Breeding meat chickens

[scubaforlife]

I say do it. What's this all about if not for learning? Plus you can leave your meat "on the hoof" and not have to freeze it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I think it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to get some eggs and meat for your family or are you going commercial? Are you buying everything the chickens eat or will they scrounge up a lot of their own food? Do you have plenty of space to store butchered meat or will you butcher one when you are ready for a chicken dinner?

The model I grew up with was that the birds would find almost all their own food, lay enough eggs to feed a family with a few kids, hatch out some eggs for replacements, and provide meat for the table when it was needed. Most dual purpose birds were great at this. They were not great at feed conversion to eggs or meat, but if they are free ranging and finding all their own food most of the year, who cares. To keep the numbers up enough for a flock to be self-sustaining, you need a certain mininum number of chickens. You don't just eat the roosters, you eat all excess chickens. Even if all of the hens are not laying every day, you will still get a lot of eggs.

Of course, there were commercial operations near cities that provided eggs (usually from leghorns) and meat for the poor unfortunate city folk that could not keep chickens in their back yard, but most of the city folks did not eat much chicken. It was mostly beef and pork. It was the advent of refrigeration and the genetic development of the specialized meat birds that made it efficient enough to profitably grow chickens for meat.

Some people have developed their own strains of dual purpose birds as pretty efficient meat birds. This takes hatching out a lot of chicks and severe culling, breeding only the best of the best over time, and continually working to keep the quality of the stock up. As a causal backyard chicken owner, you can improve your stock with careful breeding, but to actually make big improvements takes a lot of dedication and hatching a lot of chicks. That can get expensive. I have improved the size of my roosters by selective breeding and still kept the egg production up to reasonable, but I cannot compete with many of the people that have really developed their own strains let alone the commercial operations.

If you are looking at efficiency, you are never going to match what is out there. If you want to play with a hobby flock and see what you can develop, go for it, whether that is one flock for eggs and one for meat or one "dual purpose" flock. I'm having fun doing that with mine. I don't think it really matters that much which dul purpose breed or breeds you start with. They can all be good ones.

 

[LOVE2FARM]

I have raised the CX for many years, they are a very nice breasted bird and a quick grower. They don't like the heat and we have to be careful not to loose them just before they are table ready. All in all, a definite plus for a meat bird. Negative side is they are horrible foragers, they just sit and eat. If you were comparing them to a cooped bird for economy, they are the winners. I decided last year to stop raising them and look for a free range bird that is a dual purpose. I chose the Chanticleer, I purchased 3 hens last year and crossed them with my very large roo. I have some nice looking hens from the bunch (although I wanted roos) My roo passed on this spring and I replaced him with a young Chanticleer roo, I am hoping for nice hens and roosters next year. They completely free range, I hardly feed them in the summer. The feed I put out in the morning is always left for greener pastures. The babies are growing nicely. Very nice for the pocketbook. I did the same with my turkeys, stopped raising the broad breasted whites and now have a family of Bourbon Reds, all free range on about 5 acres. Once established, I hope to be able to raise my own meat here on the farm. Plus the kids love the poultry roaming around and watching the chicks grow up. It all depends on what your goals are. I chose this over the large breast, I can live with stew if I have too.

 

[SteveH]

Quote:
Personally I would be looking for some quality Plymouth Rocks , the white ones if you like white meat birds , or Orpingtons . I assume your PBRs are hatchery birds and quite a bit smaller than the original type . You could just find a breeder of a good dual purpose breed like the two I mentioned and buy a roo to cover the pullets you have now . Either way , if you check the BREEDS GENETICS & SHOWING section will find a lot of breeders here at BYC that breed and sell the old dual purpose varities towards their original size , build , and characteristics .

 

[scgwagner]

Well, I've watched and read and used this site more times than I can count and probably for more hours than I might admit!

