Also can I eat the girl birds, for instance if I did not want any more eggs but I needed more meat and my chicks turned out with a bunch of girls, can I eat them?
That's what I do but some people sell the pullets instead to help pay for feed costs. As always there are different ways to go about this.
How important is size to you? There are only two of us and I'm not selling meat commercially. I can get two meals from a small dual-purpose pullet. If the chicken is a large cockerel that means I get leftover chicken for lunch. I like the larger cockerels and those lunches but size is not an obsession with me. More of a nice to have. I do select my breeding roosters for size, size is a nice to have.
I tend to butcher my mixed breed dual purpose cockerels between 16 and 23 weeks, that suits the way I raise and cook them. I generally keep my pullets until they are about 8 months old before I butcher. I want to evaluate their egg laying a bit before I decide which I want to keep as replacement layers. They still cook the same as the younger cockerels.
Chickens develop flavor and texture as they age but there is a big difference in how fast cockerels develop compared to the girls. The hormones that hit the boys in adolescence greatly accelerates both texture and flavor. The texture difference is obvious when I butcher. Some people call the flavor "gamey", some like it and some don't. That's why you steer a young bull calf, to stop the hormones from turning the meat gamey and tough.
Also, are the breeds above broody, because I do not want to have to use a incubator?
This kind of plays into the "can you eat the girls" question. No matter the breed, some hens will go broody. No matter the breed, some hens will never go broody. Some breeds are a lot more likely to go broody than others but there is no guarantee that any one specific hen will. Even if one goes broody a lot there is no guarantee that she will when you want her to.
How many chickens will you want to eat each year? How often will you eat chicken and how many people are you feeding? My normal routine is to bake a chicken on a Thursday and use leftovers in soup Saturday. I can vegetable soup from the stuff in my garden so Saturday evening meals are soup, cheese, and crackers, easy preparation and easy clean-up. But with visits to the grandchildren and other events we don't do that every week. With a bit of trial and error I determined I need to hatch about 45 chicks a year. I eat older hens as they are retired and old roosters as they are replaced. 45 worked out to be my number.
When I hatch I never know how many will be boys and girls. Over time the ratio is real close to 50-50, but even with different hatches a year I often get several more of one sex than the other for the year. It might be more boys, it might be girls. I don't know how many chicks I'll need to hatch every year to get 45 cockerels. It may be over 100, it may only be 80. By eating both girls and boys I know I need to hatch 45. If I only ate cockerels I'd have to hatch at least twice as many chicks, which would mean more facilities, more room, buying more feed, and more hatching. I have a system that I know what I need to do to meet my requirements.
How much freezer space do you have? My freezer space is pretty precious, especially during growing season as I keep vegetables, fruit, and berries in there as I gather enough to preserve by canning. I make a lot of jam and jelly. I keep fruit and berries in the freezer until I get enough (and time) to make a batch. I may have four or five gallons of frozen tomatoes in there before I cook them down to a sauce and can them. When I butcher chickens I part the meat to get serving portions as that is how I cook it but I also save the rest of the carcass to make broth. I'm constantly managing freezer space during the summer so I can't just fill that freezer up with enough chicken meat to last the year. Some people would just buy another freezer which could solve the problem. But I don't, I can mange it.
This means I have to have a regular supply of chickens hitting butcher age or I run out of chicken. I purposely bred broodiness into my flock, you can do that if you have some broody hens. I really like broody hens to hatch and raise the chicks but be careful what you ask for. Mine go broody during the summer so much it hurts egg production. My broody buster is almost always in use.
But they almost never go broody in the late fall, winter, or real early spring. To get that constant supply of chickens to eat I use an incubator and hatch about 20 in February and raise them myself. After that I pretty much rely on broody hens to raise the rest. When one goes broody and I give her eggs to hatch I usually put some eggs in the incubator too. The broody gets them those raise too. Sometimes a broody hatch doesn't go well. For example, one time a snake ate all the eggs under a broody hen. I kept her broody with fake eggs and she still had the incubator chicks to raise. Before I bred broodiness in my flock I used that incubator a lot more.
The point of this is that you cannot control when or how often you will get a broody hen or how many she will actually hatch. My typical laying/breeding flock is one rooster and 6 to 8 hens. Even if I bought an extra freezer I'd have to keep and feed more hens and have extra facilities to get enough meat to last the year if I relied on broody hens. The only way you have any control over when you hatch is to get an incubator and use it.
This is my system that suits my goals. Other people have different goals. What I do will not work for them at all. I'm not obsessed over size so am quite happy with the hatchery stock I started with. I'm not planning on showing mine so I don't care if they meet SOP standards or not. Since mine are mixed breed mutts there is no breed SOP anyway. I manage them for what I want. Hopefully this will help you determine what you think might be a good way to go.
You can get tied up in knots trying to make a decision. Try to not let the pursuit of perfection keep you away from plenty good enough. There are breed differences and the quality of the stock you start with makes a difference, so making your initial selection is important. But as long as you pay attention to some basics a lot of these differences may be more nuanced that apparent. You are not really going to see a lot of difference between many breeds. In other words with just a little care it can be hard to make a bad decision. There are a while lot of dual purpose breeds out there that can work quite well.
Good luck!
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