Cornish Broiler

[ChickChic00]

Any way to keep cornish broilers for eggs and breeding purposes? At what age do they get health problems, and what kind of problems occur? Will feeding them layer pellets/crumble help them lay?

 

[Birdinhand]

I'd put money on it that the large hatchery is breeding for CX, not breeding CX to CX. I've raised only a few hundred so far and I've experimented with rationing and come to some hard conclusions. I think it's possible, but a lot more work than it's worth, to slow down an actual CX's growth. There have been lots of folks who have, over the years tried to find a more perfect, better balance between speed of growth and longevity and well being. It is not my experience that it it is worth trying to grow them out as pets or for eggs, they are a genetic wonder as a meat bird. there are many propriatary variations of the cross. the best one, IMHO, is the COBB 500, it stays pretty plucky, has a decent life and has a great grain to meat conversion rate, about 2.5 lbs of grain to a lb of meat. I use a sort of industrial grade mother heating pad to grow them out, no heat lamp, they are forced to sleep at night, so they take a natural break from eating. I grow them out in the fall, the days get shorter and nights longer, as they get older, which I find to be a great balance, I don't see leg problems and I get nice 7 to 9 lb birds at 9 weeks. I've concluded that they have something like 10X the metabolism of the typical heritage breed bird, that they produce so much of their own growth hormone that it's best to just give them the food they need and aim for a 9 week harvest. after 9 weeks they tend to get pretty burdened by their biology and I just don't see a way to give them an enjoyable life. there appetite is so intense that I think you could make an argument that restricting their diet too much actually leads to suffering. I try and find a balance, give them a good life with good health up to harvest time, at which point I kind of feel that they have reached their natural end due to their extreme genetics. I grow about 35-70 out a year, produce hundreds of lbs of organic meat, almost all the meat for my family of 4, it all gets vacuum sealed and frozen and I find the ability to show my kids a way to be somewhat self sufficient with growing our own meat in a human way, even in the suburbs and it feels kind of glorious, though the last few weeks can be trying.

 

[Birdinhand]

keep in mind the genetics of crosses is super duper complicated, involving punnet squares, genotypes and phenotypes and the reason people are hush about what they achieve is because millions of dollars and countless hours of research can go into creating a winning line. The folks who sell cobb 500 chicks for instance, have to pay royalties in order to breed them and they generally won't even let the eggs be sold. just as with crosses of plants, when you breed a cross to a cross, you don't generally get any of the previous generation. so a cornish cross to a cornish cross will give you throw backs, not blended birds so much but pure single birds of previous generations. In my book, CX are practically a mutant strain, a genetic anomaly, a bit of a freak of nature that is on a super spead up aging schedule that tends to quickly spin off within a few months into a state of deterioration. it is tempting to think that you can simply blend different traits into the cross line, they are typically very sweet birds, but it doesn't work that way, at least not in any kind of reasonable time and investment (do a search for "Toads" and you'll find a thread by a guy who has come about as close as anyone I've seen to breeding in traits and ending up with something he felt was, after much work, a clean and stable line that could be bread continuously. by all means have fun experimenting, just don't be disappointed with the initial randomness of the outcome. if you make it through the tedium, who knows, maybe you'll get inspired to create something new and interesting and share it with the rest of us :~).

 

[Ridgerunner]

People try. Most are disappointed but a few are successful. The most successful tend to be the ones that keep females and cross them with dual purpose roosters. Check out Compost King's thread below in this section about crossing red rangers. That's a long thread but some really good information in it from several of the posters.

 

[Ridgerunner]

This video in two parts shows how one place in Canada does that. Not everyone everywhere will do it exactly the same but it cleared up a lot of my misconceptions.

 

[Noah Way Farm]

Really interesting! All I can tell you about these birds is the hens and roosters all look the same. There are no dwarfs in the bump. The farm owner doesn't know what he has - apparently he genuinely has no interest. He did say they used to lay brown eggs and now they lay white eggs (though they seem more cream/tan colored than white). The birds get delivered in a bunch and removed in a bunch. He has four houses which, if I have it right, have in the ballpark of 10,000 birds each. They have already begun laying when they arrive. The eggs are collected and hatched off-site.
So, I don't know if these are grandparent or parent strains, and neither does the farmer. I am fixing to find out though, as I have some in the incubator that are due to hatch in a few days. I will let you know if we have to eat them or can grow them out as breeders, or if we get any dwarfs.

I agree they pretty much have to be breeding for the Cornish X, either a Grandparent or Parent line. That's the ones that the Corporate growers want to lay eggs, as many as possible. But I think they do that with controlled feeding, not because of genetics, except in the case of the dwarf mother line when they use that. That's why I keep bringing dwarfism up. It is something important for cost effectiveness.

I can't get my first link, the Cambridge one, to let me cut and paste an excerpt so I'll paraphrase. In the bottom of the first paragraph of the next to last section that shows, it says you can sell the brothers of the Parent line hens as broilers.

I'm not going to think too hard on the sex-link breeding on the broiler mother's grandparents side, (actually i will but not on here). But if the males from that line at that stage can be sold as broilers it implies to me that they can grow pretty big if fed to grow big. Probably not quite as well as the terminal broiler bird but they would still be pretty impressive.

