Slow growing Cornish vs Freedom Rangers

[Bucky182]

I have seen some hatcheries advertise a slower growing cornish cross. Does anyone have any experience with these birds? Do they still have leg problems like the faster cornish X? How about some of the "medium" briolers out there? I just read the 25+ page journel on the FR. Chickens and it seems like they would be alot more expensive to feed with them going to 12 weeks rather than 8 weeks. I was just wondering if there was something that would be in the 9-10 week range that someone has had good luck with.

 

[Esteri]

We have 28 of the slower growing Cornish crosses showing up from McMurray next week. Our first try at meat birds. Will let you know how it goes?

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[zephyrcreek]

The Freedom rangers take longer to reach size, but they eat so much grass that it makes up most of the difference. Plus the pasture is a much healtier food for the birds than 100% grower. I only raise some CX because I have a few customers that still prefer all that breast meat. Not my cup of tea after eating a CRB though.

 

[KatieH]

I just butchered the last of my "cornish roasters" from MM and I'm very pleased with them. You do need to restrict their feed like with the X, but we had no leg problems (they could even run!) The only trouble we had was losing two to CHF but that was our fault for not restricting their feed. Once we did we had no trouble. They are aggressive come feeding time, but the rest of the time we had no trouble, they were pretty passive. We also let ours free range during the day. The meat is fantastic, we're having a fryer as chicken and dumplings tonight. We roasted one of the big guys the other weeks, I used the drippings for gravy and OMG. With some homemade buttermilk mashed potatoes and chicken gravy covering everything, i just about died and went to pregnant lady heaven, lol.

 

[sfessler]

I've got the "slow" CX from privett as my first batch ever. I really would have rather had the fast just because the whole point is to get production. Anyway, the birds are fully feathered in clean white feathers and are only somewhat smaller than the normal CX based on photos on this site. We had one of 25 that needed to be culled very early on due to bad legs, and/or failure to thrive. It was being trampled.

I don't believe that properly raised CX have health problems by default.

 

[Bossroo]

Quote:
You have hit the nail on the head... the key is to read and FOLLOW directions !!!