Help! Cornish Cross!!

[StormySkyD]

How much feed per Cornish X chick??
Help! I am reading so many weird charts of unlimited feed, 22% feed, feed in lbs, 12 hr feed. How much feed per chick per day?

 

[LizzzyJo]

I free feed mine during the day and remove it at night. So they eat between about 8-8

 

[LizzzyJo]

I free feed mine during the day and remove it at night. So they eat between about 8-8

For how much: I had 10 from week 1-6 and they ate a full 50#bag.

 

[HenriettaPizzaNolan]

For the first ~2 weeks I let mine eat as much of the chick feed (usually 20-22%) as they want - 24 hours a day. Then the next week I start the 12 hours on 12 hours off thing with the chick feed. By about week 3 I had them on 18% protein broiler feed and they ate that until harvest day. No leg or heart issues. I think too much protein can make those issues worse. I found the 18% to be just fine for me and my birds were huge by the end of 8 weeks. Between 6.5 and 8.5 lbs, dressed.

Good luck with your birds. Don't stress too much about the details, but I would say that starting the 12 hours on 12 hours off by week 2 or 3 is the most important thing (in my limited experience).

EDIT: Wow, I'm sorry, I realize now you were asking about feed per chick per day. I didn't really answer that so my bad. I did not measure my feed like that because I think it would have resulted in some chicks being "starved out" by the more aggressive chicks. However, I did use the chart on this page to help me gauge how much feed I would need to buy. Scroll down to "Estimated Growth Rate and Feed Consumption of Jumbo White Cornish Cross Boilers". In fact, I used this whole page as a guide when I raised my first Cornish X. It was helpful.

 

[StormySkyD]

For the first ~2 weeks I let mine eat as much of the chick feed (usually 20-22%) as they want - 24 hours a day. Then the next week I start the 12 hours on 12 hours off thing with the chick feed. By about week 3 I had them on 18% protein broiler feed and they ate that until harvest day. No leg or heart issues. I think too much protein can make those issues worse. I found the 18% to be just fine for me and my birds were huge by the end of 8 weeks. Between 6.5 and 8.5 lbs, dressed.

Good luck with your birds. Don't stress too much about the details, but I would say that starting the 12 hours on 12 hours off by week 2 or 3 is the most important thing (in my limited experience).

EDIT: Wow, I'm sorry, I realize now you were asking about feed per chick per day. I didn't really answer that so my bad. I did not measure my feed like that because I think it would have resulted in some chicks being "starved out" by the more aggressive chicks. However, I did use the chart on this page to help me gauge how much feed I would need to buy. Scroll down to "Estimated Growth Rate and Feed Consumption of Jumbo White Cornish Cross Boilers". In fact, I used this whole page as a guide when I raised my first Cornish X. It was helpful.

Thankyou so much! For some reason I can’t figure out the chart very well, do I need to get a scale for feed?

 

[FunClucks]

Thankyou so much! For some reason I can’t figure out the chart very well, do I need to get a scale for feed?

I had 23 CX, and they ate about 15 lbs a day by 2-3 weeks. Just get a feeder where everyone has enough space (the space of their shoulders for a minimum per chick), then make sure it won't run out. You'll figure out pretty quickly how much they need. Use the chart to estimate how many bags of feed you'll need to buy overall (if you want to) to feed them up to a certain number of weeks, and then keep the feeders full and accessible to all chicks whenever they're being fed. No need to measure anything with a scale. I would put two feeders in first thing in the morning to make sure everyone had enough space when they were gorging themselves to make up for not eating all night. Otherwise they'd hurt each other trying to get to the food in that first morning rush.

Vinyl gutters from the hardware store make great CX feeders once they're about 3-4 weeks. You can use cinderblocks to hold them and put an inverted gutter over the top to prevent feed scraping.

I did first 5 days feed them 24/7 with the light on, then 12 hours on, 12 hours off until processing. 22% meat bird food throughout. Transferred from brooder to outdoor open air covered 15'x10' pen at 4 weeks and wish I could've done it sooner - I had one with leg issues, and 2-3 that appeared to die from heart attack around week 8. Chickens were grocery store roaster size by 5 weeks, and 2-3 times that size by 9 weeks when I processed the last of them. They were so heavy I could barely hold them up to process them.

