Meat Birds and Egg laying...

[123RedBeard]

We need a card for the weed ... I actually have a ribbit type toad that lives under my rain barrel ... only comes out during monsoon season when barrel overflows ... and it comes out of its buried dried as hard as concrete "mud" ... comes out every year for about two months, then burrows in while ground is soft ...

Ralphs toads are tasty looking! (Mine not so much!)

 

[cppeace]

Many people have successfully raised CC pullets to maturity and then bred with a DP breed like white rock or Delaware. The CC hens generally will live to maturity if fed like a normal chicken and can breed and lay but generally only live a couple years.
Several people are working on making a meatier DP breed, I'm really just starting my own, myself. I don't plan to have any CC or RR in there but Traditional Dark Cornish and some other breeds I like that are nice and docile. I have a goal in mind and figure I can get there within 5-12 generations. We shall see.
Yeah, many people like quail as well, but I just can't see having to kill and clean so many birds just to feed a handful of people. Just seems like a lot of work to me but to each their own.

 

[igorsMistress]

There's a thread about crossing Red Ranger hens with Dorkings. He hatches eggs and is trying a Cornish cross as well. About page 52 I think.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/crossing-my-red-ranger-hens.1281099/

Thanks for the link aboit Toads!

 

[Kris5902]

I see what you are going through. From the time I have spent here on BYC I have come to understand that my fellow chicken keepers in the State have a ROOSTER problem. They don't know what to do with those freeloading gangs of rambunctious cockerels who show up every spring and who taste like garbage.

No matter how much you cull, a rooster is gonna taste like a Rooster that is tough, chewy and stringy. What my family calls ''a sad meal'' The male hormone testosterone makes the meat less desirable. That's why people castrate their calves, lambs, baby goats and piglets. A steer's, wether's and a barrow's meat is always superior to that of their intact counterparts.

The castrated male animals also create less problems on the farm and pose less danger to their handlers and to each other. They also don't overbreed the females. If you let a gang of hormonal roosters overtake you are going to have hens with bloody bloody heads, bald backs and a lots of injured roosters. The flock will look like they have come out of a tornado.

The best way to deal with this problem is to caponize your extra cockerels. They will be mellower than a hen, disciplined like a well beaten wife, peaceful like a nun and kind enough to brood the chicks.

Capons are plump like a mellon and their meat is tender like a mother's love. It is juicy, moist and full of flavours. You don't need to process them in mass and care about maintaining a freezer like Cornish cross. They live as long as a normal chicken.

Here is a pic of my RIR caponView attachment 1886359

Note: Nothing I said is an exaggeration.

Please edit... the “disciplined like” phrase is highly inappropriate even for a meat bird forum that is less likely to see younglings, there are still plenty of non “disciplined” women and I’m sure men here that will hopefully object to this turn of phrase.

Primary reason for castration in male animals is handling, with the exception of boar taint and a slightly more gamey flavor in old rams... goats are a whole other story, like boar taint but everyone can taste it My cockerels are quite tasty, though the leg meat is a little tougher at 19-20 weeks, the breast meat was just fine.

Older bull meat is prized for balogna as it has the ability to hold more water than steers. (We professionally raise beef cattle and lambs, hunt goats and deer, I may be new to chickens, but so far, no one has found cockerel meat that unpalatable here!)

 

[Kabootar]

Thatslwhat I did. He has some interesting stuff there surrounding sex linking too. I have a couple of eggs from his Dorking/Red Ranger crosses due to hatch Sunday.

Good luck with the hatch and be sure to keep us updated. Unfortunately we don't have Red Rangers in India yet.

I get my hatching eggs from PUSA Agricultural University. The university buys a lot of exotic birds, but not all. I know a guy who works in the university and I have to bribe him to get those eggs. Their breeds are of superior quality and I get them at much cheaper price.

Btw the university was started by one Mr Henry Phipps from Chicago at the dawn of the last century hence the name PUSA, Phipps of USA.

 

[Kris5902]

.

I am extremely sorry about that 'disciplined' phrase. I didn't know that it is regarded as inappropriate. I can't think of anyother way to put it, so I just deleted that part. Pardon me for my foolish mistake .

Thank you... cultural differences most likely, and understandable. I would always rather let a person know directly than have an otherwise good post “reported”, as I’ve noticed that quickly leads to threads being shut down.

It makes handling cockerels easier and safer too and that's too many exceptions.



It will be interesting to know how you finish your roosters. Looks like you are processing the cockerels before they reach their full potential. At that age most cockerels are scrawny and they have much more bone, feathers and entrails than they have meat and it's an undeniable fact that the meat they have is still much tougher than that of a capon. I request you to try a capon once and compare it with that of a cockerel. I bet you can't ignore the difference between the fibrous rooster meat and a capon.



Kris meat of an older hen or a roo is preferred for making stews and broth, but not many people prefer to eat an old hen or roo as regularly as they like to eat the meat of a broiler. BTW I was talking about the meat of a full grown male bird.

The only Roosters I have are the ones I am keeping for breeding (and one sort of “pet” who might be a candidate for the procedure) so I will probably be a while off of processing one of them! Give the boys and I a few years and I’ll Let you know what I think on old rooster... but the cockerels are not worth caponizing for me, it’s not the easiest thing to do from what I’ve read, and for 20 birds at a time... I’ll just stick to ending them as they become hostile to each other.

It's always best to raise your own CX as a day old chick in the supervision of an active hen like a game hen or another breed like Cornish. Someone who is good forager.

They were raised by another local farmer we are developing closer ties with, and I picked her up at 6 1/2 weeks old (they were from the same order as my Red Ranger chicks) I’m pretty sure they are pushing 17–18lbs live weight now, mostly due to breeding. The CX we have here grow ridiculously large extremely fast. The last of my rangers which I processed at 14 weeks were 6-7lbs dressed out.

 

[Kabootar]

They were raised by another local farmer we are developing closer ties with, and I picked her up at 6 1/2 weeks old (they were from the same order as my Red Ranger chicks) I’m pretty sure they are pushing 17–18lbs live weight now, mostly due to breeding. The CX we have here grow ridiculously large extremely fast. The last of my rangers which I processed at 14 weeks were 6-7lbs dressed out.

Cornish cross birds are same everywhere. They do nothing but sit and eat. Generally I am not a very emotional person, people say I am very practical, but hearing a large birds chirping like chicks always gets me.
One day I was selling a batch of CX to our local butcher and I saw one of my hens running around with her chicks of exact same age as CX batch tagged behind her and it was really disturbing.

We still don't have the Red Rangers in our country, but anyway I hope you will keep me updated with your experiment.

 

[GotCoop]

Economically, its important to watch your feed conversion rate with meat birds. Might be more inefficient to have some of your birds continue to maturity and reproduce. Freedom Rangers are an alternative meat bird that don't grow at the rate of Cornish-X or have the health issues with age...they will reproduce...but I doubt that you could efficiently continue the cycle. You can buy the chicks for about $2...

 

[Broodygranny]

I like the taste of quail, but they only cost about five dollars each where I am, so you could just eat one to see if you like it. They can't be housed with chickens. They are much smaller, so the pen doesn't take up much room.

 

[Kris5902]

Looking forward to the input here... I’m also looking at trying to get a good breeding program for meat birds started... not CX necessarily, just looking at different hybrid and heritage breeds for a sustainable meat flock. I have geographical issues with bringing in chicks on a regular basis, and there are limits on how many CX non-registered poultry producers here can have processed...