Breeding my own Cornish X...will this work?

[EmsoffLambs]

Hi. I'm new to chickens. About 7 weeks ago I purchased 8 light brahma and 5 dark cornish straight run chicks. I will keep the brahma pullets as layers/breeders, plus one each of the brahma and cornish cockrels. I would really like to have a relatively self-perpetuating flock, so I plan on keeping the resulting resulting brahma pullets as replacement layers and the brahma x cornish chicks as broilers.

So here are my questions:
1) I read in one sourse than cornish often can't breed naturally. Is this true?

2) I've read that brahmas and pure cornish grow relatively slowly. Should the crosses grow faster due to hybrid vigor?

3) Would you expect these to have decent carcass quality?

4) What color will they be? Will they be sex link?

Thanks in advance.

 

[silkiechicken]

Cornish x's are a cross and their parents are more mobile than them thus it may be hard for the average cornish x to mate with another cornish x, providing that they even get old enough to reach maturity before dying... also second generation hybrids never have the same characteristics of first gen hybrids.

Possible vigor but the strains used as the parents to the cornish x's are special strains. They have been bred specially to get the desired offspring... you won't get the exact same results but might be one step closer. Low possibility though unless you can get cornish x breeder stock.

All home chicken is good! They won't be as big as the commerical cornish x's though. Commerical cornish x use a cornish female I belive and a white rock male... or is the other way around?

No idea what color they will be but they will be somewhere between their parent's colors. As for sex linked... doubt it. Sexlinked birds use a barred male and a non barred female as the trait for bars will become expressed in the offspring only in one sex. It's something like that. You can't quote me because I don't remember that clearly how the sexlink thing does. Feathersite has a link on ther sexlink page though that talk about sexlinks.

There are a few people on this board though that I think are trying to do what you are thinking of. I don't remember who they are eather.

My my memmory sucks!

 

[EmsoffLambs]

Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify, I'm using purebred dark cornish, not cornish X (from my understanding a cross between cornish and rocks).

I did a little reading about crossing RIR with white rocks, saying the males will be white and the females red. I was wondering if I would have similar results, with dark females and light males crossing the dark cornish on the light brahmas.

 

[silkiechicken]

Ah, I misread that part then. Either way you would "need" to get your sticky fingers on that breeding stock to get such chubby roasters. You might be able to get the same result. Not sure which gene exactally does it for them. Might as well try right! Good luck .

 

[EmsoffLambs]

Thanks for the help Silkie. Has anyone else tried this themselves? What were the results?