This year I ordered a bunch of various chickens to make my own meat birds. I got several different heavy breeds, male and female, including dark Cornish, white rock, white giant, and Delaware, buckeye, and turken. Should be enough to play with and come up with some interesting and hopefully efficient meat chickens from all that… I don’t need super fast or super big, I just want nice plump birds that can range my property till it’s time for dinner, but aren’t stringy old hens…
You don't need to reinvent the wheel, just use Red Rangers, and breed them, and only keep the chicks that grow fastest and physically look like Red Rangers. Or you can buy a few male Cornish Cross and use them only for reproduction with Red Ranger hens. To keep the Cornish Cross Roosters alive, keep then on a strict diet after the 3-4 week, they will grow slower and will not grow as large as they normally would, but you will have a rooster that you can use to reproduce with other heavy hens (such as Red Rangers). Don't use the Giants, they will grow very slow, that will slow down the growth rate of your birds.
I am currently working on two lines of chickens, the White Leghorns for egg production which I will keep pure and true, and Cornish Cross for meat production, the only drawback with the Cornish Cross is that the hens hardly lay any eggs, and it becomes a delicate balance between keeping them alive with a strict diet of feeding once a day, and getting them to lay eggs, so if you want eggs from them, you have to give them a bit more feed for the duration of the time you'll be collecting eggs, say a few weeks, then hold back on the feed again so they will not grow too fat and suffer health issues, another possible solution would be to cross the Cornish Cross rooster with Red Ranger hens, that way the growth rate of the Red Ranger will improve, and the hens produced will be better egg layers than the Cornish Cross hens. It is all a delicate balance of trading one thing for another.
@@Uptownfunkyouup843 Making an efficient meat bird which grows fast and is efficient converting feed to meat is not so much in what breeds you use and mix together, but instead it is all up to the individual bird itself, for example, say you have 10 hens and 10 roosters and you want to see which ones would make the best meat birds for future generations, what you could do is keep them all in individual cages with no other source of food than the one you provide them with, and measure the feed given each day to each bird, the same amount for all the roosters, and the same amount for all the hens, and after a few months, select only the birds which have put on the most weight, and which are the best egg layers, that way you will breed the most efficient birds that put on the most meat for the same amount of feed and also produces the most eggs for future breeding. I bet they will not come close to the feed to meat conversion efficiency of the Cornish Cross, but they will most likely will be better egg layers and will be more efficient in feed to meat conversion than any known heritage breeds.
If you remember Punnett Squares from 7th grade biology, that explains what happens when you breed hybrid chickens. It is really just probability. if you hatch 100 eggs, 25% should favor the mother breed, 25% will favor the father breed, and 50% should be equally mixed. But because there are 100s of genes involved between the two original breeds, the probability is more like a gradient. So like you have a very small percentage that one of your chicks will be exactly like the original father breed... and a much higher chance that one of your chicks will be 50-50. The problem is that even if your chick is 50-50, it might take the wrong trait from the wrong parent. For instance, the father might have been selected for big breast meat size, while the mother might have been selected for great foraging skills. You could end up with a 50-50 bird that has the mother's breast meat size, and the father's foraging ability, so in essence, a very subpar bird. If you are serious about breeding and improving your stock, you are much better using a heritage breed, and then only allowing the birds to breed that display the quality you like. In my case, I want the biggest birds possible at 14 weeks of age, so I measure all my birds at 14 weeks of age, and the biggest ones become my breeding stock for the next year, and every year my breeding stock are heavier than the previous year. If you try to do that with Freedom Rangers, your results will be much more jerky and will take longer to even out.
Thanks for the dissertation but I think you're missing the point. Despite my punnet squares being laden with the filth of indifference, the yield I have gotten is acceptable, and not different from the originals.
We got 4 Mystic onyx in a batch of birds from Tractor Supply, they looked like fuzzy black ping pong balls as babies but they looked like something escaped from Shreaker Island after a few weeks, their feet had 6 toes each, black beak, comb, legs and skin, took forever to feather out. But once they did, they were beautiful, iridescent green and blue feathers and when we hatched some offspring, almost all of them turned out to be black silkies.
Question 🙋🏻♀️ We are not going to process all of our Rudd Rangers, so we can keep some to try and see if we’ll get fertilized eggs to try hatching. After they’re past the typical age for processing, do you keep the older Rudd Rangers on finisher feed or switch them to regular layer feed?
I'm feeding them layer feed. Doesnt seem to change much, their egg output is slightly less but I don't know if that is because they have less protein or because they are older.
