Back to the Future: Timeless ARB poultry flock a national treasure

By Dan Rahn

James Dean, Buddy Holly and Edsels are gone, but in one poultry flock on Milledge Avenue, time has stood still for 50 years.

Chickens elsewhere have changed. The bird that took 70 days to become a 3-pound roiler in the 1950s now takes only 40 days to weigh 5½ pounds.

Scientists know the difference is predominantly genetic because of a few hundred chickens known to poultry breeders everywhere as the Athens-Canadian and Athens Random-Bred flocks at the University of Georgia Poultry Research Complex. They're the chickens that time forgot, a living yardstick that breeders have relied on for half a century.

"It's a national treasure," said Mike Lacy, head of the poultry science department in
the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. "It's a truly unique flock that we intend to safeguard."

"It was always intended to be a project of 30 years or more," said Henry Marks, the one man most intimately familiar with the unique flock. "It was a way to measure environmental variation from one year to the next so breeders could accurately measure genetic gains."

Marks was the director of the Southern Regional Poultry Genetics Project for three decades. The project began in the late 1950s. When Marks came along in '67, "the first three directors had each served and left," he said. "But I messed things up. I didn't leave."

He won't say it himself, but colleagues say that was extremely fortunate for the
project. "He was indispensable," Lacy says of Marks' contributions.

Marks himself has always seen it as depending on all the parts: the U.S. Department
of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and cooperating land-grant universities in 13
Southern states.

The ARB flock grew out of the AC population and other genetic stocks from states in the project, Marks said. Together, they preserve the genotypes representative of chickens of
the 1950s.

"Everything we are, whether we're people or chickens or plants," Marks said, "is a composite of our genetics and environment. We've managed this flock so that from one year to the next, there's minimal genetic change. The primary change is environmental."

By "environmental," he means everything that's not genetic: food, climate, exposure to diseases. Having a way to measure environmental variation from year to year enables breeders to accurately measure the purely genetic gains in their flocks.

In the dynamic world of poultry breeding, the ARB flock has been a center of attention and Athens became the project headquarters. "We had the control population for all of the states," Marks said. "They didn't have to keep their own flocks. We would just ship them eggs when they needed them."

The flock began with 60 roosters and 420 hens in 60 sire pens. New chicks grow in a standard environment for eight weeks. "In the old days, we used to move them to the range then," Marks said. "But we got too many predators. Now they're always indoors."

At 20 weeks, the birds move to the breeder house for 50 to 60 weeks. For a broiler chicken, it's a long, cushy life.

Keeping them genetically stuck in the '50s requires exhaustive, immaculate record-keeping. Each sire pen, each hen, each egg is identified to maintain the essential random breeding.

"Over the years, the flock has remained relatively stable," Marks said. "It would bump up some years and down some as they responded to environmental variations. But it's been a sawtooth line with no significant trend."

Now, when baby boomers look longingly back to the '50s and the movies, the music, the cars, maybe they'll think of the chickens. Well, they were different back then, too. And in Athens, some still are.

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