Red Ranger foraging prowess
Last year, we
were overall quite pleased with our Red Ranger broilers, but I
wished their fat was more yellow than white. Did the fault lie in the
breed (which forages a lot more than a
Cornish Cross, but a lot less than a "normal" chicken) or in the time
of year? To answer that question, we started our chicks a month earlier
in 2016 so they'd bulk up while the grass was still green and bugs were
still copious.
This week, we harvested
half of our current flock. Unfortunately, the fat is still white,
pointing to breed as the culprit.
Despite the lower
quality fat, I still think Red Rangers are a good compromise for the
average homesteader. They're relatively efficient converters of feed to
meat, don't die like Cornish Cross, and do produce succulent meat that
doesn't require special cooking techniques like heirloom breeds do.
All of that said, in the
interest of cutting back our workload so I don't stress myself out
again next summer, Mark and I decided to outsource our broiler
production to the same folks who provide our pastured lamb each year.
So...back to Cornish Cross we go!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I too had red rangers this year. They got good and large 6+ lb at 14 weeks. They all had LOTS of yellow fat.
I seem to remember that someone said red rangers are hybrid birds and as such it depends a lot on the genetics of the parents and there is a lot of veritability in the different hatcheries