Do meat breeds go broody?

[coffeenutdesign]

I am still researching meat chickens. Trying to figure out if it is better to just buy day old chicks each time or if breeding them myself might be an option. If I got a couple for breeding stock, are meat breeds good at going broody and hatching out their own chicks or would an incubator work better...or is it just not worth the effort and better to just buy chicks each time?

 

[Oregon Blues]

The really efficient meat "breeds' are all hybrids and don't breed true. Some people use them in breeding projects to try to develop their own breed of high production meat bird.

So, it just depends upon what you want to do. I like the Cornish Cross, so I just buy chicks. Even with purchasing chicks and paying shipping, I end up with a reasonably priced product on the table that is miles better than anything I could buy.

I already breed purebred ducks and geese and I have a turkey project starting. So I don't have time or space for any sort of chicken project. It might take you dozens of generations to develop a meat breed that begins to approach the efficiency of the Cornish Cross.

Some people enjoy the challenge of that breeding project. Breeding chicks isn't going to be much cheaper than buying them because if you are breeding your own, you must feed all of your breeding stock over the winter. Home raised chicks are not free.,

 

[nlossing]

I think its a neat idea, especially if you can get them broody, then you can put any eggs under her you want to hatch. We have raised meat chickens awhile ago and butchered them except two hens, just the other day our meat chicken went broody so i gave her some eggs from our egg layer flock shes doing great very devoted, so will see. These are the red broilers. I thought that i read that the red broilers were a cross of two different breeds that made a hybreed that if you were to raise them the offspring wouldn't be red broilers.