However, I've never posted! So, I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents! We've had chickens for about 5 years. Originally, we just had layers, then we really caught "chicken fever" and have now had experience with ornamentals, bantams, ducks, guineas & turkeys! That said, this spring we bought 30 or so straight run Barred Rock, Columbia Rock, White Rock, Black Australorp (turned out to be mutts!), & RIRs. We figured we'd have the hens as layers, and as an added bonus we'd try our hand at butchering the roos. Well, at 24 weeks we butchered a few...they were not filled out at all...their keel bone was really pointy. One dressed out at 4.25 pounds, but there really wasn't much meat. I'm not sure how much was bones vs. meat. We have 4 kids, so to feed a family of 6 I would have needed probably 2 or 3 of those just for dinner. We were very disappointed. Now, I do have to say we weren't expecting to get huge breasted chickens. We knew that these were DP birds & not CX. But we were hoping for a better turn out. We had so many end up being roosters, we just couldn't feed that many for who knows how long, just to butcher them later. So we decided to sell all the roosters off and we now have 10 CX chicks...approximately a week old right now. We can already see in only 1 week's time how fast they are growing. We are currently feeding them Medicated 18% chick starter, then at about 3-4 weeks we plan on switching to non-medicated 21%-24% gamebird/turkey starter grower, as our feed purchase options in our area don't include a broiler starter grower. We are waiting to give them the 21-24% protein feed until the 3rd or 4th weeks in hopes to alleviate some of the crippling & heart conditions that are known to happen. We will see how this regimen works and we will try something else next time to see if it works better. We are also taking notes and will soon begin weighing to see how our growth is going with these guys. We would like to have some breeder stock so we could possibly hatch our own rather than buying them in the future, but when I read more about it, it seems like there is way more involved than what we can afford in money and time to set that up. So we will keep buying these chicks when we need to re-stock the freezer!

 

[Ridgerunner]

SteveH posted this link recently. It may not help the original poster much but I thought it was excellent on talking about what goes into the breeding of commercial meat birds. It cleared up a lot of my misconceptions.

 

[TimG]

Quote:
You won't save money creating your own line and hatching your own chicks, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, there are plenty of other reasons to do it including just because you want to.

I would suggest that you look into Delawares, Buckeyes and Brahmas. Probably more important than the breed is the line within the breed. Shop around and look for a breeder who has concentrated on quick, early growth.

A method for those who like to be self-sustaining is to hatch chicks in the spring of year 1. In the fall of year 1, harvest all but a couple roosters. Hatch chicks again in spring of year 2. In fall of year 2, harvest all but a couple of the roosters and all of the 18 month old hens. In year 3, repeat year 2. You'll have a good supply of meat and a good supply of eggs. This will not be as efficient as buying meat chicks (Cornish Crosses or Rangers) every year and raising them for 8-12 weeks and keeping yourself in supply of production egg layers (like the Golden Comets) from a hatchery. But, there is something (I imagine) something very satisfying about doing things yourself and not buying from a hatchery every year.

 

[Jared77]

I have to agree with defining what your goals are. I got into this with the goal of supplying my family quality chicken that was hormone and medication free. Anything extra is great, but for us its not about quick turn arounds or conversion ratios for us. We keep a small hobby flock that feeds us well. We didn't want to get into specialized breeds like the leghorn or the CX because I don't want/need to manage multiple breeds. The intention was to find a happy medium between meat and eggs with meat being the bigger priority so we tracked our consumption before we started on this venture so we knew our needs and then did our research from there.

Maybe I'm in the minority here (by reading some of the posts here I think I'm in a VERY small minority

) but I don't want to keep a zillion chickens. Nothing against anybody who does but the whole reason we got into this with the intention of eating better eggs and chicken. We want enough to keep us fed and if we get extras to share with family and friends.

We enjoy our BOs they are calm, and gentle with my daughter, and my nieces/nephews when they visit. We ordered 50 BOs, raised them, and held back the best hens and roo from that batch as our foundation breeding stock to produce next years chicks for the freezer. Next springs chicks when old enough will be divided into 2 tractors one in each of 2 horse pastures.

We used the info http://albc-usa.org/EducationalResources/chickens.html to assess our foundation stock and will use it for next years birds as well. The plan for next year is at 20 weeks everybody in the tractors will evaluated and compared to the notes I made last year on the breeders we kept back at the same age and Ill keep the best group of birds for breeding and the rest are freezer bound. Once I get more consistancy in the birds I'm producing Ill only evaluate the tractored birds when its time to replace aging breeders.

Its worked so far for what we need, but again that's just for our own consumption. Hope this helps.

 

[Buster52]

I have now tried several combinations of crosses and the best one so far is a Dark Cornish rooster over a Rhode Island Red hen. It was an accidental cross (sort of like the discovery of rubber) while I was playing with crossing Buckeyes, Delaware, and Standard Cornish. Left the rooster in with some of my layers and this is what came about.

I'm really happy about it, too, as good RIRs are easy to find and very productive layers. Ended up with some big, tall birds with good breast meat.

As to why one might not want to raise Cornish X, I could write a book.

And in fact probably have, if you add it all together.

Chief among them, they are a product of a factory farm system, and that is my primary reason for raising my own meat. To get away from factory farm raised meat animals.

 

[Jared77]

How were the thighs on that DC x RIR cross? Thats a very intriguing combination and how old were they when you processed them (if you processed them?)

edited for spelling