If you’re looking to start raising chickens, you’ll want to know what breeds are best for meat and eggs.
Here are some of the best chicken breeds for meat and eggs.
- Rhode Island Red
The Rhode Island Red makes an excellent laying hen that produces large brown eggs. Rhode Island Reds lay about 250 dark brown eggs per year, and they’re a medium-sized fowl that weighs in at six pounds or more. Their brown eggshells make them easy to spot on nest boxes or nest boxes with light colored wood interiors.
- Leghorn (Light)
The Leghorn is one of the most popular breeds for egg production because of its ability to produce very large white eggs (300 per year). Leghorns are also good for meat because they grow quickly and have very little fat marbling in their flesh. The Light variety has a yellowish tinge to its feathers rather than black, which makes it easier to spot among other fowl in the flock.
Best Chicken Breeds For Meat And Eggs
The Dark variety is similar in appearance to the Light variety except for its grayish-brown plumage instead of yellow-brown feathers. Both varieties are good producers of
The best chicken breeds for meat and eggs have different characteristics that make them suitable for different purposes. Some of the best meat breeds are dual purpose, good both as egg layers and meat producers. But there are many others that are good only for laying or only for meat production.
Meat Breeds
The most popular meat breeds include:
Leghorn – This breed is known for its high egg production and fast growth rate. It is not suitable as a backyard breed because it requires large quantities of feed to reach market weight quickly. However, it can be raised in commercial operations where the cost of feed is lower.
Cornish Cross – This breed has been developed over the last 30 years by crossing different breeds with Cornish Game Bantam to create a high-yielding bird that grows very fast. The result is a bird that can reach up to 6 pounds in just six weeks! The Cornish Crosses produce lots of white meat but they don’t grow large enough to be considered a commercial chicken breed because they don’t reach much more than 4 pounds before slaughtering age at around 7 weeks old.
The most popular breeds of chickens for meat, eggs, and show are listed below.
Best Meat Chickens:
Cornish Cross (also called Cornish)
Sumatra
New Hampshire Red (aka New Hampshire)
White Leghorn
Plymouth Rock
Jersey Giant
If you want to raise chickens, there are plenty of breeds to choose from. You can get a bantam or a large fowl and they’ll all produce eggs and meat, but some breeds are better suited for growing bigger birds than others.
Here are some of our favorite chicken breeds for meat production:
Cornish Cross: These chickens are bred specifically for meat production, so they grow very fast. They’re also very efficient at converting feed into weight gain — which means less feed costs per pound of chicken meat produced. The downside is that these birds have very little breast meat — about 25 percent of their body weight is edible meat. They are also prone to leg problems if not raised properly.
Jersey Giant: The Jersey Giant is a dual-purpose breed known for its size and egg production as well as its carcass yield. This bird is good for those who want an efficient layer that produces large eggs and has the ability to grow quickly on low-cost grain diets.
Rhode Island Red: This is another dual-purpose breed known for its hardiness and great egg production capabilities (which makes them popular with backyard farmers). They’re also great at converting feed into muscle mass — which means they will produce more
The chicken is a domesticated fowl descended from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. It is one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, with a population of more than 24 billion in 2003. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food, consuming both their meat and their eggs.
The modern chicken is descended from Red Junglefowl hybrids along with the grey junglefowl first raised thousands of years ago in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. In the United States, chickens are also occasionally raised for cockfighting, and not just for food.
Chickens are omnivores. In the wild, they often scratch at the soil to search for seeds and insects. Laying hens’ natural diet includes seeds and plants; however, when fed a commercial diet, this can be supplemented with grain that has been ground into “chicken feed” which may contain vitamins, minerals and antibiotics. Commercial poultry feeds usually include compounds such as lysine or methionine to promote more efficient conversion of food into meat by upping amino acid availability and protein levels in their bodies as well as various nutrients including calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate (both as part of calcium carbonate), choline chloride (