Looking to raise chickens that lay eggs and are also great meat birds? We often get asked, what is the best breed of chicken for dual purpose - meat and egg laying.
Why we believe Sussex are the best dual purpose breed of chicken
In our opinion, Sussex Chickens are the best dual purpose heritage breed as they produce a high quality, good tasting meat and their egg laying production is impressive. We’ve kept and bred these hybrid chickens for more than 25 years and find that their overall size, flesh colour and meat flavour are fantastic.
Cockerels can reach a dressed weight of over 4kg if grown out to around 9-10 months of age. This compounded with the hens laying around 200-250 eggs a year, makes them a very useful dual purpose purebred breed.
Cross-breeding experimentation
This breeding season (2022) we’re running an experiment to see if we can create our own dual purpose chicken breed by cross breeding types of chickens known for quality meat and eggs. Crossbred chickens often grow faster than a purebred chicken which is a favourable quality for a dual purpose chicken.
Specifically Indian Game birds are well known for their high quality thick breast meat. We’re interested to see if by crossing them with a Sussex we can improve that meat flavour even further and also reach that desired large Sussex size even quicker with a more meaty bird, particularly in the breast. Another cross we’re experimenting with is Leghorns and Indian Game. Leghorns are among the most prolific egg laying chickens. They also have a particularly long body and tall frame which we expect will create a fantastic broiler chicken when crossed with the more compact thicker Indian Game.
Other dual purpose poultry breeds
When it comes to other dual purpose poultry, you can’t go past Muscovy and Pekin Ducks. Pekin ducks are famous for their delicious, fatty meat but it’s little known that they’re also a great egg laying breed. They produce over 200 large eggs a year that are fantastic used in cooking. When it comes to Muscovys, while they lay about half the amount of eggs as a Pekin, and don’t have as much fat on them, their meat makes up for it with an incredible flavour! They’re also one of the best brooder duck breeds and are very friendly birds and fantastic mothers.
