we’re focusing on poultry, but if listeners want to learn about the conservation priority list for other taxa, like cattle or donkeys or pigs or sheep, they can go to LivestockConservancy.org, and it lists all of the different numbers of status and it also gives all of the breeds you guys are focusing on.

If a breed is listed as critical or threatened, what happens? Do breeders get notified? Are there campaigns to bring awareness to the public so people start breeding them?

Jeannette Beranger: Typically, , we review the conservation priority list twice a year. And, we;ve got to weigh what is what is possible to do. And then, do we have the funding to be able to do it? And sometimes we can piggyback on other projects to try and promote something, but typically, we’ll sit down in our twice a year [00:11:00] meetings to decide what is it we can really do to help a breed or species.

In the case this year, we were able to get funding to kind of give a leg up on turkeys, because we’re a bit concerned that we’re losing turkey breeders. It’s not like a giant red flag yet, but the, the number of turkey breeders in the U. S. hasn’t grown for a long, long time. And it, it’s not that hard to see them start to slip. And standard bred turkeys are incredibly important from a diversity point of view, because commercial production is reliant on these big white birds that can’t breed naturally, aren’t going to hatch their own eggs, and if they end up having genetic problems, if we don’t have standard bred turkeys around, where are they going to get the genetics to fix those problems? Standard bred turkeys are quite important, and we are fortunate enough to get funding for doing a [00:12:00] couple things. We’re revising our turkey breeding manual, and then we are gonna be collaborating with the Tennessee Valley Poultry Club and some key people in, in the turkey world to put on a turkey workshop.

And this is going to be a really intense workshop for people that maybe they only want to raise holiday birds and that’s fine. But we’re also going to cover breeding. And so we’re going to run the full gambit of, if you just want to raise a few for the holidays, or whether you want to have a breeding flock, and how do you do that?

And this is going to be coupled with we’re hoping it’s going to be a good showing of turkeys at the Dixie Classic this year, and the workshop’s going to be held there in Knoxville in December. And we’re hoping to have a big showing of standard bred turkeys at the show, and they’re going to do an old fashioned table judging.

And Frank Reese who, anybody who knows anything about turkeys knows the name [00:13:00] Frank Reese. He’s going to be judging the show. And we’re hoping to have everybody mic’d up so we can hear firsthand what thoughts are going through and what qualities you’re looking for to, to pick a bird that’s outstanding from a flock. And, as, as you probably know, not every animal is meant to be a breeder. And so what we’re trying to teach people is how to determine which are that top 10 percent that you want to keep as a breeding stock.

So we’re really excited about this workshop, and its focus is mainly in the Southeast. Because the Southeast is like this turkey desert. There’s not a lot of turkey breeders in the Southeast. There are some, but the bigger concentrations are elsewhere. So the grant is focused in on, on getting people excited about raising turkeys in the Southeast. And once upon a time, there used to be huge populations of turkeys in the Southeast, and just over time, they’ve kind [00:14:00] of fizzled out.

[00:14:01] Turkey Breeders in Decline

Kenny Coogan: Why do you think turkey breeders are in decline?

Jeannette Beranger: Well, they’re, they’re big birds that eat a lot, and they need space and they’re not the easiest bird to keep within a perimeter. They can fly ,and then they get outside and then they forget they can fly and they run the fence line for hours and hours trying to figure out how to get back in. They’re not the cheapest poultry to keep, and so I think, , the reason you see so many bantams in shows is because they’re, they’re little, they don’t eat a lot, and they’re a heck of a lot easier to house than you know, a turkey.

And and interestingly, some of the rarest animals are also some of the biggest. And I think it’s all for the same reason. When I first moved to North Carolina, I could get a sack of feed for 12 bucks. Now it’s $27. So , my growing birds eat me out of house and home and, and I’ve raised a few ducks this year and, oh my God, the food consumption there [00:15:00] is just out of this world.

And so I think that’s one of the biggest challenges is that they’re just really expensive and they take up a lot of room. And so, it’s hard. It used to be you could keep a few in your backyard, but nowadays, fewer and fewer people have enough property for letting animals free range around. And, a pen for turkeys, even if you have a breeding flock of 15 to 20, that’s, that’s a pretty big pen that you’ve got and a barn that you’re going to need to build for those animals. If you’re lucky enough to be in a place that’s warm, like in the Southeast, all right, you don’t need a barn for them, but you still need a lot of space for them.

[00:15:41] Heritage Breeds Versus Commercial Breeds

Kenny Coogan: What are some of the positive attributes of heritage turkey breeds or turkeys that are able to breed naturally? Why would somebody consider that? Is it all flavor and texture? Because I just don’t know if people who are investing all that money, [00:16:00] do they really care about the genetics as much as they should or as much as you do?

