When Abraham Lincoln passed farmyards on horseback as a circuit-riding lawyer in Illinois in the 1840s and 1850s, many of the chickens he saw pecking and clucking around barns and houses likely were a breed known as Black Javas.
Prized for their tasty meat and eggs, for being efficient breeders and hardy, independent foragers, Black Javas in the 1800s became perhaps the most common breed of chicken in the country.
Now the biggest collection of Black Javas left in the world is a flock of 120 at the Garfield Farm Museum, 5 miles west of Geneva on Illinois Highway 38.
While for decades the potential extinction of rare animals across the globe has provoked growing public concern, government legislation and a legion of environmental activists, virtually the entire focus has been on wild animals.
Only recently has anyone taken up the cause of equally endangered animals, albeit ones with considerably less magnetism than Siberian tigers or bald eagles: domesticated farm animals such as chickens, turkeys and geese.
Many such breeds have already become extinct, and others are threatened as mass commercial production drastically narrows the types raised.
This weekend, experts from across the country have gathered at the historic Garfield farm to discuss how to save rare farm breeds in the interest of preserving genetic diversity. On Sunday, the farm museum will hold its 13th annual Rare Breeds Show, bringing endangered cattle, horses, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry from all over the country for a display open to the public.
The Garfield Museum is one of a number of non-profit institutions that for the last few years have been trying to interest hobby farmers and small breeding businesses in keeping neglected farm breeds.
“The idea is to form networks of people with particular breeds,” said Jerome Johnson, Garfield Farm’s director. “When you have networks, people can send their best breeders around to avoid inbreeding.”
For the last five years the museum has been trying to stave off extinction of the Black Java chicken by recruiting bird fanciers around the country to breed and keep Black Javas, now numbering about 500 in the world.
That is about the same number as the surviving population of the whooping crane, America’s poster bird for endangered wild animals. Unlike the whooping crane, however, there are no laws protecting the Black Java, no government funding on their behalf and no small armies of conservationists, naturalists and ecologists drumming up support.
Still, letting farm animal breeds fall into extinction would be a serious and possibly dangerous loss of genetic diversity in animals that humans depend on for food and fiber. If surviving breeds were stricken or wiped out by unforeseen perils such as new disease pathogens, there would be no alternative breeds to replace them.
What’s killing the Black Javas and dozens of other domesticated breeds of chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese that were farm mainstays two or three decades ago is simple lack of commercial interest in them.
Giant “hothouse” factory farms concentrate on one or two specialized breeds that they can hatch out by the tens of millions.
Most chickens bred by factory farms for their meat, for example, are from a single, fast-growing blend of White Rock and White Cornish breeds. Fed special diets and antibiotics, the hybrid grows from a newly hatched chick to a mature, meaty, 4-pound bird ready for slaughter in just six weeks.
Thus, not only are Black Javas endangered, so are many familiar breeds such as Rhode Island Reds, New Hampshires, Brown Leghorns, Jersey Giants, Dominiques and Wyandottes. Some once-popular breeds, such as Jersey Blues and New Hampshire Whites, are extinct already.
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While most people today are so far removed from agriculture that they don’t know one breed of cow or pig from another, Johnson likens the situation to imagining the world’s dog population being reduced to just one breed, perhaps the German shepherd.
With milk cows, for example, 99 percent of all the nation’s milk now comes from a single breed–Holsteins–used in similar “closed” factory farm systems. Familiar, historic breeds such as Guernseys, Jerseys and Ayrshires are dwindling into rarities.
Factory farming has done much the same to hogs, sheep and other traditional farm animals, victimized by the industrial specialization over the last 40 years that has turned farming into agribusiness.
“Today, if you are a corn and soybean farmer, you raise absolutely nothing else,” Johnson said. “That is agribusiness. If you are a hog producer, you are a megahog farmer. If you want to make money, you are going to raise hogs by the hundreds of thousands.”
What specialized farms replaced were smaller, integrated farms in which multiple kinds of crops and animals each had multiple purposes.
Cows, pigs and other hooved livestock were valued for meat, milk, fiber, hides and sometimes–with horses, mules and oxen–labor. All of them produced valuable manure for crops.
Geese were highly esteemed as guard animals that would alert farmers to intruders. Their feathers could be plucked twice a year for pillows and quilts without harming them, and their eggs and meat were valuable.
Free-ranging chickens, ducks and turkeys, beyond providing meat and eggs, were crucial in helping keep down insect populations in fields and farmyards.
Now only a few of those traits are desirable to specialized factory farms. Cows have to be super milk producers. Steers have to grow lots of meat, fast. White Leghorn hens have to lay lots of eggs. Nothing else matters. Whether they are good reproducers, foragers or farmyard alarm systems is immaterial.
Life and human lifestyles change so fast now, Johnson said, that it makes it all the more important to keep every possible breed and variety of breed of old farm animals around.
“We can’t predict future needs,” Johnson said, “but we should be prepared for what changes inevitably will come by preserving these genetic banks these animals represent.
“Something like a Black Java chicken might not seem so useful to us now, but we don’t know when we might need them again. . . . Losing them at a time that genetic science is just being perfected, we may be forgetting more than we’ll ever know.”