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?

Light Sussex are one of the
new breeds of chickens we experimented with in 2011.  My
conclusion is — they’re very sweet chickens, but not very farm-worthy.





History

Sussex chickens are a
bit like Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth
Rocks, but from the
Old World.  They were a common backyard bird in England, and are
supposed to lay about the same number of eggs per year as an Australorp (250).  Meanwhile, the
chicks are supposed to mature relatively quickly into broilers.



Note all of the
“supposed to”s in that last paragraph.  Unfortunately, Sussex are
now being bred for looks rather than utility, so you can’t expect them
to be either great egg-layers or hefty broilers.  I can’t report
firsthand on egg-laying abilities since ours are just now starting to
lay, but you can read my
analysis of Sussex as broilers here.





Behavior

Our Light Sussex are
extremely tuned in to people.  They follow me around just like my Golden Comets did, which means they’d make
a great backyard bird…as long as you don’t have a garden.



Unfortunately, our
Sussex are also very inquisitive, and are tough to scare.  They
find every hole in our fence long before the other chickens do, and
always seem to end up in the garden (or outside the front door.) 
While I was able to train the Australorps and Marans to stay out of the garden by
chasing them away a few times, the Sussex think it’s a game when I run after them shouting.



Sussex are reputed to be
good foragers, and they do seem to be about on a par with my other
birds…now.  However, the
motherless chicks I raised couldn’t seem to figure out how to eat grubs, which makes me wonder a
bit.  (On the other hand, our motherless Australorp chicks also
had a hard time learning to eat Japanese beetles, so there might just
be a learning curve involved.  For those of you who don’t watch
your chickens daily, Japanese beetles and grubs are chicken candy.)





Color

We chose the Light
Sussex because they are supposed to be better layers, but in
retrospect, I think we might have been better off with one of the
darker color variations.  I’ve heard from readers who swear by
Speckled Sussex, and I suspect that this breed might not be such a hawk
magnet as our Light Sussex.  Is it a coincidence that we’ve had
two hawk attacks since we started raising Light Sussex, but none
before?  (Possibly — although the hawk went after a Sussex the
first time, he was trying to eat an Australorp when I chased him off
the second time.  Yes, the Australorp did survive.)





What
do you think?

I’d be curious to hear
about your experience with Light Sussex.  If you felt they lived
up to the  hype, where did you get your birds from?  (Ours
came from a private chicken-keeper in Pennsylvania.)