To help the chickens of the future, Carl Schmidt is looking to the chickens of the past.
Schmidt, associate professor of animal and food sciences and biological sciences at UD, is studying heat stress on chickens — both those that would have been around in the grocery stores of the 1950s and those found in supermarkets today.
The $4.7 million, five-year research project is funded by the Climate Change Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
"The basic thought is that with climate change, it's not so much the fact that the average temperature is going to go up a couple of degrees; it's more the anticipation that there will be more heat waves, they will be hotter and they will last longer. And that is a problem for poultry production," Schmidt says.
By studying poultry from the 1950s, or "heritage" chickens, Schmidt is trying to see if any specific alleles, or individual gene variances, have been bred out of modern chickens that might make them less resistant to heat stress.
"Our hope is to identify particular alleles that help them survive heat stress. The thought is that if we can identify these alleles, industry could attempt to breed the alleles into their production lines," he says.
The heritage chickens for the study have been provided by the University of Illinois. In 1956, Illinois scientists set aside a male and female line of chickens and stopped selecting them for improved meat production. Those lines have been maintained, unselected, throughout the years, allowing researchers to study the chickens much as they would have been found in the 1950s.
Among their differences, a heritage chicken is much smaller than a modern one. A modern chicken would go to market in six weeks; the heritage bird in 16 weeks.