Ross Cobs as meat birds

[Poultry Snob]

I checked out the links you provided, and I see that the industrial strains of chicken are not the same as those available to the home poultry market. Sure they are. Virtually all of the chickens sold as Cornish X whatever come from eggs produced at CWT Farms in Georgia. http://www.aviagen.com/home.aspx?siteId=6. CWT farms is owned by the same company that owns the Ross genetics.The first one calls the descriptions of the birds "product profiles", as if they're describing inanimate objects. That's unfortunately becoming a more and more common attitude, to think of meat animals as "products" rather than as "live creatures". In the other direction we have people who think of chickens as feather covered people with speach impediments.

Those Ross-Cobb crosses are not available through most hatcheries that sell chicks for home meat production, at least not in the US. You are probably correct on this since Aviagen probably dosen't have any Cobb-Vantress breeders at CWT Farms. Cobbs are a Tyson product . It would be like mixing Coke and Pepsi and getting either company to sell the blend.So while you are correct that they aren't unknown in the US, they are not known in the US to the average home grower. Makes no difference - al the industrail broiler strains are so simular it would be nearly impossible to tell them apart in a backyard situation. Except for one dead bang give away. A pure Cobb Vantress will always have a few colored featehrs. Incomplete black or red "ticking" is a hallmark of the line

If I were the CEO of a huge company that raises chickens for supermarkets, in those places I think of as "chicken concentration camps", I would probably want those. But most home raised poultry is being raised by people who don't want to raise thousands at a time.

Here are some links that show the Cornish-Rock crosses that no longer exist, according to you.

http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/CGA/Broil/BRKMeat.html

http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/category/meat_birds.html

It's possible that the ones on the McMurray site aren't Cornish-Rock crosses. They are industrial type meat chickens, genetic "products" Not Cornish X as they advertise in order to sell them to backyarders.. They don't actually tell you what they are, so who knows. There are many other hatcheries that sell similar birds, but since they don't list them as "Avigen 78" or whatever, we have no way of knowing if that's what they actually are. Dosen't make any difference because they are all just about the same.

Most of us are aware that the Cornish-Dorking (or other combos) are not the Cornish-rock X's. That's what some of us are talking about, is something DIFFERENT from the Cornish-Rock X's. Where would one get this breeding stock?

I'm a smallholder, interested in raising meat for my own table, as humanely as I can, and I prefer a bird that, while it may be slightly less efficient, is healthier, more active, able to forage and make use of good pasture, and doesn't drop dead from CHF or have it's legs collapse. This is NOT a "fantasy", people are doing this all the time. There are Color Rangers, Rainbow Cornish, and others. Yeah - they have been around for years. Mostly as birds for the market and conditions in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. The "organics" like them and the big genetics companys have brought some of them to North America.Just because something doesn't fit the massive market model, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. I couldn't agree moreI want to try various crosses until I find something that fits MY needs, not Tyson's. It is your money. Enjoy the chewing expereince!

The dual-purpose birds are generally birds that are good layers, but the roosters get large enough to be worth sending to freezer camp when you have too many of them. Or when you run out of feed money They aren't the huge frankenbirds, but they are perfectly good to eat. And very flavorful I might add. That is because they are so old And as far as not being very good layers, my black Australorps lay an egg a day, except when moulting (once a year) or brooding. What? About 320 eggs a year like an industrial layer?There are non-broody types a person can get that lay an egg a day, except for a yearly moult. Just how much better do you expect a hen to do? We don't all require absolute peak production of everything at all times. Unless you are trying to make a living selling to Wal-mart.

A healthier bird is healthier food. Soft, mushy, bland, antibiotic laden meat that is chlorinated or irradiated before being packaged has become the industry standard. Many of us are no longer willing to continue consuming this inferior food.

WOW - have you ever been sucked in.

We're willing to do the work to provide a better alternative for ourselves. If you don't want to, that's your choice.Good for you. I admire your goals but consider your methods somewhat flawed. Myself - I work to keep up the payments on my half of a broiler farm that has a one time capacity of 280,000 birds. (That is about 1.8 MILLION birds a year. How many chickens do you have?)

 

[dancingbear]

Poultry Snob, I replied via PM.

Becky, I apologize for getting carried away earlier and inadvertently instigating a hijack of your thread.

..................................................................................
Back on the topic of meat birds....

I've heard from a few folks who raise them, that Buckeyes are a good meat bird, but I don't have any personal experience with them myself. Do you know if they're available in England? The Dorkings are supposed to make a good meat bird on their own as well, I think, but the cross with Cornish was preferred. Probably because the Cornish have a lot of breast meat. Just for clarity: There's purebred Cornish, from Cornwall, they grow slow and so are not great meat birds, but have dense meat and big breasts. They are not the birds that has over time have been bred into various strains of meat birds that are collectively often called Frankenbirds.