The Wiki article will allow cuttting and pasting so I'll take an excerpt.

Advantages of broiler breeder hens
Under current practice, normal parent poultry breeding stock potentially face welfare problems. Intensive selection for production traits, especially growth rate, is associated with increased nutritious requirement and thus feed consumption, but also reproductive dysfunctions and decreased sexual activity in broiler breeders. A first resulting serious welfare problem is the subsequent severe feed restriction which is applied during rearing, in order to prevent health problems and to reach better egg production. This severe feed restriction has negative effects on bird welfare as it causes chronic stress resulting from hunger.[27] The use of normal fast growing broiler breeder hens require dedicated programmes of feed restriction, both to maximise egg and chick production and secondly to avoid metabolic disorders and mortality in broiler breeders. The negative correlation between muscle growth and reproduction effectiveness is known as the "broiler breeder paradox".[28][29] Using dwarf broiler breeder hens is a good alternative, because dwarf hens combine relatively good reproductive fitness with ad libitum feeding.

As I said, I don't have first hand knowledge, just what I read and imply from that reading. If it is this hard for the professionals think how loaded with minefields it is for us. No wonder most of us fail when we try.

 

[Molpet]

keep in mind the genetics of crosses is super duper complicated, involving punnet squares, genotypes and phenotypes and the reason people are hush about what they achieve is because millions of dollars and countless hours of research can go into creating a winning line. The folks who sell cobb 500 chicks for instance, have to pay royalties in order to breed them and they generally won't even let the eggs be sold. just as with crosses of plants, when you breed a cross to a cross, you don't generally get any of the previous generation. so a cornish cross to a cornish cross will give you throw backs, not blended birds so much but pure single birds of previous generations. In my book, CX are practically a mutant strain, a genetic anomaly, a bit of a freak of nature that is on a super spead up aging schedule that tends to quickly spin off within a few months into a state of deterioration. it is tempting to think that you can simply blend different traits into the cross line, they are typically very sweet birds, but it doesn't work that way, at least not in any kind of reasonable time and investment (do a search for "Toads" and you'll find a thread by a guy who has come about as close as anyone I've seen to breeding in traits and ending up with something he felt was, after much work, a clean and stable line that could be bread continuously. by all means have fun experimenting, just don't be disappointed with the initial randomness of the outcome. if you make it through the tedium, who knows, maybe you'll get inspired to create something new and interesting and share it with the rest of us :~).

Duluthralphie has had longevity issues with his toads this last generation. He was trying to add new blood.
I kept a CX and bred her to a mix heritage roo. Cockerels from this breeding I had used and I am on the 3rd generation. ... Cockerels dress out at 16wks 5-7lbs

 

[Compost King]

I tried this spring with one Cornish X broiler, it died around week 15 when the temperature reached the high 90's. I am trying again now with Birds that hatched at the end of July. I have 3 of them (bought 6 and 3 turned out to be males and I am ate or will eat them) The one that died kept her weight down and was running and even flying short distances to get over obstructions. However she couldn't handle the heat. I am hoping to keep just one of them long enough to breed then cross her with my Naked Neck or my free ranging broilers. If all 3 survive to point of lay then I have more breeding options.

 

[Noah Way Farm]

I know I am late to the discussion, but there's a farm near me that has broiler breeders - thousands of Cornish Crosses, both hens and roosters (one of the industrial strains, not sure which), and they have no trouble getting these birds to reproduce. They lay very large off white to cream colored eggs. They keep them for a year, then "recycle" them. So, it can be done. These birds have their feed tightly regulated, which as I understand it, is required to get them to adulthood. From my research, they are free fed for the first 5 days, then get food with held for 12 hours a day, to slow growth.
Not sure what mortality is after a year though. They all become soup meat. But they are early and fairly prolific layers, laying from 20-26 weeks, and each house of 10,000 chickens (no idea hen/rooster ratio) produces 6-8,000 eggs a day, which is a daily or every other day layer. This farm is specifically a farm for hatching eggs to make little broiler babies.

 

[Ridgerunner]

That's what I've always read on here and elsewhere: that the breeding birds are not the same thing as the chicks they produce. ................... Otherwise we'd be able to breed the broilers together to get more, and we all know that doesn't work out that way.

After a while I vaguely remembered someone, maybe Nicolandia, talking about dwarfism in broilers. It's rough getting old, sometimes it takes a while for my memory to kick in and it's not always as reliable as I think I remember it being.

The basic idea is that the mother of the broiler is dwarf, which reduces her size so she can be fed regularly and avoids a lot of the issues of them being so big health wise in addition to reduced feed costs. This dwarfism is a recessive sex-linked gene. The hen gives it to her sons but since it is recessive the boys grow to normal (huge) size. She does not give it to her daughters so they grow to normal (huge) size. It's basically the reverse of sex linked breeding, set up so you don't see the results in the offspring.

If you use a male Cornish X that has this trait, about half of his offspring will carry the dwarfism trait. I don't know how widespread the usage of dwarfism is in the broiler industry, but it's another good reason to only use female Cornish X in a breeding program.

I'll include a couple of links so you know I'm not just making this up.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...ken-industry/1850F90D19ED787A98944B67A638C43A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarfism_in_chickens