Jeannette Beranger: Some people do. Other people they just want to raise them for the holidays, and and that’s it. They don’t want to breed, and that’s fine too, because they’re providing a market for the people that are breeding them. And for standard bred turkeys, there are a number of reasons that they’re a great choice. One is that if you’ve got the place where you can let them forage in pasture or even in the woods during the warmer months when you’ve got food opportunities, like insects or invertebrates, what have you, the turkeys will take advantage of that. And they’re really great at integrated pest management.

I know people that have cut flower fields. Turkeys are great for that. ‘Cause the only bug a turkey won’t eat is the one it can’t catch. They really are quite efficient with that. And then when you get to the culinary part, yeah, that [00:17:00] is, is quite important, at least from our perspective. The reason these animals are rare is because they lost their job. For turkeys, it was being a table bird, and also pest management. And, folks have just turned to chemicals for the pest management, and people are used to cheap turkey. And if you’ve ever had a heritage turkey, it’s like night and day.

But the challenge is training people to understand how to cook them properly because they’re not full of water like a commercial bird is. And, the flavor’s there, but when people see the sticker price where you’re paying 60, 70 bucks for a turkey, let me tell you, it, it costs that much to raise them.

Commercial turkeys are ready at 18 weeks. Heritage turkeys are ready at about 28 weeks. So you’ve got 10 weeks more feed that you have to feed those [00:18:00] animals compared to the, the commercial ones. And, and I think for a special meal for the holidays, I see people spending that much just for a cheese board. So why not put a decent bird on your table too and experience that , amazing flavor? And, and it’s worth the effort. It really is.

Kenny Coogan: And those cheap turkeys really come at a cost because it’s just terrible that people have designed turkeys and other breeds that can’t even reproduce naturally.

Jeannette Beranger: Well, exactly. And, and I’m not slamming commercial turkeys, that’s not my thing, but I’m also not going to slam it because not everybody can afford a $70 turkey. But, we can’t let these heritage turkeys go because sooner or later, commercial production is going to need these genetics. Because, when you’ve got such a limited gene pool for a majority of the production, sooner or [00:19:00] later, problems going to creep in.

Like with commercial turkeys and commercial chickens, you’ve got this condition called “woody breast.” And it affects a lot of the population. And what it does is some of the muscle tissue will toughen up. And they call it “woody breast” because it’s kind of like the consistency of wood. Now you can chop that up and put it into a chicken nugget. No one’s the wiser. But for a table bird, that can be a problem, if you’re trying to have a nice presentation for a table bird. And it actually costs the poultry industry millions of dollars to deal with woody breast. And I was really surprised. I knew it was well documented in chickens, but I didn’t realize it’s actually quite well documented in commercial turkeys too.

So it makes sense. They’re both really fast growing. These animals are growing in a way that Mother Nature never intended. It’s great they grow [00:20:00] fast and produce product in a short period of time so a lot of people can get fed, but there is the cost. And that’s one of them.

Heart disease. A lot of the, the animals, their hearts can’t handle that huge body in such a short period of time, which is why you have a lot of birds that just keel over. Or leg problems with commercial turkeys. They get so big, they just don’t have the leg structure to be able to support that immense weight. So there, there is a cost. And standard bred turkeys don’t reflect those same problems as the commercial birds, because they are slower growing, and they haven’t changed all that much in all these years. There’s still the same basic package, just different colors.

Kenny Coogan: Do you have a video or an article on how to cook a standard bread turkey versus a watery commercial turkey?

Jeannette Beranger: I might go to the Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch. They [00:21:00] always have recipes on there. I know D’Artagnan, they’ve got some really great recipes for heritage turkey. And then you can go to, like, old cookbooks. Cookbooks before commercial turkeys came out, and they’ll tell you how to do it.

One thing that I have done is I’ve written a series of articles for the Livestock Conservancy, and there may be some on our website. But I talk about how to cook turkeys at different ages, because depending on the, the age of the bird, you cook them a little bit differently, from really young ones that can be friers to mature toms. And mature toms are unbelievably flavorful. I mean, they’re amazing, but they’re big. They’re a bit of a challenge to manage in the oven. But if you understand how to cook them properly, I talked with Frank a lot about different cooking techniques, and he always says his favorite [00:22:00] bird to eat is an old Tom.

But it takes time to cook it properly, and this is another part of culinary heritage that a lot of folks have forgotten is that the roaster is not the end all for, for breeds. There are different cooking techniques for different ages. Like with chickens, you know, your spring chicken, or your poussin. And then you’ve got your, your friers, which are young chickens. And, you can use high temperature methods and cook them fairly fast. Then you’ve got broilers, which you cook a little bit differently. Then you’ve got roasters, and then you’ve got your spent hens and your old roosters.