Once I moved them outside, daylight was only 12 hrs long, and they wouldn't eat in the dark (if you have outside lights on, they may try to), so I just kept their gutter feed troughs full and didn't pull the feed at night anymore.

 

[HenriettaPizzaNolan]

Thankyou so much! For some reason I can’t figure out the chart very well, do I need to get a scale for feed?

FunClucks gave a really good answer. I've quoted it below. I highlighted the part that pretty much would have been my answer.

I had 23 CX, and they ate about 15 lbs a day by 2-3 weeks. Just get a feeder where everyone has enough space (the space of their shoulders for a minimum per chick), then make sure it won't run out. You'll figure out pretty quickly how much they need. Use the chart to estimate how many bags of feed you'll need to buy overall (if you want to) to feed them up to a certain number of weeks, and then keep the feeders full and accessible to all chicks whenever they're being fed. No need to measure anything with a scale. I would put two feeders in first thing in the morning to make sure everyone had enough space when they were gorging themselves to make up for not eating all night. Otherwise they'd hurt each other trying to get to the food in that first morning rush.

As for reading the chart, the second column tells an estimate of how much feed one chicken will eat per week. Then the third column tells how much feed they will have eaten TOTAL for their age in weeks. So for example, according to the chart, an 8 week old bird will eat about 3.10 lbs of feed that week and will have eaten 13.43 lbs of feed in their lifetime if you processed them at that age. This is useful because say you have 6 chickens and plan to process at 8 weeks.
13.43 x 6 = 80.58
So you would know you need AT LEAST 80 pounds of feed. Does that make sense?

 

[cmobley]

Lol I tried the measuring thing and weighing thing and about drove myself crazy. I started filling a 30 lbs feeder and a trough give it to em at 530 am take it from em at 5 pm. Out of 25 birds I had one have a heart attack in front of me so I cleaned it a week before the others. I processed my birds at 8 weeks my birds averaged 4.5 lbs cleaned. So much less headache than trying to do all the figuring. I’m sure you’d have to keep up with that if your selling by the pound or something but for home consumption 12 on 12 off fill the feeders. Make sure their up so the birds won’t lay and dig the food out.

 

[FunClucks]

Lol I tried the measuring thing and weighing thing and about drove myself crazy. I started filling a 30 lbs feeder and a trough give it to em at 530 am take it from em at 5 pm. Out of 25 birds I had one have a heart attack in front of me so I cleaned it a week before the others. I processed my birds at 8 weeks my birds averaged 4.5 lbs cleaned. So much less headache than trying to do all the figuring. I’m sure you’d have to keep up with that if your selling by the pound or something but for home consumption 12 on 12 off fill the feeders. Make sure their up so the birds won’t lay and dig the food out.

Oh yeah, I had to put my feeders and waterers up on cinderblocks or lumber and keep increasing the height as the birds grew - if they didn't have to stand up to eat, the feeders and waterers were too low. They would literally lay down by the feed trough and eat all day if they could. I had a runt, so it got a paver to stand on, but most of the access area was standing height for the larger chickens.

I put the waterers and feeders as far away in the enclosure as I could manage - it was almost the only exercise I could get them to do, walking back and forth. And they wouldn't get out of the way of anything like normal chickens - you'd have to physically push them to get them to move anywhere. I'd use a gravel rake to turn over the wood chips every day (otherwise the poop would get thick and matted), and I'd have to physically move the chickens with the rake or my feet to get them out of the way of where I was trying to work.

At 9 weeks, I had one hen fall over on her back somehow while drinking water (horizontal nipples on a 5 gallon bucket up on a cinderblock), and she literally couldn't right herself - she was stuck flat on her back. Good thing I heard her and was able to turn her back over, or she would have probably died from stress.

 

[FunClucks]

Thankyou so much! For some reason I can’t figure out the chart very well, do I need to get a scale for feed?

I used the chart to figure out that I'd need 12.5 bags of feed if I grew them out to 5 weeks. So I went out and bought half of that and stored in metal trash cans in my garage (it was super cold so I knew it wouldn't spoil).