Page 20 - ECF-LIA-Nov-DEC-2023-F2

LEGACY IN ACTION
20
Every other week, Katrina Foster
picks up a dozen eggs. They’re not
uniform or all one colour, like the eggs
you’d find at the grocery store. The
shells range from white to light brown.
Some have speckles. Inside, the yolks
tend to be orange rather than yellow.
The size isn’t always the same, either.
Foster has noticed the eggs she gets in
January are smaller than the ones she
gets later in the year. No matter the
season, though, they’re delicious.
“I can taste the difference,” says
Foster. “They just taste richer and
more substantial.”
Foster is a longtime subscriber to
the University of Alberta’s Adopt-a-
Heritage-Chicken program, which
launched in 2014 with help from
a $40,000 grant from Edmonton
Community Foundation.
Through the program, eggs from
the 1,200 heritage chickens who live at
the U of A’s Poultry Research Centre are
sold to help cover the costs of keeping
the flock at the farm. The program helps
promote the conservation of unique
genetic lines of poultry – from breeds
such as Plymouth Rock, Light Sussex
and Brown Leghorn.
Currently, the program has about
425 subscribers, who pay an annual
subscription fee of $200 to get 20 dozen
eggs per year. There’s also a mini-
subscription of 10 dozen eggs. The eggs
come from all the different breeds,
not just the subscriber’s particular
adopted chicken.
“We give them a variety of eggs and
it’s all random; just all these different
heritage breed eggs. It’s sort of like a
little rainbow,” says Taresa Chieng,
Heritage Chicken Program Coordinator.
Chieng enjoys interacting with
the chickens.
“My favourite is the Light Sussex,
because they’re really pretty. But the
really friendly ones most often you
see on TikTok videos, you see a lot of
Plymouth Rocks, they’re really friendly
and they’re really cuddly and fun.”
But along with the delicious eggs and
cuteness factor, keeping these rare breeds
of chickens — some of which were
donated to the university as far back as
the 1990s — is incredibly important for
the future of poultry farming.
“Because a lot of the commercial
breeds use the genetics from these
heritage birds, if anything were to
happen to the commercial breeds, we
can actually go back to the heritage
breeds and see where we went wrong,
and correct it,” says Chieng.
It’s also important to have them as a
link to the past.
“It’s sort of like a living museum,”
says Kerry Nadeau, Unit Manager at the
Poultry Research Centre. “They’re the
different types of chickens that used to
be important to people back in the days
where you’d raise all your own food.”
Today, commercial chickens are
bred to be uniform, producing cartons
of the same size and colour of eggs. “It’s
the same with meat birds. You go to find
a roasting chicken, they’re all sort of the
same. Whereas with the older, heritage
breeds, they show a lot of variation,”
says Nadeau.
Over the years, they’ve also been
“
WE GIVE
THEM A
VARIETY OF
EGGS AND
IT’S ALL
RANDOM;
JUST ALL
THESE
DIFFERENT
HERITAGE
BREED EGGS.
IT’S SORT
OF LIKE
A LITTLE
RAINBOW
”
— Taresa Chieng