Cornish cross vs Buff orpington at 5 weeks

At 5 weeks of age:

This is a cornish cross chick on the right, and a buff orpington chick on the left. They're exactly the same age. At this point the cornish cross weighs about 3x what the buff orpington does.

at 2 weeks of age:

My guess is that the cornish cross eats about the same amount of feed per pound of chicken produced as the heritage breed does, but that it does it in a shorter amount of time. At this point we're on feed restriction for the cornish cross.

Feed restriction prevents the cornish from eating themselves to death. If given all of the food that they want they'll completely stuff themselves and die, probably of flip.

Flip isn't a problem with heritage breeds who grow much more slowly and seem to regulate their feed intake better than the cornish cross. For me this is one big advantage with the heritage breeds. You put them out on pasture, make sure they have food and water, and walk away. They'll happily grow and forage without any work on your part for the next 6 months.

The cornish aren't nearly that self-sufficient. Part of the reason that people raise them in pens that you move is that it's easier than cleaning a coop of manure, and it encourages the cornish cross to forage. Otherwise they'd pretty much stay glued to their feeders.

"free range"
There are various huge chicken producers that produce "free range" chickens. It would be more accurate to say they're "barn raised". One producer simply cut doors into the side of their broiler barns and during the last 2 weeks of the chickens life opened the door. Of course, since chickens are territorial, and broilers in particular want to stay close to the food and water, it's not unusual to find that not one chicken ever goes outside. In a rather cynical move, some of the producers have little lawns they maintain between the barns so that they can claim to be "pasturing" the chickens. None of the chickens actually get on the grass, but theoretically they could.

For my chickens they're out there on the ground, pecking and scratching and doing what chickens are meant to do.

The chicks have arrived, farming calendar

Received our first batch of chicks for sale this summer. In this batch there's 50 roosters, 100 buff orpington hens, and 100 cornish cross meat chicks. We also ordered 25 bantam chicks because I like to keep a small flock of bantams on the farm.
This is a buff orpington chick on the right, and a bantam chick on the left. Notice the size difference in the feet between these two birds. Buff orpingtons are a heritage breed egg layer, and are really quite pretty when they're full grown.
Here's the same bantam chick next to a cornish cross chick. I'll take some more pictures to compare these two as they grow. The cornish cross will be 4-6lbs in 8 weeks. The bantam will be about 1/4 of a pound in the same timeframe. This cornish cross chick weighs 50% more than the buff orpington chick at this age. It doesn't look that much bigger, but you can feel it when you pick them up.

This is a free chick of some sort. I don't know what breed it is, but it looks interesting.

It's got that pronounced stripe down the back and face markings. So it may be a sexlink... these free chicks are almost always roosters, which is fine by me. I like roosters.

Shipping mortality

Buff orpingtons; zero dead on delivery, but one with a birth defect that'll probably be fatal

cornish cross; zero dead on delivery. all look OK.

white leghorn roosters; all 25 doing well.

delaware roosters; all 25 doing well

straight run bantam; 16 out of 25 dead on arrival, expect a few more to die overnight.

It may be too early in the year to ship bantams. they don't have the body mass to withstand cold very well, so I'm guessing they got chilled somewhere in transit, poor little guys. I'm going to ask that they ship the replacements in a month so it's a little warmer for them.

Prep for recieving chicks

Fill bins with chips, fill wateres and feeders

Put lamps in and test surface temperature under lamps for 100 degrees. Adjust lamps to provide that temp at the surface.

allow the lamps to run overnight to make sure that the chips are dry and warm when the chicks arrive.

Putting chicks in the bins

Sort through the chicks and segretate those that don't appear to be doing well

dip each chicks beak into the water

Observe to make sure they've found the light, and tap the food to get them to notice it

24 hour check

Count and tally overall mortality, call hatchery and get replacements. Refill food and water, check temperatures again.

We have pre-ordered 300-700 chicks per month for the next 5 months.

Seasonal chickens

Year-round chicken is a relatively new invention. 60 years or more ago you'd see chicken, but mostly as a seasonal meat in the summer and fall.

Seasonal Chicken
This seasonal pattern was due to how the hens produce eggs. In the spring and early summer a heritage breed hen lays best. These excess spring eggs were retained by the farms and hatched, producing next years laying hens, and about an equal number of roosters. The roosters and surplus hens would be sold when they'd grown big enough to eat, and the cycle would begin again.


Year 'round chicken
You can get chicken year-round today because chickens are typically raised in huge barns that are temperature controlled and managed very efficiently. Well, efficiently in terms of cost, but the experience of the animal isn't particularly enriched.


