The
back of this postcard says the photo was taken by Joel Couchouron, and
that it was printed in 1987.
“Les Vosges.
Piou! Piou! Elles accourent” seems to translate to “The
Vosges. Pfff! Pfff! They rush.” I gather that
Vosges is a French department (county?) in the Lorraine.
Anyhow, the image
tickled my fancy and I wanted to share.
With
Dark
Cornish no longer in the running for a permaculture broiler breed, I’m starting to narrow down
our
choices for next year’s experiment. Freedom Rangers were
near the top of my list, until I did a bit more research.
What
are Freedom Rangers?
The term “Freedom
Ranger” is merely an American popularization of the hybrid breed
developed for use by French companies operating under the Label Rouge
program. Label Rouge is a certification process, a bit like “free
range” or “organic” in the U.S. Their website is difficult to
read if you don’t understand French, but ATTRA put out a PDF file
about Label Rouge
which is worth a viewing (and from which I stole this image.)
Freedom Ranger parents
come from a few proprietary lines owned by European corporations.
So, don’t think you can buy a flock of Freedom Rangers and raise your
own, or even start your own breeding flock by growing the two parent
breeds. Freedom Rangers, like Cornish Crosses, are industrial
hybrids.
What are their advantages?
Freedom Rangers are
relatively fast growing, but they don’t grow as quickly as the Cornish
Cross. As a result, they don’t tend to have the high mortality
rates that break so many backyard broiler-raisers’ hearts.
Freedom Rangers are reputed to grow to 5 pounds in 12 weeks, to be
tastier than Cornish Crosses, but to have less breast and larger legs.
Based on one
backyard experiment,
Freedom Rangers seem to have a feed to meat conversion ratio that’s
almost as good as Cornish Crosses — 3.4.
What
are their disadvantages?
As I mentioned earlier,
we couldn’t create our own self-perpetuating Freedom Ranger flock,
which is a deal breaker for me. Having to buy chicks every year
makes the meat pricey — the experiment I linked to above ended up
with a cost of $1.73 per pound for Freedom Rangers and $1.47 per pound
for Cornish Crosses.
I’m also not sold on
Freedom Rangers being good foragers. If they’re so good at
catching bugs, why did they eat so much grain? I think I’ll let
someone else do that experiment for us and move on to a different breed
for our next batch of broilers.
We
decided to try out Dark
Cornish cockerels
for our first broiler experiment since they are supposed to be good
foragers and very predator resistant. It turned out that predator
resistance wasn’t really necessary in our instance, and our
cockerels
seemed to be lackadaisical foragers. The meat will be a bit
better for us than storebought since the chickens did consume some
greenery and insects, but we clearly spent more than we would have on
grocery store meat, or on raising Cornish Crosses.
Here are the stats on
the 12 week old birds, which averaged a mere 2.25
pounds dressed weight apiece:
| Expenditure | Price per bird |
| Purchasing chicks | $2.00 |
| Feed (~14 pounds per bird) | $3.64 |
| Total | $5.64 |
| Price per pound | $2.51 |
Big producers focus on
the feed to meat conversion ratio, which in our
case was about 6:1. This is double the average for Cornish Cross
broilers, meaning that our chickens actually consumed twice as much
grain as a similarly sized Cornish Cross would have. That’s the
precise opposite of the goal of our forest pasture experiment, so we’ll
be moving on to a different breed next year.
Meanwhile, we still have
two thirds of the cockerels bulking up for another month or two.
I’ll let you know if their figures are any different, and how the 12
week old birds compare in taste to older birds. Stay tuned!