Another cornish cross question

journey's end :

How do they breed them? I can't get one to last long enough to lay. They all have heart attacks if left too long.

The Cornish X meat chickens are a hybrid. They will not breed true even if you did manage to get them to produce babies. There is a sire line and a dam line. The two make the Cornish X. The breeding stock is not generally available. Even if it were, it makes no economic sense to produce your own chicks. It is so much cheaper to just buy them.​

 

First, the two (actually I think it's four, isn't it?) parent lines are not quite as dysfunctional as the offspring (the CornishX themselves) are.

But also, I know that commercial breeder turkeys are kept on a sort of 'starvation diet' (fed very sparingly, both when growing and when mature) to minimize health problems of the "600 lb guy stuck in apartment" type.

People who try to keep CornishX as pets generally do the same thing, feed them minimally and make them exercise for it, and some have kept them alive for as much as a coupla years (I've not heard of longer but maybe it happens sometimes)

Pat

 

journey's end :

How do they breed them? I can't get one to last long enough to lay. They all have heart attacks if left too long.

Nevermind, I read the question wrong.​

 

I agree with the other posts. The commercial Cornish crosses require very special breeding.

If you want a closed flock, you can get a Cornish rooster and dual purpose hens and raise your own. They will not be the same as the commercial birds, will not grow as fast, gain weight as efficiently and all that, but you will get pretty good meat birds.

Good luck!

 

Cornish X is, as the others have said, a hybrid that don't breed true. They are the end of the line bird breed to a given 'recipe'. Each year you would have to begin a new 'recipe' batch to have uninterrupted chick supply. The cost of maintaining the parentage lines would be beyond the normal pocketbook.

These series of paring (if you knew the 'recipe') produce birds that are not the most reliable layers. If you wanted 100 chicks in a single hatch you would have to have at least 20 hens producing the end 'meat bird'.

Then there would have to be room in the incubator for the 'parent' stock needed for the next years 'meat' chicks. You are probable talking about 4 to 6 years of pairings to get to the end product.

Oh, by the way, what is you knowledge of artificial insemination of poultry? Most of these 'parent' stock birds can't even breed successfully because of their size.

Then you get into the big problem of Nutritional requirements for them. You can't feed an “off the shelf” feed and be successful.

These are just a few of the pages that must be turn in this book called “Cornish X”.

Nothing tried is nothing gained!

 

Figure it out, and you'll be a millionaire in about 10 minutes.

 

I took the Ridgerunners comment to heart, I have a shipment om CXR's coming in next week and I called today and added 5 cornish roosters to the batch, I am currently incubating some dominique x sussex eggs right now, and I will run the cornish on them and see if I dont improve on the off spring, I realize I wont get near as good as the CXR but hey, I will have some fun at it and my customers that are buying the home raised meat chickens will get a little better product....and might save a little on improving feed conversion...just dont tell the wife I ordered more chickens!!!!!

 

My Cornish X hens have 1 Roo with them. They are laying eggs every day,and ALL of them so far have been fertile. They started laying at 16 weeks. Most of them are double yokers. I have 2 that are wanting to sit on their eggs,but I won't let them. It's just getting to cold for me to have to worry about lil babes running around. Come spring,if they are all still doing good,I'm planning on letting the raise some babies. I have been reading on here about them not breeding true,and it has made me very Curious as to what the babies would be like. If it wasn't getting so cold,I'd go ahead and let them sit,just to see what they would look like. I have thought about getting some RIR hens. I think some white and red chickens would be pretty.