lystn

After several years of raising Cornish Cross chickens as our meat birds, we decided it was time to compare them to another meat bird we'd been hearing a lot about: Red Rangers. So we did an experiment. I bet you're here because you want to know who won the mighty battle between Cornish Cross vs. Red Rangers at our farm. Well. About that... Note: this is simply one farmgirl's experience regarding two breeds of meat birds. Your experience may be different. If you'd like further thoughts on choosing a meat bird, check out my ebook Choosing the Best Meat Chicken for Your Homestead. (Don't want to read all the words? This blog post is also a podcast—just press the triangle play button on the little black bar at the top of this post!) Cornish Cross vs. Red Rangers: the actual purpose of our experiment The original purpose of our experiment was to see if the Red Rangers would: a) work decently as a meat bird, in which case we would... b) save a rooster and several hens to provide us with fertile eggs, which we would... c) incubate and hopefully hatch out more Red Rangers! It would be a closed system! We would no longer have to buy Cornish Cross chicks every year! Our plan could not fail! In my excitement, however, I failed to see something that seems rather obvious now: if it was such a perfect plan, why wasn't everyone doing it? Good question. Our dream to keep some Red Rangers, collect their eggs, incubate them, and hatch them out so we could have a closed system for meat birds quickly crashed and burned when someone hinted to us a wee bit into our experiment that Red Rangers don't "breed true". Meaning that even if a mommy and a daddy Red Ranger love each other very much, their babies aren't necessarily going to have the traits of Red Rangers that we would be looking for. Well, then. Must have missed that little nugget in my original research. Cornish Cross vs Red Rangers: the plan...and how it failed. Now knowing that the Reds didn't breed true, and being fully aware that the Reds grew slower than the Cornish Cross, our plan was to keep all the meat chickens for 9 weeks and butcher them all at the same time. We knew the Cornish would be on the larger end of things and the Reds would be a little smaller than they could have been, but we didn't want to set up another butcher day—we already had 3 big butcher events planned at our farm for the year!  By butchering both the Cornish and the Reds at 9 weeks, we knew we we'd be looking at something "a little" smaller with the Reds. Well. Over the weekend that our meat birds reached 8 weeks old, we had our first Cornish Cross die—as well as another Red Ranger (the 4th since we'd started the experiment). As is our usual practice when a chicken dies from an unknown cause, we decided to breast the chickens out for our dog. Below is the comparison of breast meat from two 8 week old birds - Red Ranger on the left, Cornish X on the right. I called my husband over and said "So, then. Butchering these Reds at 9 weeks is pretty pointless." He agreed. When Cornish Cross butcher day arrived, however, we did butcher the largest Red Ranger rooster. I wanted another comparison—this time a full bird. I mean, the chicken breast comparison a week earlier had to be a fluke, right? Well. Not a fluke. So, let's discuss how much these chickens eat while we punt through this experiment some more, yes? Cornish Cross vs. Red Rangers: how much do they eat? I raised our Cornish Cross and Red Rangers together so obviously they were all eating the same food at the same time. (They also shared their coop with 9 turkey friends!) We feed twice a day; once in the morning and once at night. Since our experiment wasn't intended to figure out who ate what food, I don't have an exact division of numbers. But I've got a pretty solid idea, and you can take my observations for what it's worth.