A chicken coup: Group seeks to protect rare breeds
FRESNO, Calif. -- At about the time Foghorn Leghorn appeared on the Looney Toons drawing board in 1946, he began disappearing from America's dinner tables.
Now the bird on which the rooster cartoon character was modeled is among 66 types of old-fashioned chickens the North Carolina-based American Livestock Breeds Conservancy is trying to save from extinction as factory-raised cross varieties command 90% of the market.
"When we can identify something in danger, we need to protect it," says Barbara Bowman of Sonoma County, an original board member of Slow Food USA who has a dozen of the last 510 Delaware breeding stock chickens in existence. "The old breeds provide really sturdy genetics that we have to guard."
Since the arrival of industrialized agriculture, more than 95% of vegetables that had been grown in the world have disappeared, according to the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.
America's purebred chickens began a similar decline after World War II, when poultry producers, seeking to hold onto the market gained during wartime beef shortages, participated in the national "Chicken of Tomorrow" contest. The goal: a broad-breasted variety that could be mass produced quickly on minimal feed. A Cornish-Plymouth Rock cross dominates today.
Now the Pittsboro, N.C.-based Conservancy hopes to do with chickens what seed banks have done for heirloom vegetables.
"All of the other breeds lost their jobs because they couldn't grow as fast," said Marjorie Bender, the Conservancy's technical program director. "The marketplace only cared about how fast it grew and how big it got."
Unlike chicken bought by the bucketful, certified heritage chickens like the Leghorn must breed naturally, be able to live and forage outdoors, meet certain breed standards and not be genetically modified to grow with abnormally large breasts. If a human baby grew as quickly as a five-week factory fryer, he would weigh 349 pounds by age 2, a University of Arkansas study found.
The group hopes that its "heritage" seal of approval will alert consumers that the chicken or eggs come from birds with unique flavors and characteristics, the way organic labels indicate an absence of pesticides.
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