And I have to say one of my favorite birds to eat from our flock is our old roosters. And I can tell you, I have a number of chefs not far from here that would kill for any rooster that I’ve got because I’ve sold them some and, and they want more. And I, I just don’t have that many [00:23:00] more.

But it’s all about a cooking technique. And so I’m working through all the species. I’ve started with chicken and then went to duck and then the turkey and goose, and then I’m going to start working through the livestock breeds because it’s the same thing. Like with cattle , you’ve got the, the, the veal cow, which , if you look at Spanish tradition, young animals were butchered often for, for various reasons. But otherwise it would be you’d have the veal animal, and in France, they call it or, ” farm veal.” And they do not separate the animals from their mothers. It’s just they’re processed at an age where they’re still having the benefit of the milk from the mother, but they haven’t gone into that long and lanky stage where they’re just more bone than, than meat.

Then you get into the typical cow where, , maybe they’re a year, year and a half, and then you’ll, you’ll butcher steers as a meat animal. [00:24:00] And then you get into, what do you do with a cow that’s come to the end of her life or, or a bull. And this is stuff that producers don’t understand that you can have a really great product, no matter what age the animals at, so long as you understand how to process it and educate your customers that this is really good stuff.

We had a major tasting in New York City with mutton. And we had a mature Cotswold ram, and that sucker processed out at 150 pounds hanging weight. That’s a huge animal. But we understood that this animal had to be butchered out of breeding season so the hormones aren’t messing with the meat quality. He had to be separated from the females, fed no grain. He was just fed grass or hay. And that the hang time was really important too. With mutton, [00:25:00] you’ve got to hang the animal or age it for at least a week and a half to two weeks, because he was a mature animal. He went up to 2 weeks and because he had so much fat on him, as he was aging, you could trim the fat and you weren’t really losing any meat. And, we did this great event we call Much Ado About Mutton, and most of the people there had never had mutton before. And there wasn’t a single person that walked out of that event that wasn’t totally blown away with that product.

We had a tasting with this old ram. Mutton got a really bad reputation during World War II when the British were butchering their animals because they were worried about animals being destroyed by bombs. The problem is they didn’t age the old animals. They just butchered them and put them into cans and fed that to the troops. That, my friend, is God awful stuff. It’s just beyond gross. And it’s no wonder no one wanted to touch mutton when they got home. But if you look at writings, like [00:26:00] Charles Dickens, when you wanted to impress somebody for dinner on a Sunday, you had a haunch of mutton there.

Just like, don’t tell me it’s awful stuff because you’ve never had good mutton. And it’s the same thing with the poultry. Everybody’s like, “oh, a rooster is tough.” Well, you just don’t know how to cook one. Because mine falls off the bone because I cook it properly for three and a half hours at 275 in liquid, and that thing comes out fabulous.

Kenny Coogan: We’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor, and when we return, we’re going to talk about Java chickens and Aylesbury ducks.

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[00:27:09] Update on the Rare Chicken Breed, the Java Chicken

Kenny Coogan: We’re back with Jeannette Beranger, the Senior Program Manager for the Livestock Conservancy. Now, the Java chicken is the second oldest breed of chicken developed in America. Can you tell the listeners what it looks like?

Jeannette Beranger: The Java chicken, they come in mottled or they come in black. There are sport colors of white and, and what some people call auburn. But the recognized colors from the APA is the mottled and the black. You’re right, it’s one of the oldest chickens we have in the U. S. And in particular, the black Java is, is really hurting right now. There’s not a lot of people raising them.

There was a significant flock up in the Museum of Science and Industry up in Chicago, and they’ve since stopped that flock. [00:28:00] And so the biggest breeding flock in the country is gone. So we’re trying to help people, well, encourage people to think about breeding the Java, but people that know what they’re doing with chickens, a lot of times people want to work with the rarest of the rare. And if you don’t have a lot of experience, you’re not doing that breed any favor if you get them, and they all die for whatever reason or get wiped out. Don’t start with the rarest of the rare if you don’t have experience.

Kenny Coogan: What are some of the attributes of a Java? Why would they want to raise them?

Jeannette Beranger: Good temperament. They’re good egg layers. They will raise their own young. They’ve got a pretty decent carcass for meat. And they’re excellent foragers. They’re rough and tough kind of chicken that you don’t have to coddle for it to be successful.