I have a few Dark Cornish, and though there's a breed chart that says they're poor foragers, mine are very good foragers. It also says "can be broody". Of my 4 Cornish hens, 3 have been broody this year, one of them twice, and they tend to be motherly toward any chicks that come around them. Excellent mothers. So are 2 of my light Brahma-Australorp cross hens. They adopt anything little that peeps. Beautiful birds. Very solid, much heavier than they look. Most of my other birds look heavier than they are. The Cornish aren't the best layers, but the fertility of the eggs I saved from them (I isolated them for a few days to get their eggs, specifically) was pretty good. Out of 12 eggs I set under the hens, 10 hatched.

 

[becstar]

Hi Jenny

Not at all Jenny. I wholeheartedly agreed with everything you said in response to Poultry Snob. I could have written a long rant back at him/her, but I am guessing you did that in your PM
Anyway, thanks for the useful info. I havn't heard of Buckeyes here, but what you were saying about crossing a Dorking with a Cornish makes a lot of sense. I have also heard that an Indian Game cockerel crossed with either a Dorking or a Wyandotte hen make good meat birds.
Anyway, now I have my Ross Cobbs, I am going to see what happens with them. It defeats the whole object of what I am trying to do if they get so fat that they lose the use of their legs! I don't want a freak bird. That's why I stopped buying mass produced chicken - I want a chicken that grows naturally. I bought the Ross Cobbs because, in my naivety as a newbie to all this, I thought this was the only chicken good for meat. What I have discovered, with help from the posts on this thread and elsewhere, is that there are lots of choices! The Ross Cobb is just the 'fast food' of chicken meat! Thanks for all your great advice. I will let you know how I get on - oh, and I may be after some great chicken recipies too!!!

 

[Janie]

Hi Becs, I've been following this thread with interest. My family have grown Ross birds for several years and I have 5 on order which I am hoping to cross with my cochin roo to have a line of table birds that don't grow to obscenely and go off their legs. My dad has also ordered 30 of these birds and as he keeps his in more confined conditions than I intend to it'll be interesting to see the difference in their growth rates (we are on the same farm, just different barns and ideals!)

I understand the cost involved in rearing for the table and the need to keep that down to a minimum but I weigh that up against the fact that I enjoy my birds while they are alive too and need to know they are happy, healthy and well cared for.

I have also ordered 5 Traditional Natural Cornish-Cross birds which supposedly have no heart or leg problems but still grow very quickly. I again hope to cross my roo with them.

As a quick side note we got 3 French Marans in an auction a couple of months back and although they are still growing they are getting huge! Their feet are massive and when they jump, they land with a thud! I reckon they will be rather tasty

I'll let you know how I get on with these little experiments and good luck with yours xx

 

[Bossroo]

Poultry Snob... yours is a voice of reason among the brainwashed throng paroting the Liberal Press' idea of idealism for a World Order that has very little to do with the REAL world. Most have no idea of how to raise a chicken , so they badmouth the most efficient and best chicken and the scientific breeding and most efficient ways of raising them. Then they voice their opinion in the blind leading the blind in their quest to return to the "simple life". If we followed these idalistic ideas, the world will have famine sooner than later. Famines lead to handouts at best and wars at worst. Yours feeds the world, theirs... will further the dependance on the "Liberal Government" for their meager subsistance. Oh yeah, the Liberal Govenments around the World use these very same Frankenbirds that are raised on these abhored factory farms for their handouts. How ironic is that?

 

[Janie]

Thankfully Boss I only have to feed my family rather than the whole world so I shall continue in my idealistic ignorance

 

[ninjapoodles]

Quote:
Me, too! And also, are there people who really don't see the danger of having a single, "generic" food source instead of varied food sources? What happens when something devastates that single homogeneous strain of chicken, or corn upon which millions of people are dependent?

There are other things to consider besides "efficiency" in food production. Guess that makes me a capital-L "Liberal?" Whatever.

 

[dancingbear]

In my idealistic ignorance, I have come to value biodiversity, in the garden, poultry, and livestock. I seriously doubt that I'm going to cause a famine by being fussy about what I raise for my own consumption. But monocultures have done so, in the past, and I'm certain it'll happen again.

BTW, I grew up with poultry and livestock, and have been raising poultry for the last 15 years. In our overpopulated world, we're probably going to continue to have factory farmed food, but it's my choice not to make it my main food source.

For those commercial poultry operators, please note that this forum is called "BackYardChickens Forum", not "BackYardChickens Mega Commercial Poultry Farm Forum". Very few people are raising chickens on a scale to sell to Walmart in the back yard, or on a small farm hold like I have. I don't know why big producers seem to be so afraid of us.