Got a call today...
This post is inspired by a call I received today asking if I sold chickens, and during the course of the conversation she explained that she just couldn't eat the factory chickens any more, and had made that transition for ethical reasons. I completely understood what she was saying -- that's why I started my farm, and why I raise the type of chickens I do.

The chickens I raise for laying hens, and to eat
I raise both Cornish cross chickens (the type of chicken you're used to seeing in the grocery store) and heritage breed chickens. I hatch eggs from my own breeding flocks of chickens and turkeys, and I purchase day-old chickens from a variety of hatcheries. I purchase chicks from time to time to increase the genetic diversity of my flocks or from customer demand.

I raise both heritage and Cornish cross because I get asked for both. Both are treated identically and both go out on pasture, on grass and get fed a non-medicated feed to make sure that there's no antibiotics or other drugs.

Cornish cross
These chickens are basically bred to be eating machines. They convert the least amount of feed into the most meat, and in terms of efficiency they cannot be beaten. The cross breeding of Cornish chickens and white rock chickens has produced a chick that takes 8 weeks to mature, from hatch to slaughter. In terms of husbandry they're actually more work to produce than heritage breeds. The basic issue is that if you give them all the food they want they'll eat themselves to death. So you end up having to carefully restrict their food intake every day towards the end of their time here so that you don't lose too many. Since they're butchered so young you don't see the foot and leg problems, but they're there if you keep them longer than a couple of months. Since these chickens are so centered on food you have to move their pens to make sure that they eat as much grass and forage as possible. Otherwise these are the chickens that you'll find asleep in the food dish, waiting for the next food delivery. They are actually pretty friendly, goofy birds.

Heritage breeds
I've been raising batches of black australorp roosters as my primary meat bird, mostly because asian customers are reluctant to purchase white birds -- they'd much prefer red or black -- and because the mexican customers don't want a bird that looks like the "safeway" birds -- they want a bird that is longer and narrower than the birds you see in safeway. As far as husbandry, I'll raise a batch of a couple of hundred and keep them in mobile pens on grass. They do pretty well; and don't eat themselves to death, so they're easier to care for, for me, at least. I fill their feeder and check the waterer and walk away for a day or two. The drawback to these birds is that they take longer to mature -- instead of 8 weeks, we're talking 18-20 weeks. And the shape of the body puts off some Americans because most everyone now believes that a chicken should be shaped like a Cornish cross. It's very similar to the situation that you run across when you try to convince people that white eggs can be just as natural as brown eggs. The consumer has been taught that organic eggs are brown, and that's that.

Taste differences
You can raise a Cornish cross to taste about the same as a safeway bird by duplicating the environment they're typically raised in. Get yourself a small box, stuff a couple of chickens in there, and feed them a soybean meal until they're big enough to eat. No exercise, no variation in diet, and in close contact to their own manure.

When I raise a Cornish cross it lives its first weeks under heat lamps and on sawdust, and then goes out to a mobile pen on grass. The pen is moved every day or two, and the bird is given the opportunity to eat grass and bugs and scratch the ground and do all the things that birds like to do. It's also exposed to the weather -- they see sunshine and rain, and can chose where they spend their time. Most choose to roam around their pen and enjoy hunting for chicken treats. Nothing more fun to watch than a couple of birds fighting over a grasshopper.

Even though the pastured bird and the safeway bird are the same breed, and in some cases might even have come from the same breeding flock, my experience has been that the pastured birds have less fat, better color and a meat taste and texture that's superior. But if you're curious, try this experiment: Cook a safeway bird and a pastured Cornish cross in the same oven for the same time, and do a taste test. Once you've had a pastured bird you realize what you've been missing. What was there once.

Heritage bird taste
The heritage birds are much older -- nearly 3 times the age of Cornish crosses -- and have spent that time foraging and eating and so on. so their meat is firmer, and has a deeper taste than the pastured Cornish cross. For the younger roosters and hens they cannot be beaten as a pan-fried or roasted bird. Fried heritage chicken is a real treat. My favorite recipe for the slightly older birds is Coq Au Vin, a traditional french recipe developed to eat the older roosters that are a little tougher than a young, tender bird.

Bird cost
Here's the hard part. I'm interested in making good, natural food available for a price that makes it accessible for most people. We've all seen great food that is priced so that few people can enjoy it. But on the other hand, I need to make a fair profit so that I'll be around next year, and the year after, to produce more birds. For the Cornish cross birds, oven ready (that is, plucked, head and entrails removed) I charge $3/lb. For the heritage birds, that take so much longer to produce, I charge $4/lb.

Lower cost birds
But if you're interested in a lower cost bird, I'll sell birds live at the farm gate for $18 for a rooster, or $22 for a laying hen. If you're not sure what to do, I offer classes two or three times a year on how to process your own chickens or turkeys.