another "good meat" bird question.

[Owingsia]

Ok I know this has been asked probably 100 times.... ok ok more like 10000 times however I have a twist to it.

Ok so we have been raising Cornish X for meat however, I would like to move over to something we can breed/ hatch/ have a roo and hens if that is clear no sure. So like a good group of hens and roo that we can rely on to make babies. We were wondering how RIR and or speckled sussex do as far as meat. I know they are a dual purpose birds but the questions are.

How much meat?
What age to process?

We want something we can reliably do ourselves without having to buy birds.
We have plenty of hens that lay and have raised our own... our Japanese Bantams sit on anything that looks like an egg and make the best moms. We let them do everything and have wonderful birds from it. So hatching and raising is not an issue and yes if we had to we could do an incubator.

So the issue here is more of a are those birds worth it in terms of meat. Should we look at something different. We are not apposed to having to process at a younger age and have smaller chicken for the table if we up the quantity. We are looking for quality meat here.

 

[Chick Charm]

White Rocks make excellent meat birds. I like to butcher around 18 weeks. For me the bigger the better.
Barred Rocks work very well also.
RIR are great dual purpose birds and our family likes them very much.
Black Australorps are nice and big around 22 weeks. Love those big birds.

We take all kinds of "cockerels" before they mature and put them in chicken broth and bake them in the oven like cornish game hens and the meat is so tender that it falls off the bone and you don't have to chew if you don't want to.

Processing age on most cockerels is between 10 and 20 weeks.

These are just my opinions and if you use the research bar above you will find 1000's of others.

Wish ya the best.

 

[SIMZ]

Marans are still my favorite! Don't forget cross breeds, either. Several crosses can make sex-linked chicks, so you can sell the extra pullets at hatch and raise the boys for meat. We've found that a black copper marans roo over our cuckoo marans hen created some very quick growing boys (and girls that lay nice dark eggs).