New Meat Experiment....

[eldonrgv]

About a year and a half ago I bought some chicks from Pure Poultry (Madisons, White and Barred Plymouth Rocks, RIR, Orphingtons, and Dark Cornish) wantimg to raise them and do some crossings to see if I could get some decent meat birds. About 5 months after I got them a gang of stray dogs hit the coop and killed a good portion of my birds. Being all disappointed, I gave the remaining flock to my father. Fast forwarding to today my dad has a beautiful flock 2 Dark Cornish Males, 1 Buff Orphington Male, 15 Madison Females, 5 RIR Females, 7 White Plymouth Rock Females, and 1 Barred Plymouth Rick Female. I told him 2 months ago to separate them into two coops so we could do some crossings so we put the Orphington Male with the 15 Madisons (which are supposedly a "breed" Pure Poultry designed for eggs and meat and they do pretty well in laying large brown eggs and are a pretty good size bird) and the 2 Dark Cornish Males with the Plymouth Rocks and the RIR' s. I set 90 eggs 8 days ago on my GQF 1202 and candled them last night, I had 3 blood rings, 5 unfertiled, and 4 with small cracks on shell so i ended up with 78 eggs on my bator for this experiment, plus another 39 I set last night. My plans are to raise and choose the largest birds of both flocks and breed the ones of Flock A with the ones of Flock B and hoping to get nice meat birds.

 

[ChickenGrass]

Ok
Goodluck with it and keep us posted
:cd

 

[Egghead_Jr]

Good luck with your venture.

With what you have I think your best cross would be Cornish over the Madison hybrid. By description the Madison is basically a Dixie Rainbow hybrid. They have all the genetic material your looking for in them excepting the double breast of Cornish. Quick maturity and double breast carcass would be had from the offspring of that cross. Then crossing them onto selves and cull all slow and skinny birds to breed the best of traits for meat. You'd have a pretty fair sustainable flock with traits your looking for nearly set into them 4th generation.

A lot of back yard crossings have been done. What you find from results is it really pays to start with good parent stock. If your hatchery stock RIR is anything like I've seen of typical hatchery reds then that would not be a good choice of parent stock. Orpington as a sire brings little to the table as it's not a fast maturing bird nor sporting an outstanding table carcass. Some food for thought.

 

[eldonrgv]

Good luck with your venture.

With what you have I think your best cross would be Cornish over the Madison hybrid. By description the Madison is basically a Dixie Rainbow hybrid. They have all the genetic material your looking for in them excepting the double breast of Cornish. Quick maturity and double breast carcass would be had from the offspring of that cross. Then crossing them onto selves and cull all slow and skinny birds to breed the best of traits for meat. You'd have a pretty fair sustainable flock with traits your looking for nearly set into them 4th generation.

A lot of back yard crossings have been done. What you find from results is it really pays to start with good parent stock. If your hatchery stock RIR is anything like I've seen of typical hatchery reds then that would not be a good choice of parent stock. Orpington as a sire brings little to the table as it's not a fast maturing bird nor sporting an outstanding table carcass. Some food for thought. 

Thanks for this great info. Like you said, the RIR seem to be kind of small for being 18 months old, the Whites and Barred rocks are just beautiful big birds and the Madisons are still larger than them. I dnt know that much about breeding just figured white rocks crosses with Cornish and then cross them with madison/Orphington, but what you said of the Madison's is true they are huge I might as well cross them with the Cornish. Since the Madison's have been with the Orphington for about two months, if I remove the male how long will it take for their eggs to become unfertiled so I can add the Cornish? Meanwhile I can check the offspring of the cornish/rock cross I have in the bator.