Why is the Cornish-X practically the only broiler on the market today?
What happened to the broiler — the chicken that everyone thought that they knew?
Before the term “broiler” they were frying chickens — sometimes simply “fryers.” Earlier in the last century, they were broken into a number of categories, including “spring chickens,” or “fryers,” and a smaller bird at harvest, termed a “squab fryer.” All had lighter harvest weights than now, although interest may be returning in the smaller bird as more restaurants offer milk-fed “baby chicken” as birds marketed to be a single serving.
There is certainly nothing new about feeding milk and skims to chickens. Most often they were the young Leghorn males that were hatched along with their sisters but were meant to go into laying flocks later in the year. They weren’t the monster size of today’s meat birds, but they were a valuable secondary product of the laying flock. They were indeed heritage-breed birds, and they looked, cooked and tasted just like chicken is supposed to. There were table fowl of many different harvest weights produced and sold in that era, including the even-then-pricey Cornish game hen.
There is a most exacting USDA definition for the term “broiler”: “a broiler or fryer is a young chicken (usually 9-12 weeks of age) of either sex, with tender meat, pliable, smooth-textured skin, and flexible breastbone cartilage.” There are no requirements as to breed or feather color, and harvest weight will be set naturally by respecting the normal growth curve of the chicken.
For many years, a frying chicken had a harvest or dressed weight of 2.5 to 3 pounds. One or two such birds were generally enough to be the entrée at one meal and to provide the basis, in the form of trim and leftovers, to create two more meals in the form of soups, sandwiches or a chicken-based salad. That potential to be the base for three different meals is still valid in the marketing process for a broiler.
By the turn of the current century, however, harvest weights had grown to 4 to 4.5 pounds and poultry was being sold more and more in bits and pieces and ready-to-eat forms. Recipes were no longer being written starting with the words, “begin with a whole roasted chicken from the market …”
Most consumers today lack the skill or desire to process whole, fresh chickens in the family kitchen. Harvest weights continue to grow nearly as fast as the nontraditional ways of utilizing that growing mass of meat. The bird, now generally known as the Cornish-X broiler, was being bred and developed to generate a cheap source of protein, produced best and in greatest volume from the factory-farm sector. The industrious little red hen had become a ball-shaped blob of muscle and white feathers that did little more than splay about in the floor litter.
Harvest weights have grown to as heavy as five pounds (certainly not frying size), with an emphasis on the three money cuts: the leg, the thigh and the breast. This way of thinking about the broiler arose from the TV dinners of the 1950s and evolved into the strips, nuggets and popcorn-sized bits of chicken sold today.
Recently, however, new challenges have arisen to these primary cuts of the chicken carcass and are weighing heavily on the future of the Cornish-X broiler. First has been the emergence of what was once thought to be one of the least valuable parts of the chicken carcass. Who could have imagined how valuable the two small appendages of what is essentially a flightless bird would become? Chicken wings have grown so much in demand that a faux, boneless wing is now being reformed from what was once the most valued segment of the carcass — the breast.
And then there is the chicken sandwich — the fried chicken sandwich, to be exact. Crowding the hamburger from its long-time seat of power on the fast-food bun, chicken meat (and how to make it fit that bun) is ruffling a lot of feathers. The fast-food trade has long relied upon a three- to four-ounce portion of protein to fit on all those cheap and easy-to-make little round buns. Into a world of ground meat patties and portions of restructured protein — from little more than meat saw dust — comes a protein product that requires that most expensive form of processing: actual butchering.
Sliced into segments to fit the bun, a most un-bun-shaped chicken breast requires careful slicing, slows the packing line and requires rethinking — all the way from the breeding pen to the delivery truck. Some very serious questioning of the Cornish-X broiler in its current form is underway.
What is a producer with, or considering, a farm-to-fork, pasture-ranged broiler venture to make of all of this? Many states have adopted a law that limits a farmer to the rearing of no more than 1,000 birds a year for direct marketing from the farmyard. This is not a huge venture — certainly not by industry standards — and for many consumers, such birds are largely a feel-good purchase. For the producer, it must be cost effective if it is to be more than just one more short-lived food fad.
One hundred broilers packed too tightly into a chicken tractor fare no better than the birds crowded into a broiler plant. And the current bird of choice in pastured production has been long used as the classic example of Frankenfood. It lacks the type of frame and constitution needed by a bird to succeed on range — to be considered sustainable there.
The Cornish-X bird is derived from no simple crossbreeding measures — a fact to which anyone who has tried to replicate them in a farmyard setting can attest. They are far from the avian equivalent of the black baldie — the Hereford crossed with an Angus feeder calf — even though the final mating that produces them is truly a terminal cross.
Initially, the producers of the Cornish-X drew upon two pure breeds of chicken: the Cornish large fowl and the White Plymouth Rock. In the first half of the last century, the Plymouth Rocks were the backbone of the broiler trade — the Barred variety in particular. The Cornish breed added frame and the carriage needed for a bird with larger primal cuts.
The Cornish-X was developed by a period of extensive, often quite-close linebreeding to create numerous breeding lines with the various traits to draw upon in creating these birds. The birds available to us smaller producers are often generations behind in breeding compared to the commercially used strains.
Some years ago, at a Small Farm Today conference, I was on a panel on range broiler production and was seated between a couple of university researchers. I gave the Cornish-X its props — it was, and still, is fairly expensive to acquire (although prices on all chick stock have gone up in recent years), but it has the yellow skin and shanks preferred by U.S. consumers. I didn’t then, and won’t now, praise how big they are and how little time it takes them to do this.
At that time, I had been doing some research of my own with a small sustainability grant from the Missouri Department of Agriculture. I had chick groups of ten birds each of several different pure breeds, as well as a set of Cornish-X chicks. As expected, the Cornish-X chicks were the first to reach harvest weight — but all 10 did not cross the finish line. Two were lost along the way due to leg and soundness issues. The other groups had 100 percent survival in the same type of housing, grown at the same season of the year, and fed the same ration.
Days on feed and time of a venture on the farm does matter, as range production is very much a seasonal pursuit. Still, the acquisition and feed costs — including that of the birds that are lost — have to be factored against those that do survive.
In my opinion, the only thing Cornish-X birds have to teach us is how to write checks and bury dead chickens.
Kelly Klober farms in Missouri and is the author of the books Dirt Hog, Talking Chicken and Beyond the Chicken.
