New to chickens

[luke835]

I just bought 30 Cornish X but I would really like to sustain and breed my own meat flock. From what I have read it isnt feasible to breed the Cornish X because it is a hybrid and wont necessarily breed true. So what I am wondering raises a bird or even crosses two true breeds to make a good meat bird. I am not talking the freakish 8 lbs in 8 weeks but maybe something that would be meaty enough to harvest around 12 weeks.

any comments would be awesome

thanks!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Welcome to the forum! Glad you joined us!

You’ll have problems finding what you want. I’m afraid this is going to get long, but bear with me.

The Cornish X and Freedom Rangers are hybrids, but that is not the only reason they don’t work out for a breeding program for most people. Freedom Rangers don’t grow as quickly as the Cornish X, but both breeds grow so fast and get so big that their skeletons and hearts can’t support them. They break down and die unless you severely restrict their feed. They also get too big to breed naturally. Although they are hybrids they would actually work pretty well for a breeding program if you could keep them alive. There have been several threads on here where people tried to keep them and breed them. A few were able to make it work, but most were greatly disappointed. It’s not something someone unfamiliar with chickens should try.

Back before the Cornish X was developed, the main meat breeds were Delaware, New Hampshire, and White Rock. These were carefully bred to produce chickens that put on meat pretty well and had nice carcasses. They are light-feathered breeds so when you pluck them, you don’t see the pin feathers. This makes for a prettier carcass as opposed to a carcass where you see a lot of dark pin feathers. Those pin feathers are still there. You just can’t see the light ones as well.

There is something about breeding chickens. Unless you reinforce specific traits you want every generation by very carefully selecting your breeders, the flock quickly loses those traits. Before the Cornish X took over the market, you had Delaware chicks advertised as being able to weigh 4 pounds at 12 weeks, for example. That was considered excellent for them. But when the Cornish X was developed, people quit selecting these breeds for meat traits. They just became regular dual-purpose breeds. There are some general differences in conformation, but how much depends on the person selecting the breeders.

The traits you want in a meat bird are rate of growth, size, feed conversion (pounds of feed per pound of meat), and conformation. The light feathers are a plus if you pluck instead of skin the carcass.

Each hatchery has different people selecting the breeders so there are some differences in hatchery birds. I’ve had the same breeds form different hatcheries and there is a clear difference in them. But you are not going to get hatchery birds that have a great growth rate or that reach a large size. Conformation can really vary too.

The other potential source for chickens are breeders. There are a lot more difference in the product you can get from “breeders” than from the different hatcheries. Some people that sell hatching eggs or chicks get hatchery birds and breed them, often not having a clue how to select their best breeding chickens.

Some breeders are breeding for show. They have no interest in rate of growth or feed conversion. Their chickens are usually larger than the hatchery birds so you do start off with an advantage there, if you can find the right breeder. But these eggs or chicks can be really expensive. And unless you learn how to select your breeders, in a very few generations you are back to birds of hatchery quality.

There are a very few people out there that are breeding not only for show but for the traits the heritage breed should have. Instead of just breeding for the traits a judge will see at a show, they are breeding for things like egg color, personality traits, rate of growth; the things that made them a good utility bird to start with. These people are generally passionate about their breed. They are not going to sell their birds to anyone that is not also passionate about trying to maintain the breed as it was supposed to be. You have to convince them you know what you are doing and will try to maintain the breed, not just try for a few months or a couple of years, then lose interest. These are the birds you want, but these are extremely hard to find and you can’t get them once you find them.

Of course, you have people in between all these groups. The groups are not as clear-cut as I have painted them.

What a lot of us do is just get the best stock to start with as we can, sometimes hatchery birds and sometimes from show breeders, and develop our own flocks. It doesn’t matter if our flocks are purebred or crosses. In a few generations if you select your breeders to have the traits you want, you can improve your flock to better meet your goals. They are not going to come close to matching the Cornish X or Freedom Rangers. They are not likely to meet the 4 pounds at 12 weeks the Heritage breeds attained. But you can get something better than hatchery chick quality as far as meeting your goals.

There are several threads in the meat bird section of this forum where people talk about which breeds they select for this purpose and why. Some people use the regular Cornish (not Cornish X) to get more breast meat, for example. But the quality of the stock you start with has a lot to do with your finished product. Not all regular Cornish are equal for example so be careful of generalizations.

Real long, I know. It is not really as negative as it may sound. People have done this type of thing and been happy with their results. But it is not really all that easy.

A lot of this is my opinion. You’ll find people on here that disagree with some of what I said. But hopefully you will get something out of this. And once again,