Cornish Cross- our biggest homestead learning curve

written by Sunday

By September of 2018, we had harvested one set of meat chickens, and our laying chickens were 6 weeks old. We decided we needed one more run of meat chickens to set us up with meat for the winter.

In the interest of learning about different options, we decided to go with Cornish Cross, the “standard” meat chicken in America. Cornish Cross are not genetically modified, as some people think. They have just been bred for many years to be extremely efficient at turning feed into meat.

We decided to go with 30 chickens. We had ended up with 67 pounds of meat from our 21 Black Broilers, so we were hoping for more like 100 pounds in the freezer this time. We had read to expect an 8-10% loss, that these birds often just grew too fast and keeled over dead. We received 32 baby chicks in the mail on September 12.

Brooding went well. This was the first batch in our new 4 foot by 8 foot brooder box. We lost one chick the second day. They sleep splayed out as though dead, and one just actually was.

We fermented their feed from day 1, and gave them plenty of weeds and grass with roots attached. We kept their feed on the other end of the brooder from the heat and the water, to encourage activity.

The weather was on our side this time, and out on pasture they went at 2 1/2 weeks, in the new tractor we built based upon a design we found on the internet.

It turned out that this tractor was really really hard to move. I could not move it by myself, but had to move it with our farm truck, which really isn’t very efficient time-wise, as someone had to watch the chickens to make sure they didn’t lay down and get crushed by the moving tractor.

At 4 weeks, we lost another one. It got trampled by a crazed mob of chickens when I replaced their feeder, and received a deep gash on its head. I culled it immediately, and processed it out within the hour. It came to the size of a Cornish game hen, about one and a half pounds.

A flat roofed shelter in a hurricane

Then, we got hit by Michael, a Category 1 hurricane by the time it came through our neck of the woods. Our Barred Rocks, in their round top tractor and coop, were just fine through it all.

The funny thing about a flat top tractor is that it can hold a lot of rainwater. Up until it can’t.

With Mike at work, before the rain came, I tried unsuccessfully to come up with some sort of tent to make the water run off instead of in. I put a pallet in their tractor so they could get out of the water, and piled up wood chips.

When my poorly designed tent fell apart, I spent the afternoon into the late evening bailing the roof out with the feed scoop every 2-3 hours to keep our 4 week old chicks safe, dry, and alive. The roof was bending with the weight of the 2-3 inches of rain collecting during that time, and I was very afraid of catastrophic failure- roof collapse.

A waterfall coursed down like a curtain in the middle of the tractor where the roof ended. The chickens huddled behind the water curtain, quite disappointed with my farming skills. That flat roofed, hard-to-move tractor is now sitting next to our pole barn, being scavenged for usable parts.

We started harvesting the remaining 30 chickens at 7 weeks, and finished up at 11 weeks. With just the two of us harvesting, we could do about 3 an hour by then, using our brand new drill plucker attachment.

These birds were huge in comparison with the Black Broilers. The dressed weights were 5-8 pounds! We ended up with 190 pounds of meat, almost double what we were hoping for, and had to buy a new chest freezer in order to accommodate it all.

We will raise Cornish Cross again. More meat per chicken means less chickens to process, which is a huge time savings for us. The Cornish Cross averaged at over double the size of the Black Broilers. In addition, since they are white, they have no black pin feathers! We found them to be slower moving than black broilers, but, possibly since we kept them active from day 1, they were still active, healthy chickens.

What we learned

Never to use another animal shelter that has a flat top.
Cornish Cross need to be harvested before about 9 weeks. 12 pound chickens are much harder to deal with and process.
Even our active chickens were not awesome foragers. They eat a lot of feed. In the future, if we have to buy pastured chickens, we will be much more aware of what their supplemental feed is.
Processing cut-ups for part of the batch is something that takes the farmers (us) more time, but that the chef (me) hugely appreciates. It’s quite nice sometimes to be able to pull boneless skinless breasts or whole legs from the freezer.
They taste amazing.

To read about more of our adventures with chickens, you can check out our posts on Black Broilers or Barred Rocks. Thanks for stopping by!