Author: Anna & Mark

I was bound and determined to
lower our feed
conversion rate this
year, so I decided to think outside the box and try to raise laying
breed chickens for
meat.  My hypothesis was that these avid foragers wouldn’t get as
big as heavy broiler breeds and would look leggier than a supermarket
chicken, but that their prowess at finding their own food would lower
the overall feed to meat ratio, saving us money and resulting in
healthier meat.



We killed our two
biggest cockerels on Monday, so I have the first set of results to
share with you.  I took the photo above after bagging both the
australorp and the golden comet cross, so it’s tough to see the
difference, but in person, the golden comet carcass (on the left in the
photo above) looked how I’d expect — not much breast meat and
sporting long, gangly legs.  On the other hand, I was surprised to
notice that the black australorp carcass (on
the right in the photo here) actually looked pretty much like a
supermarket chicken, only smaller.



Next, I weighed both birds —
1.86 pounds for the australorp and 1.87 pounds for the golden
comet.  Here, the results were more in line with my expectations
— at 11.5 weeks, the laying breeds were considerably lighter than the
dark
cornish at the same age (2.25 pounds apiece) and
vastly lighter than a cornish cross would have been.  I feel
obliged to also mention that I did choose the biggest cockerels, which means that
the average carcass weight of our laying breed chickens was probably
closer to 1.75 pounds at this point.



Finally, I crunched some
numbers.  At 11.5 weeks, our australorp flock had consumed about
8.3 pounds of feed per bird instead of 14 pounds for dark cornish
cockerels of the same age last year.  Divide that by the average
weight of this year’s cockerels, and you get a feed conversion rate of
4.5 : 1.  Suddenly, our little cockerels look like big winners,
cutting the amount of grain I had to buy per pound of meat by more than
a quarter.  In fact, the australorps even won out over the average
for slow broiler breeds on pasture.  I suspect that some judicious
breeding, combined with making the forest pasture an even more buggy
spot, might even raise our feed conversion rate up to the level
experienced by folks who raise cornish cross on pasture.



That said, we actually ended up
spending more money per pound of meat this year than
last year — $3.09 versus $2.91.  (I forgot to factor in brooder
costs last year, which is why this number is different from what you
see in a previous post.)  Over the last twelve months, chicken
feed costs have increased by
42%, from 24 cents per pound to 37 cents per pound, which in turn
increases our feed costs even though we gave the chickens less
food.  If we hadn’t needed to buy chicks and had just factored in
the cost of
running the incubator and brooder (next year’s method, I hope!), we
would have spent a mere $2.11 per pound.  I think we’re
going to be more and more glad we’ve settled on good foragers as grain
costs continue to rise.

I can tell that everyone’s starting to think
about buying chicks for their spring flock because I’ve heard from
several of you wanting more information about our Dark Cornish
experiment last year.  For those of you who weren’t following
along, you can read the highlights: why
we chose to raise Dark Cornish broilers and the economics of Dark
Cornish broilers ($2.51
per pound if slaughtered at 12 weeks and even
more expensive if slaughtered at 16 weeks.)  Basically, we
concluded that Dark Cornish don’t forage nearly as well as we’d hoped
and are very expensive to raise, but that the meat is some of the best
chicken we’ve ever eaten.



That said, I thought
you’d like to hear the experience of another backyard chicken keeper
who also tried out Dark Cornish broilers in 2010.  Reg Delorey
wrote:

In a later email, Reg went on to say that he
kept his broilers in tractors and felt like they were very good
foragers.  “They would rather attack fresh grass and bugs way
before going to feed.”  On the negative side, he was raising
Cornish Crosses in the same tractors as the Dark Cornish and the latter
killed the former.  “Somewhere around 8 weeks, 4 pound Cornish
roosters began killing my 7 and 8 pound meat kings [Cornish crosses].”



Reg concluded:

I suggested either
crossing the Dark Cornish with a Plymouth Rock to make your own Cornish
Cross, or perhaps breeding them with one of the old timey broiler
varieties like New Hampshire or White Wyandotte.  Any other
feedback to pass back on to Reg?  Any one else have experience
raising Dark Cornish as broilers?