[00:28:51] Update on the Aylesbury Duck

Kenny Coogan: And one of the largest duck breeds, the Aylesbury duck, is also not doing too well since we last spoke. What’s going on with their status? [00:29:00]

Jeannette Beranger: Yeah, like standard bred turkeys, Aylesbury ducks are big and they eat a lot. And I know this from personal experience because I’ve got some eating me out of house and home at, at the farm right now. But they are delicious birds. They were probably the number one meat duck in England for quite a long time.

And , I think because they’re big, they consume a lot of feed, and they’re not colorful or anything. They’re, they’re white with pink bills. If they’ve been in the sun a lot, the bills will turn orange from the UV exposure. But they’re, they’re really sweet ducks, easy going, not too loud. Easy to train, like I’ve easily trained my birds to go into the house at night, just tell them, “Go in the house,” and it only took 2 or 3 days for them to figure that out. And so , it’s easy to round them up and get them to go into the house. But but they, they need help, and and they’re not a small package. They’re, they’re a [00:30:00] big duck. I’ve eaten some and they are just delicious and they make excellent duck bacon. So if if anything else, bacon, what’s better than that?

[00:30:12] How to Find Rare Poultry Breeds

Kenny Coogan: If you are an experienced poultry breeder, is it possible to obtain Java chickens or Aylesbury ducks from breeders, or are their numbers too low?

Jeannette Beranger: There are different spots in the country where you can find them more easily, but if you’re not willing to go out and get them, not everybody ships animals. I don’t ship birds anymore, I worry too much. So, if you want live birds from me, you’re gonna have to come and get them. When I first got into CrèvecÅ”urs, I had to go to St. Louis to get them, because that’s all there was to find. It’s possible to get them, but realize they’re super rare, and they’re not gonna necessarily be in your backyard.

Kenny Coogan: And how can people find breeders or these animals, just generally speaking, to add to their homes?

Jeannette Beranger: So we’ve got a online breeders and [00:31:00] products directory online classifieds, certainly breed clubs, if they have them.

I find another resource that’s really helpful is the APA annual yearbook, and you’ll see advertisements for people that are specialists in different breeds, and that’s a wealth of information there if you’re looking for a specific breed. And SPPA, that’s another directory that you can go to.

[00:31:26] American Poultry Association and the Future of Standard Bred Poultry

Kenny Coogan: All right, Jeannette, last question because you just mentioned the APA -the American Poultry Association just approved a census committee, which will spearhead future censuses of standard bred poultry. What does that mean?

Jeannette Beranger: I’m hoping what that means is more engagement with the breed clubs and getting a more accurate view of what animals are out there. I mentioned earlier, it’s a real challenge to census chickens because there are no stud books or anything. We do censusing every 5 [00:32:00] years because it takes a good year, year and a half to census poultry. And you’re talking about individual owners, hatcheries, university flocks, and a lot of it comes down to picking up the phone, doing emails. We can send a survey out, but a lot of people don’t want to take surveys. So again, picking up the phone, “Hey, what do you got?” So I’m hoping that we can form a team within APA circles of people that are involved with different classes of poultry. Say, somebody that’s involved with Mediterranean fowl, they know who’s in the community and they have a better knowledge of who’s got what out there than than I would. Those people all hang together so that’s what’s got me really excited about that.

Kenny Coogan: Thank you so much Jeannette for this conversation and joining us on our annual the Livestock Conservancy checkup.

[00:32:57] Podcast Credits

Jessica Anderson: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News [00:33:00] and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast. You can also email us at Podcast@OgdenPubs.Com with any questions or suggestions.

Our podcast production team includes Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner.

Music for this episode is “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod.

The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.

[00:33:28] Brinsea Post-Roll Ad

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Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.

About Jeannette Beranger

Jeannette Beranger is the Senior Program Manager for the Livestock Conservancy. Jeannette has been with the Livestock Conservancy since 2005 and uses her knowledge to plan and implement conservation programs, conduct field research, and advise farmers in their endeavors with rare breeds.

She is the co author of the best selling book, An Introduction to Heritage Breeds. At home, she maintains a heritage breeds farm with a focus on rare breed chickens.

Additional Resources

The Livestock Conservancy

Listen to more podcasts with Jeannette:
Heritage Poultry Update: Threatened Rare Chicken Breeds and More
Endangered and Unusual Poultry Breeds
Cold Weather Chickens


Our Podcast Team:
Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner
Music: “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod

Listen to more podcasts at MOTHER EARTH NEWS PODCAST.
Check out the MOTHER EARTH NEWS Bookstore for more resources that may interest you.
Go to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS video page for an opportunity to see some of our podcast guests on camera.

The Mother Earth News and Friends podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.

Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.

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