About the ISA Brown

and other commercial brown layer hens

Image from the ISA website.

Summary

• ISA Browns are one of many commercial layer hens.

• The name is a brand name, like “Coke” or “Pepsi”. It’s not the name of an actual breed. There’s no such thing as a “pure” or “purebreed” ISA Brown, Lohmann Brown, etc. 

• The brand/product name is registered to specific commercial entities, who own that name - again, just like “Coke” or “Pepsi”.

• Commercial layer (and meat, for that matter) birds are a complex multi-generational “recipe” that cannot be replicated in a backyard setup. 

• The “recipe” is designed to produce an animal that lays as many eggs as possible in a mass-production setup, for as long as possible.

• Most commercial layer birds don’t live much beyond 2-3 years of age. “Most” is taken in the context of the millions of birds bred and used to supply eggs across the world. Exceptions will of course be seen in small-scale setups. 

• They tend to die of reproductive organ failure, or complications arising from that failure.

• They are vaccinated against most of the common poultry diseases, so are not prone to common respiratory issues (eg Coryza, ILT, IB), Coccidiosis, Fowlpox, or Marek’s Disease.

• For every guaranteed layer pullet, there’s a male chick disposed of at hatching time. This is the inevitable result of hatching chicks, where the proportion of male to female is broadly 50:50 (over a long enough period and with enough chicks). 

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Contents

• What is the ISA Brown?

  • Other names

  • Why not use purebreeds?

  • So they’re genetically modified chickens?

• Main traits of the commercial layers

• I breed/supply my own ISA Browns.

  • How are they bred?

  • How chicks are sexed.

• My chicken is over 7 years old! How can you say they die early?

  • What do they die of?

• The commercial layer chicken industry is horrible. Do you know what they do to the male chicks??

  • Why aren’t the male chicks used?

  • Why can’t they tell male birds in the egg?

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What is the ISA Brown?

ISA stands for “Institut de Selection Animale”. It’s the company that developed this particular commercial laying variety. 

Originally the birds came in three colours - White, Brown, and Black, but only the White and Brown are now available. White is not used in Australia. I am aware of a breeder/grower in northern NSW who claims to have “purebred ISA White”. Hendrix Genetics confirmed in November 2020 that they do not currently have any distributors of the ISA White in Australia, and suggested we check with Biaida, who are the sole distributors of the ISA brand in Australia.

The name “ISA Brown” is a brand, much like Coke or Pepsi. Like those drinks, the difference between the different laying “brands” is subtle, not really obvious to the disinterested eye, but of enormous commercial interest to the different companies. 

The name is now owned by Hendrix Genetics, and the birds are grown and distributed in Australia solely by Biaida.

I’ve heard other names ... 

Other similar laying varieties in Australia include:

• Lohmann Brown (owned by Lohmann Breeders GmbH - previously Lohmann Tierzucht - and distributed by Specialised Breeders Australia)

• Hy-line Brown (owned by Hy-line and distributed by Specialised Breeders Australia)

• Hi-sex (owned by Hendrix Genetics and distributed by Biaida, the same as the ISA)

There are many other brands - Brown Shaver, Gold Comet - but these varieties aren’t used in Australia.

There are also three Australian-developed and supplied commercial layer birds.

• Barter. Bred and distributed by Barter and Sons, NSW. Has Barter Black, Barter White, and Barter Brown chickens.

• Bond. Bred and distributed by Bond Enterprises, Qld. Has Bond Black, Bond White, and Bond Brown chickens.

• Gingerham. Red/brown layer, bred and distributed by Wagners Poultry, Vic. They also have white and black chickens with no specific “brand” name

These Australian birds aren’t as intensively bred, so tend to have more of the characteristics of a farmyard crossbreed - may go broody, will moult in autumn, lay fewer eggs in the first 18 months than the commercial breeds, but will live longer overall.

They are, however, still the “brand name” of a commercial chicken, not the name of a pure breed.

Why do they exist? Why not just use pure or heritage birds?

Purebreeds, or first-cross crosses, still tend to go broody or into moult once a year. They’re longer-lived than these complex crosses, but not as efficient for large-scale egg production.

The CSIRO in Australia developed a particular line of Leghorns that were the primary layer and scientific birds across the world for many decades. They were called “CSIRO Leghorns”, and differ from the usual Leghorns in that they were crossed with Australorp very early on, then bred back to pure, to produce a reliable layer bird that was slightly more calm and solid than the usually quite skittish Leghorns. They’re not auto-sexing and do tend to go into moult once a year.

