Cornish X Rock vs Cornish Roaster?

[thunder duck ranch]

Hi! This is my first post here, so please forgive any message board faux pas I may unintentionally commit while I find my footing.

We raise khaki campbell ducks for eggs but are branching out to chickens for meat. We purchased a mixed flock of Cornish X Rocks and Cornish Roasters, and while I find some differences between some of the birds, I cannot find any comparison pics to help us! From our research, some birds will be ready to head to the freezer in 2 weeks (they are 6 weeks old now) and others can be held to 10 weeks. But not only do we have no clue which ones go first, we are not even sure of their genders!

So while I am seeing marked differences, I do not know if it is a gender difference vs a breed difference. Are there any tell-tale signs?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Judy]

This thread would probably do better in the meat birds forum; you might consider asking a mod to move it.

I have wondered the same thing and never really found an answer.

 

[cassie]

This probably won't help a bit. The last batch of meat chickens we got from mm was their BBQ Special which is either Cornish Roasters or Cornish X or a mix of both. I don't think you can tell the difference by just looking at them. And I couldn't tell the gender until shortly before we butchered them and I am not sure I even got that right all the time even then. Just butcher them when you think they are big enough. Since we like large roasters we butcher ours at ten to twelve weeks of age. There is a risk of losing some if you wait that long. If you can tell which are the hens, butcher them first. The roosters grow bigger and we found that the hens tended to put on a lot of fat when we keep them as long as we did. If I could figure out how to sex them, I would butcher the hens at 6 to 8 weeks or so for fryers and keep just the roosters for the large roasters.