If they are laying enough eggs to hatch, it's basically free chicks so I prefer to do them that way. Unfortunately they shut down egg laying completely this winter, so I might need to buy more hatchery chicks this spring. We'll see.
@@theotherjeremysfarm337 cut feed. Ration it and no more than 16% protein. Broilers get fat super quick. Not just muscle but straight up fat when they get to be this old they get obese easily. I saved back a couple cornish cross for hatching eggs and kept their protein low for the first few months but they got fat and quit laying before i could hatch any. Eventually had to cull 1 for leg issue, at about 6 months. One got pecked to death at 8 months by cannibalizing trash birds that i plan to cull, and the eldest that had laid a bunch of eggs starting at 18 weeks i had to kill her at a year old because she developed vent issues and started bleeding then started coughing blood and having heart failure. She had quit laying in November and Turns out they all had got fat which is why the young ones didn't lay and the older one stopped. They were joining my ducks for 18% duck feed which I did not think it would hurt them because they were 90% grown but i was wrong. Freedom rangers are a 7 way cross like cornish x made to grow just a little slower than the cornish so even though they are more hardy they probably can have the same issues. Heck I've had Australorp quit laying because i fattened them up on too much corn. After my issues with the Cornish I ordered some freedom rangers so I'll be doing the same thing you are. Ship date is in the morning so hopefully everything works out.
@@jeremybernal7721 good to know. I bought some big red broilers (to test) which is the successor to mcmurray hatchery's red ranger. The went to freezer camp and were absolute monsters and better tasting that store bought. This time around I'm going keep a few hens and a roo to breed so I don't have to keep purchasing chicks
@@jchaulinkkk I just put 12 eggs in the incubator for another batch of Freedom Rangers, got some Bielefelders on order for April. Will post what we get in a few weeks when they hatch.
@@jeremybernal7721 I put some eggs from the grocery store in my incubator while I'm waiting on eggs from my chicks and my current chicks are feathering up. So we'll see how that goes.. how big do the bielefeilders get?
This year I ordered a bunch of various chickens to make my own meat birds. I got several different heavy breeds, male and female, including dark Cornish, white rock, white giant, and Delaware, buckeye, and turken. Should be enough to play with and come up with some interesting and hopefully efficient meat chickens from all that… I don’t need super fast or super big, I just want nice plump birds that can range my property till it’s time for dinner, but aren’t stringy old hens…
Same here…tons of breeds to mix and make my own giant Frankenstein birds.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel, just use Red Rangers, and breed them, and only keep the chicks that grow fastest and physically look like Red Rangers. Or you can buy a few male Cornish Cross and use them only for reproduction with Red Ranger hens. To keep the Cornish Cross Roosters alive, keep then on a strict diet after the 3-4 week, they will grow slower and will not grow as large as they normally would, but you will have a rooster that you can use to reproduce with other heavy hens (such as Red Rangers). Don't use the Giants, they will grow very slow, that will slow down the growth rate of your birds.
I am currently working on two lines of chickens, the White Leghorns for egg production which I will keep pure and true, and Cornish Cross for meat production, the only drawback with the Cornish Cross is that the hens hardly lay any eggs, and it becomes a delicate balance between keeping them alive with a strict diet of feeding once a day, and getting them to lay eggs, so if you want eggs from them, you have to give them a bit more feed for the duration of the time you'll be collecting eggs, say a few weeks, then hold back on the feed again so they will not grow too fat and suffer health issues, another possible solution would be to cross the Cornish Cross rooster with Red Ranger hens, that way the growth rate of the Red Ranger will improve, and the hens produced will be better egg layers than the Cornish Cross hens. It is all a delicate balance of trading one thing for another.
@@Uptownfunkyouup843 Making an efficient meat bird which grows fast and is efficient converting feed to meat is not so much in what breeds you use and mix together, but instead it is all up to the individual bird itself, for example, say you have 10 hens and 10 roosters and you want to see which ones would make the best meat birds for future generations, what you could do is keep them all in individual cages with no other source of food than the one you provide them with, and measure the feed given each day to each bird, the same amount for all the roosters, and the same amount for all the hens, and after a few months, select only the birds which have put on the most weight, and which are the best egg layers, that way you will breed the most efficient birds that put on the most meat for the same amount of feed and also produces the most eggs for future breeding. I bet they will not come close to the feed to meat conversion efficiency of the Cornish Cross, but they will most likely will be better egg layers and will be more efficient in feed to meat conversion than any known heritage breeds.
great babies! i love your kindness towards your critters.
thank you... the info is very useful... greetings from Indonesia
More good content. You can tell that you enjoy what you do.