They’re still around, but in small numbers. The CSIRO no longer maintains the flocks. 

There was also a reliable sex-linked cross between a Leghorn rooster and Australorp hen called an “Austra White”, which was often used as a commercial laying bird. You can create this lovely cross yourself and even use the name - it doesn’t belong to anyone any more. 

All these varieties, however, are simply out-laid by the commercial varieties.

So, they’re genetically modified chickens??

Not in the way you think. 

The development of these traits is done in laboratory hatcheries, mostly overseas. Not “genetically modified”, just the result of a lot of cross-breeding to isolate specific traits.

Countries import eggs for the “parent birds” or the “terminal birds”, and hatch them by the millions.

And yes, Australia imports eggs. It’s just that the process is not really accessible to small-scale breeders! - so we can’t easily import the eggs of other breeds.

Commercial layer main traits

All these varieties have been developed to have the following traits:

• Auto-sexing. When the chicks hatch, male and female down colour is different. In the Brown varieties, male chicks are white and female chicks are brown. Male chicks are generally disposed of immediately (*but see below), while female chicks are made available to commercial and domestic buyers as sexed day-old chicks. This is actually a key characteristic of the varieties. 

• Lay an egg a day for as long as possible. These are commercial birds. Egg farms - even high-quality, small-scale, true free-range/pastured egg farms - cannot afford to feed, house, and maintain birds that are not earning their way with eggs. They lay an egg a day, or they’re removed from the flock. This comes with side-effects; after about 2 years of laying, the reproductive organs simply fail, leading to death in the birds.

• Efficient feed conversion. For their size and production levels, they don’t eat as much food as other breeds. They do require a higher-protein feed than other breeds might require, however, in order to maintain health in the face of an egg a day.

• Don’t go broody. Most of their responses to general environmental conditions have been bred out, so they don’t go broody in response to warmer, longer days, and they don’t go off the lay in fewer daylight hours. Exceptions do occur, of course, and commercial layer hens have quite happily sat and raised broods.

• Calm and friendly. The layer breeds are among the friendliest of breeds to humans, regardless of how they’re raised. They can be notoriously unfriendly to other chickens, however. 

I breed/supply my own purebred ISA Browns 

No, you don’t.

You might have bred a brown layer bird. You may even have bred a rare ISA rooster with a brown layer hen.

You’ve got a crossbred chook. Commercial brown layers are not a purebreed. Crossbreeds do not automatically inherit the traits, and particularly the name, of either of their parents, even if those parents were pure breeds. The mix of genetics often produces something new and unpredictable and the more breeds there are in the mix, the more unpredictable the results are.

For eg, the result of crossing a pure Australorp with a pure New Hampshire is “a New Hampshire/Australorp cross”. It’s not an Australorp, or a New Hampshire, or even “utility Australorp” or “utility New Hampshire”. There’s nothing wrong with crossbreeds; they just aren’t either of the parent birds.

So you can’t breed an ISA Brown in your backyard, or sell ISA Brown eggs. You can breed an auto-sexing laying bird with brown feathers, and you can call it whatever you like but, officially, you cannot call it an ISA Brown or Hyline Brown.

Back to the Coke/Pepsi analogy - you can add a “cola syrup” to your Sodastream bubbles, and you can even sell if if you want, but you can’t call it either Coke or Pepsi.

However, anyone can buy day-old true ISA Brown chicks from the commercial hatcheries, raise them themselves, and onsell the birds to anyone. This is perfectly legal and common. They tend to be sold in batches of 100 at a time. They will be “true” ISA Browns; just not “pure” ones (in a breeder sense). 

These chicks should be sexed, and any rooster will be very obvious right at the beginning - they will have white down if young, or white feathers with brown speckles on the wings, instead of brown feathers. You should never receive a rooster from someone with the real deal; accidents are virtually impossible.

How are they bred, then?

Commercial layer varieties are actually a very complex, multi-generation crossbred “recipe” using a wide range of pure breeds in their mix. We know the mix can include Rhode Island Red, Rhode Island White, Leghorn, New Hampshire, and Marans, but other varieties and where they’re added in the breeding steps are closely-guarded commercial secrets.

This linked image actually relates to meat birds, but the broad concept is the same - it takes multiple generations to produce the “final’ result. 

The chicken family tree. Actually explaining how meat chickens are bred in Australia, but the broad concept is the same for layer chickens.

