I recall a post by Rokimoto on the Onagadori site a year or so ago discussing keeping Cornish Cross birds and how one has to keep them in a state of semi-starvation so they don't eat themselves to death.
It depends on the lines that you use. You can expect some hybrid vigor, but not as much as you see in commercial birds. A show White Rock crossed to a Cornish would likely produce the fryer type bird that they were dealing with in the 1940's and 50's. You could probably expect to take 15 weeks to grow a hybrid to 3.5 lbs. Modern broilers will reach over 4 lbs in less than 6 weeks. They eat more feed to grow this fast, but this saves a lot of feed and you won't be able to match the feed efficiency with any cross not involving the commercial broilers.
Jeee, that makes regret having given up on our meat line last year. We had a line that was giving 5.5 - 6.0 pound cockerels in 16 weeks. For a long time I kept growth / weight charts on every bird with measurements every other day in the beginning before going to a longer sampling period. We still have two of the breeding cocks from that line, the original Delaware sire and one of the (white) progeny males. They're both pretty big birds now, but the Delaware male is 5 years old now (and he attacks me despite the fact that I've knocked him unconscious three time with the feed scoop during attacks).
I am aware that the commercial birds are higly developed lines ... the birds that one buys in the grocery stores are probably not simple (2-way) crosses but the corporations maintain grandparent and parent lines for 4-way crosses.
I am wondering if ANY cross between Cornish and White Rock yields an improved meat bird, as judged from feed conversion, relative to the parent lines? Can one expect an improved meat bird relative to the parent lines (judged on the basis of feed conversion) by breeding McMurray's Cornish to McMurray's White Rock, for example?
By Rokimoto on Wednesday, January 9, 2002 - 07:39 pm:
Most of the commercial broilers are 3 and 4 way crosses. There are some 2 way crosses because when they generate the hundreds of millions of parents to produce the billions of broiler chicks they have to sex them and unlike the egg industry nearly all the extra males are put into broiler houses and go to the table. 2 way cross females go to the breeder houses to produce the broiler hatching eggs.
By Infomaniac on Wednesday, January 9, 2002 - 09:47 pm:
I gave up the meat line for two reasons.... my family doesn't like the flavor or texture of home-grown poultry. They rather have KFC. The other reason was that I really don't like butchering. I was able to do it, but I never really got to where I tolerated it well. And I couldn't eat meat for a week or so afterward until the memory of the butchering faded.
One of our Ameraucana breeding cocks is a huge chicken. Those guys can get really big. But the growth rate is slower. I was wondering what one would get from a Cornish / Ameraucana cross.