What is F1 and why we cannot use F1 (bounty fresh free range chicken) as breeders?

F1 is a short term for first filial generation. It is defined as the heterozygous (mixed genes) offspring produced by the crossing of a homozygous (pure) dominant strain (parent quality exhibited in the offspring) with a homozygous (pure) recessive strain (parent’s qualities do not show in the offspring). Our male, the Redbro, carry the homozygous dominant strain while our female line, the JA57Ki, carry the homozygous recessive strain. The qualities exhibited by the offspring are dominantly from the male. We import our parent stocks from a very reputed breeding company in Hubbard® to provide us with the best genetic lines. Parent stocks from these breeding companies exhibit the highest hybrid vigor or termed as heterosis. It is a term used in genetics and selective breeding describing the increased strength of different characteristics in hybrids. Heterosis is the opposite of inbreeding depression, which occurs with increasing homozygosity or sameness of genes. This is caused when you breed genetically related individuals such as F1s. Its implications is that your population will have no genetic variation and thus if a disease will hit them, chances are, all of them would be affected since they are closely related to each other.

Inbreeding can also result in depressed performance of the F1 offsprings leading to slower growth, poor feed conversion, poor growing uniformity, lower disease resistance leading to lower profitability among commercial growers. Therefore, from the right standpoint, it is never advisable to breed F1’s since they result to poorer performance of offsprings compared to offsprings from breeders. We are not talking about this as a possibility but this is a certainty that there will come a point in time that chicks you will be getting outside the breeders will have a depressed performance. Over the course of time, instead of saving money by not buying F1 chicks, you will be spending more since you will be feeding the chicks more feeds and cost to produce would be higher per head because of higher mortalities.

It is always better to replenish your stocks once you harvest them. It is not only the right thing to do but it also saves you time, money, and the hassle of hatching the eggs. We are not telling you this because we want you to always buy from us. We are telling you this because we have to break free from the ignorance that we can breed F1’s and still get the same result. F1’s were never meant to be used for breeding. They were meant to be the terminal/final/end product as meat producers.