I became curious about the economics of this.
All the information I could find was that a typical commercial strain brown egg laying sexlink female is expected to need 12.4 lbs of feed to get to 17 weeks of age. POL.
These birds feed supply is restricted just a little to make sure that they are all a uniform size when they go to the layer house. So fed ad lib they will eat a little more.
There is no data on what feed it takes to raise the brothers of these layers. But since they start to outdistance their sisters in size at about 8 weeks of age it is reasonable to assume that they will eat considerably more in the same time period.
Looking at the aforementioned; would it be reasonable to assume that 20 week old cockerels ate 15lbs of feed to get to that stage? That would be about 4.25 lbs of feed to produce a pount of RTC meat.
The typical 42 day old broiler chicken will average 5.75 lbs live weight and it will eat just about 10 lbs of feed (1.75 FCR) to get there . The eviscerated weight of this average bird will be about 75% or about 4.3 lbs. This equates to 2.3 lbs of feed per pound of meat.
So it looks like it takes somewhat more than twice as much feed alone to produce sex link male meat as it does broiler chicken meat.
It also requires up to six months rather than six weeks to get to the end of the growing stage.
Three questions quickly come to my mind-
How much better can they possibly taste?
Why would I want to buy twice as much feed?
Why would I want to raise them for six months, well beyond the stage where they start to become difficult to deal with.
