First year doing Cornish Cross birds... Here's how it came out!

[alknoll]

Hi everyone,

I was scrolling through this forum trying to read up on what people thought of the taste/size/etc of the Cornish Cross chicken breed and decided to post my own results.

We butchered ours at 5.5 weeks, and wow, what a range in sizes we got! Our runt was 2.5lb and Big Bertha was 4.3 lbs. Definitely cool to get such a range - hens vs roos will get you this variety. This is called "fryer size."

Another potential added bonus to processing so early: the birds never got aggressive. I had heard meat birds will be aggressive...but this was not my experience. Perhaps letting them grow longer, they would get more rambunctious.

It ended up coming out to $14.50/bird (didn't calculate $/lb yet), and we did 15 birds. We fed them Kalmbach Organic Starter Grower, and that s*** ain't cheap! Hoping it yields an even tastier bird.

No comments on taste yet, but will update here once I've cooked up our first bird. I am also interested in the "never frozen" bird vs one that comes out of the freezer. It's a bit unrealistic to think we could ever only eat "never frozen" chicken, I'd have to butcher a chicken a week! But, the engineer's mind is always curious...

Happy chickening!

 

[Acre4Me]

It looks like someone else processed them?

They look very nice! We've usually butchered at 7-8 weeks old, but the longer wait time can result in dead birds as our last batch kept "tipping over" when they would walk around, and they can't get up, so they suffocate. We never experienced this before and the tipping over was likely the result of uneven walking area - we had them in an open air/protected pen, but had placed 12" pavers to set the food on. I think they would tip over when they became uneven stepping on or off the pavers. Luckily only a few died this way. Obviously will hang feeders next time!

 

[Xouie]

Very nice! Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm looking forward to reading about your thoughts on frozen birds too.

 

[Brooks_]

I am also interested in the "never frozen" bird vs one that comes out of the freezer.

From buying and freezing discounted fresh turkeys, at 1 year...virtually no difference, tasted fresh. At 2 years...started to taste like a frozen turkey.

 

[Niki1313]

Congrats, this was my first year doing cornish x too. Processed at 7 weeks, smallest was 5lb, biggest was 6.5 lb. Ours cost about $2.07 a pound.

 

[Youngshin]

Great work!
I'm about to process my first batch of meat birds as well. Super excited!
They are 9 weeks old and in my experience, they are not aggressive at all. Very calm and curious, and sometimes vigorous haha.

How did the frozen vs fresh go? I'm curious too!

 

[Hopulence]

Great work!
I'm about to process my first batch of meat birds as well. Super excited!
They are 9 weeks old and in my experience, they are not aggressive at all. Very calm and curious, and sometimes vigorous haha.

How did the frozen vs fresh go? I'm curious too!

Haha, at 9 weeks, the amount of vigorous activity they have is roughly 2 seconds of charging at each other, then they have to sit down for an hour after all that hard work.

 

[atucker]

curious on how these birds were housed? Or opinons from others on here. Ive seen some say just a fully inclosed run is enough in the warm weather, that you can offer roosting areas but they get to a point where they just lay on the ground and no actual coop is needed as long as it is warm, shaded and dry? Anyone else use this method? It would certainly be cheaper for me to build just the enclosed run and avoid the cost of the large coop as well.

 

[Parront]

curious on how these birds were housed? Or opinons from others on here. Ive seen some say just a fully inclosed run is enough in the warm weather, that you can offer roosting areas but they get to a point where they just lay on the ground and no actual coop is needed as long as it is warm, shaded and dry? Anyone else use this method? It would certainly be cheaper for me to build just the enclosed run and avoid the cost of the large coop as well.

You are thinking of what the chicken raisers call a "chicken tractor" which is only about 2' tall and is moved daily. That spreads out the poop and keeps the birds clean. They are too big and young to need roosting boards. You need to protect the tractors from predators with something. I use electric net fencing from Premier1, it is great.

 

[muddy75]

I’ve held Cornish X up to 12 weeks and never had an aggressive one nor a loud one! That’s why I love them so much! We are processing second group this weekend at 10ish weeks. I feed kalmbach flock raiser to all of my birds so I can sympathize with the extra cost!!!! But quaility difference is definitely worth it!!!!