Oh, and "the Liberal Government" isn't supporting me in any way, aren't you being awfully presumptuous about people you know nothing about?

That being said, I think we're being "trolled". I should know better than to even acknowledge a troll, let alone respond.

Anyway, Becky, thanks for understanding! The Indian Game and Cornish are the same breed, I believe. The ones I like are the dark ones, they're beautiful birds. They're a hard-feathered type, which means they have stiff, glossy feathers. The dark Cornish hens have black feathers with a beautiful auburn pattern on them, sort of a penciled pattern. I need a roo, I'm looking for somebody nearby I can get one from.

When I've raised the Cornish X, by the time I bought chicks, paid shipping, and fed them for 8 weeks, (or more, if we didn't have time to do them all at once) they cost around $8-10 bucks each, unless we lost a bunch to heat or something, then they were even costlier. So, I'm thinking, aside from the cost of initial breeders, (which for Dorkings will be fairly high, because they're a rare breed, so I have to use shipped eggs to try to hatch my starters) once I get my breeders, I don't think the cost will be any worse. Then, since I can hatch my own, I can knock the cost of chicks and shipping right off of each batch. And, incubate a clutch any time that works well for me. Since my hens will supply eggs even when I'm not hatching table birds, they pretty much pay for their keep.

The cost isn't the whole thing though, it's mostly that I want to raise healthy food, and preserve rare breeds. I've raised Narragansett, and Bourbon Red turkeys before, too, they were great. Not as large as the broad-breasted types, but they can still breed naturally, and the meat is vastly superior. The flavor and texture are both better, but they do take longer to roast, before they get tender. But they do get tender, and are the best turkey you'll ever eat.

We also raised Broad Breasted Bronze one year, and let them go a lot longer than the industry standard. We kept them about 8 months, they were enormous. They also tasted a lot better than the supermarket birds. They did start to get leg trouble by then, but had done pretty well up until then. I did have to herd them into the coop at night, they'd just lay down in the field. That was better than the heritage breeds, though, they tended to fly off into the trees, if anything upset them at all. The BBB's were too big to fly. I read a bit on a site for Slow Foods, they said the market birds are so young when they're butchered that the meat hasn't fully developed, that's why it's so bland and mushy. I'm sure that's right, the ones we raised were not quite as good as the heritage types, but much better than the market birds.

Janie, I had no idea marans got that big! For some reason I pictured a small bird. I don't know why I thought that, 'cos I've never seen one in person. How big are they?

I'm always eager to hear how anybody's breeding experiments turn out. Looking forward to hearing about yours.

edited for typos

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

Quote:
The fact that thie is called BYC does not prevent people from exposing the board to the realities of the commercial chicken world, unless I missed the "sticky" stating that we all must agree with every post on this forum.

Jim

 

[AnthonyT]

Wow, this thread turned into a can of worms fast! I think that everyone can pick which chickens will work nest for them. If someone wants to grow heritage breeds, great, the genetic diversity may be needed someday (afterall, all of the genetically fixed strains of commercial birds came from somewhere). And I myself love some of the heritage breeds for various reasons. But for those of us who have to fill orders and and keep customers happy it is nice to be able to get a strain of bird that has known growth characteristics. Thats all any of the meat birds are, chickens with set and known growth curves. They are made to grow fast and go to market, at least the standard Cornish X. I grow the color range now and am happy with them, but don't think for a minute they are not a genetically selected strain, they are. They are just fixed with a slower growth and more desire to forage. There is quite a demand for this type of bird or Hubbard would have dropped it long ago. Same goes for egg layers. Most of the birds on the market and sold as a strain (RIR, Barred Rock, etc) are sad examples that produce poorly. If you want a good production red you are going to search long and hard for it, and will have to get them from someone who has worked hard at maintaining it. You would be hard pressed to find a pure breed that can compete with a black sex link though. And black sex links do just fine on range.
A quick note on heritage breeds. I think they are great and need to be preserved as a genetic reservoir. Unfortunately it seems that a good portion (not all!) of the people keeping them are doing it as it is the cool thing to do. Finding good breeding stock is hard, many breeders do not have production records. Its hard to buy hogs for example when the seller does not have litter # records, pigs weaned numbers, weight at birth, litter weight at 56 days, litter data on the sire and dam, etc. Most of these breeds had populations drop close to extinction. They are still around but may not be productive as they once were and need to be selected for improvement. This means most offspring get eaten. If you find a breeder who never slaughters any, just walk away. Be very picky who you buy from.
Not meaning any of this as a rant, just the way I see things. I have worked in agriculture on the side of the huge (worked in commercial aquaculture, with commercial hogs), and also now on the more alternative side. I think Andy Lee said it best in day range poultry that commercial agriculture has its good and bad points, so does pastured poultry. The goal should be to mesh the good parts of both together.
Anthony