Thanks your video answers everything I wanted to know
The chicks are adorable
If you remember Punnett Squares from 7th grade biology, that explains what happens when you breed hybrid chickens. It is really just probability. if you hatch 100 eggs, 25% should favor the mother breed, 25% will favor the father breed, and 50% should be equally mixed. But because there are 100s of genes involved between the two original breeds, the probability is more like a gradient. So like you have a very small percentage that one of your chicks will be exactly like the original father breed... and a much higher chance that one of your chicks will be 50-50. The problem is that even if your chick is 50-50, it might take the wrong trait from the wrong parent. For instance, the father might have been selected for big breast meat size, while the mother might have been selected for great foraging skills. You could end up with a 50-50 bird that has the mother's breast meat size, and the father's foraging ability, so in essence, a very subpar bird. If you are serious about breeding and improving your stock, you are much better using a heritage breed, and then only allowing the birds to breed that display the quality you like. In my case, I want the biggest birds possible at 14 weeks of age, so I measure all my birds at 14 weeks of age, and the biggest ones become my breeding stock for the next year, and every year my breeding stock are heavier than the previous year. If you try to do that with Freedom Rangers, your results will be much more jerky and will take longer to even out.
Thanks for the dissertation but I think you're missing the point. Despite my punnet squares being laden with the filth of indifference, the yield I have gotten is acceptable, and not different from the originals.
We got 4 Mystic onyx in a batch of birds from Tractor Supply, they looked like fuzzy black ping pong balls as babies but they looked like something escaped from Shreaker Island after a few weeks, their feet had 6 toes each, black beak, comb, legs and skin, took forever to feather out. But once they did, they were beautiful, iridescent green and blue feathers and when we hatched some offspring, almost all of them turned out to be black silkies.
Question 🙋🏻♀️ We are not going to process all of our Rudd Rangers, so we can keep some to try and see if we’ll get fertilized eggs to try hatching. After they’re past the typical age for processing, do you keep the older Rudd Rangers on finisher feed or switch them to regular layer feed?
I'm feeding them layer feed. Doesnt seem to change much, their egg output is slightly less but I don't know if that is because they have less protein or because they are older.
Do you but your chicks from a hatchery or locally? Great channel. I just subscribed. Thanks. Kevin
If they are laying enough eggs to hatch, it's basically free chicks so I prefer to do them that way. Unfortunately they shut down egg laying completely this winter, so I might need to buy more hatchery chicks this spring. We'll see.
@@theotherjeremysfarm337 oK..sounds good keep up your great work...love your channel.
@@theotherjeremysfarm337 cut feed. Ration it and no more than 16% protein. Broilers get fat super quick. Not just muscle but straight up fat when they get to be this old they get obese easily.
I saved back a couple cornish cross for hatching eggs and kept their protein low for the first few months but they got fat and quit laying before i could hatch any. Eventually had to cull 1 for leg issue, at about 6 months. One got pecked to death at 8 months by cannibalizing trash birds that i plan to cull, and the eldest that had laid a bunch of eggs starting at 18 weeks i had to kill her at a year old because she developed vent issues and started bleeding then started coughing blood and having heart failure. She had quit laying in November and Turns out they all had got fat which is why the young ones didn't lay and the older one stopped. They were joining my ducks for 18% duck feed which I did not think it would hurt them because they were 90% grown but i was wrong. Freedom rangers are a 7 way cross like cornish x made to grow just a little slower than the cornish so even though they are more hardy they probably can have the same issues. Heck I've had Australorp quit laying because i fattened them up on too much corn.
After my issues with the Cornish I ordered some freedom rangers so I'll be doing the same thing you are. Ship date is in the morning so hopefully everything works out.
Any updates on the chicks? Are they as big as their parents were at that age?
Biggie is a lot bigger than his dad. The hens are smaller than their moms but they are still growing.
@@jeremybernal7721 good to know. I bought some big red broilers (to test) which is the successor to mcmurray hatchery's red ranger. The went to freezer camp and were absolute monsters and better tasting that store bought. This time around I'm going keep a few hens and a roo to breed so I don't have to keep purchasing chicks
@@jchaulinkkk I just put 12 eggs in the incubator for another batch of Freedom Rangers, got some Bielefelders on order for April. Will post what we get in a few weeks when they hatch.
@@jeremybernal7721 I put some eggs from the grocery store in my incubator while I'm waiting on eggs from my chicks and my current chicks are feathering up. So we'll see how that goes.. how big do the bielefeilders get?
@@jchaulinkkk Pretty big considering the photos I've seen.