Official BYC Poll: What Is Your Perspective On Chickens For Meat

[ChocolateMouse]

Dunlap hatchery sells cx hatching eggs half the price of chicks. But as anyone that has incubated eggs especially shipped eggs knows hatching is never a guarantee.

Yep shipping for the hatching eggs was expensive and they were about $0.30 cheaper for an egg than a day old chick... And you couldn't pick up the eggs either, shipped ONLY. So we always just got chicks cause it wasn't worth the effort.

 

[parvani]

It's expensive and doesn't have bones
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/sin...ever-to-serve-eat-just-lab-grown-chicken.html
View attachment 2523279

That's lab-grown MEAT. No live chickens were involved after they harvested the first cells.

Does anyone really doubt that they are incubating chick cells in laboratory conditions?

 

[ChocolateMouse]

 

[JacinLarkwell]

You can buy eggs hatched by CX hens that happened to live long enough to lay eggs. But the breed isn't designed to live much past 8 weeks. Those hens had a birth defect -- a larger heart -- than the breed is designed to have.

Just because those hens laid eggs doesn't mean that the chicken you buy in the supermarket hatched from eggs.

Incubating cloned chicks under sterile laboratory conditions is simply more efficient than messing about with live chickens and their eggs. I have no proof that this is how most CX birds are incubated -- but if I owned a factory and wanted efficient, predictable results every day of the year, this is how I would do it. Once it's set up it's almost completely automated.

No I mean some hatcheries sell hatching eggs that hatch into cornishX

 

[parvani]

Yep shipping for the hatching eggs was expensive and they were about $0.30 cheaper for an egg than a day old chick... And you couldn't pick up the eggs either, shipped ONLY. So we always just got chicks cause it wasn't worth the effort.

Of course day-old lab-grown chicks are cheaper. That's because it's cheaper to hatch clones than to keep actual chickens.

As I said... Not sustainable without a whole lot of civilized infrastructure. But cheap.

I'm not sure why this is so hard for some people here to absorb. Humans have always used science to make things better-cheaper-faster.

But I raise legacy meat birds because I can buy Franken-chicken anywhere.

There's no point in raising CX birds -- it's cheaper to buy their lab-grown, factory-raised, factory-butchered, incredibly bland meat.

I want REAL chicken.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

That's lab-grown MEAT. No live chickens were involved after they harvested the first cells.

Does anyone really doubt that they are incubating chick cells in laboratory conditions?

Yes, 100%

 

[parvani]

Yes, 100%

Can you explain why?

 

[3KillerBs]

Can you explain why?

Because my former neighbor worked with a guy whose brother was employed in Purdue's breeding facility and worked with the parent-line birds for the Cornish X.

The breeding facility workers were allowed to bring home the double-yolk eggs (unusable in commercial hatching), so for a couple months every spring I'd end up with a fridge full of huge, double-yolk eggs that, had they been normal, would have hatched Cornish X chicks for Perdue.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Because conspiracy theories like this require a LOT of low-level underpaid joe-schmoes to keep their mouths shut for a company they barely care about.
There's so many ordinary randos who even if they signed and NDA would spill the beans SO FAST that there's NO WAY to keep a conspiracy that large under wraps.
It's not like the people working for hatcheries are CIA spies. They're Cousin Bob who likes smashing beer cans on his forehead when he's drunk and Aunt Sandy who won't stop telling the same 3 stories every time you see her, and Grandpa Joe who's famous for gossiping about affairs in the workplace.
Hatcheries employ thousands of people and there's no way they'd all keep quiet about the crazy dystopian illegal activity. All it would take is one hidden cell phone by a nosey nelly who wants to make a tiktok to bust it all open.

(also all the other reasons listed)

 

[Beer can]

Definitely cheaper to buy store bought.
I picked up a bunch of BB white turkeys from TSC last spring for a $1 ea, wow what a deal! After feeding them for months I'm pretty sure fresh lobsters would have been much cheaper lol