Image source: Australian Chicken Meat Federation

The “recipe” is frequently tweaked and, once the final result is produced, any further breeding on from the commercial birds tends to produce more unreliable results. Even if a rare rooster slips through the auto-sexing process, or if “real” ISA Brown or Lohmann Brown etc eggs are obtained, breeding an ISA hen and ISA rooster together does not guarantee continuation of the above traits - in particular, the auto-sexing trait.

How are ISA Brown chicks sexed?

ISA Browns, and other commercial layers, are sex-linked. This means the pullets (girls) and cockerels (boys) can be identified as soon as the down fluffs up from hatching.

In the brown birds, the sexing is done by the down colour/pattern. There are some variations in patterns for the brown layers but, broadly speaking, girls have brown patterning or down, and boys have white.

Female chick down is primarily brown.

Male chick down is primarily white.

The images above are taken from the Hendrix Genetics article “Color sexing in day-old chicks”. More down variations can be seen on the website.

In the white layer birds, the sexing is done by wing feathers. The variety is bred so the pullet feathers grow much faster than the cockerel feathers even in the first day of hatching.

Hendrix Genetics has a detailed article (if not particularly well-written …) on the genetics behind the breeding for sex-linkage. From that article:

… all the day-old commercial female chicks [show] fast feathering and all day-old commercial male chicks show slow feathering. You might guess now, what does it mean, fast or slow feathering? In fast feathered day-old chicks, the primary wing feathers are thicker and longer than the covert feathers, in slow feathered day-old chicks, the primary and the covert feathers are similar in length and thickness.

Feathering types Diagram of the wing of a one-day-old chick in dorsal view: A fast normal-feathering with the primary remiges (1a) longer than the coverlets (2a). B sex-linked delayed feathering with the primary remiges (1a) of the same length than the coverlets (2a). C modified delayed feathering with the primary remiges. (1a) shorter than the coverlets (2a).

Image from the Hendrix Genetics article “Feather sexing in Day-Old chicks”.

My chicken is over 7 years old! How can you say they die early?

Millions, if not billions, of commercial brown layer birds are bred every year, to service the world’s egg requirements.

Over that quantity, the vast majority don’t make it past 2-3 years of age.

Life, however, isn’t binary. It’s a bell curve, with “age of death” going up and “numbers of deaths” going horizontally. So some will die younger than that, and some will die older than that, but most of the deaths will be clustered around the 2-3 year mark.

We’re not saying YOUR bird will die young. We’re just saying that, statistically, a commercial brown layer is more likely to die between 2-3 years of age than other varieties of chicken.

What do they die of?

Generally, a malfunction of the reproductive organs. There’s a range of issues that can occur with the reproductive organs when they pump out an egg a day for 18 months solid. They include tumours, cancers, prolapse, breakage of eggs internally leading to egg yolk peritonitis (an internal infection), oviduct infections, immune or other organ failure due to internal infections or issues ... the list is depressingly long and all of it adds up to one thing - commercial brown layer hens tend to die quite early.

The commercial layer chicken industry is horrible. Do you know what they do to the male chicks??

Yes, they’re disposed of in their millions. It’s not a nice thing to contemplate. But there’s no market for them. They grow too slowly to be of use in the commercial meat bird market - which uses different crossbred birds - and there isn’t a market for crossbred roosters as there is. 

So when you buy a sexed commercial breed female chick, there’s a male chick that was disposed of, given the broad 50/50 proportion of male to female chicks when hatched in large enough numbers.

In fact, if you buy a sexed pullet of any breed, there was a cockerel chick that has to be got rid of somehow. Yes, even from that really nice local farmer with the fabulous rural setup. You can’t keep all the cockerels that hatch. 

Why aren’t the male chicks used?

There is one company that I know of who take the male chicks and grows them out to 16 - 21 weeks, processing them at this much older age to produce an eating bird as good as anything you can grow in your own yards. This is a fantastic initiative and is to be applauded and supported. Note that you will pay more for these older birds than you will for a commercial bird (which are processed at 7-8 weeks of age). 

• Colac, Vic: Chooks at the Rooke. Processed birds are available in a few Melbourne outlets.

The first company to start doing this - R and R Roosters in Penrith, NSW, very sadly closed down in November 2022

Why can’t they tell male birds in the egg?

There are early testing of sexing chicks in the shell using complex techniques, allowing for disposal of the eggs before they develop too far. It’s called “in-ovo testing”.

There is now a range of testing methods being trialled, mostly in Europe. It’s possible that the technology will eventually be mature and cheap enough to be used by backyarders, but that day is not yet.

More information

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