2026 Chicken Wish List

[Whittni]

I'm getting more Mottled Japanese Bantams and Laced Cornish for 2026 I think. Might get more large Fowl Cochin and Faverolles as my girls are getting up there in age...hmm

 

[DemeterAD9]

I found cx (the meat birds correct?) very difficult to raise in a layer flock, and I had to separate them from layer chicks by day 2 in the brooder box. They just eat a great deal, and I only fed them twice a day. A regular chicken just could not keep up.

I do raise them for meat - I like them in their own set up. Just works better. As a side note - I did like getting a straight run, and then processing them over 2-3 weeks. Because even in with just other meat birds, the smaller ones get out jockeyed by the bigger ones. I would just harvest 3-4 of the bigger birds, and then wait a few days and do a few more. I originally tried the idea of doing them all at once, but the was a lot of work and needed more people. I can do 3 easily by myself.

Mrs K

I've only done the Cornish cross once and only 10 of them. Brooded and grew them out with sex linked cockerels I hatched and added more cockerels to the grow out pen as they became apparent. It worked well right up until the normal cockerels started mounting the Cornish crosses at about 7ish weeks old. So I ended up separating the group for a week or two until I processed the CX. I did 7 one day and 2 a week later. Certainly time consuming but well worth it.

At 4-5 weeks I took one of the 2 CX pullets who was very friendly and rather small compared to the others and put her with my laying pullets. She fit right in and no one really bothered her until I started free ranging everyone, cockerels included... I processed the cockerels at 12-14 weeks which was earlier than planned but they made me mad with their gang-bang mentality on the poor CX pullet. She got to live with the laying flock till 25 weeks or so. I kept her just long enough to have a broody incubate and hatch one of her eggs.