So, I just realized today that I have been grossly negligent in telling everyone about the experiment we are doing around here this summer! After purchasing some pasture-raised chickens from a precious local homeschooling family recently, we decided we would like to try our hand at raising some of our own birds for meat. The meat we bought was just so much better than what we were used to from the grocery store!
Up until this point, we have eaten a few of our birds, but those were all mean roosters (which taste great as rooster & dumplins) that needed to go one way or another. While I do feel like we gained some great experience from the processing thus far, it is a far cry from raising a whole flock for the sole purpose of chicken dinner.
So, with some apprehension, I went online and ordered 25 Cornish Cross Chickens from Ideal Poultry to be shipped the following week. We actually received 28 birds total, including 2 extra “rare breed” chickens who are very interesting to watch, in that they show us the size that a “normal” chicken would be at this age compared to the enormous broiler birds!
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| Baby Broiler Chicks July 17, 2013
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They spent their first few days in the big plastic bin that I usually use for brooding, but within the week they had outgrown that, and I moved them into the largest baby pool I could find, with a hefty layer of pine shavings, and some chicken wire over the top to keep them from escaping.
Because they were to be pastured birds, I gave them big handfuls of grass, clover, and weeds daily, which they loved. I also offered vegetable scraps, which they were terrified of! You win some, you lose some!
At about 2 1/2 weeks old, they were getting very big, so we went ahead and moved them into the mobile chicken coop so that they could be on pasture.
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| Remember this? |
So, now they are living quite happily in the pasture near my garden and we can practically sit and watch them grow. They are going through at least a 50 lb. bag of feed per week, in addition to the fresh grass and bugs that we move them onto.
They drink from a “chicken nipple” waterer that I constructed from a 5 gallon bucket. It was about a 5 minute job, and so far has performed better than any water apparatus that we have had so far.
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| Teenage Broiler Chicks August 20, 2013 |
The broiler birds will be ready for “harvest” in 2 to 4 more weeks. I plan to buy a gently used drill-type chicken plucker from a friend, unless she gets tired of waiting on me to make it out her way, and sell it to someone else. After that, we’ll have a big, exhausting day of processing, but it will result in weeks of healthy, nutritious, inexpensive meals for our family, so hopefully that will make it all worthwhile. I’ll to keep you posted!
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I am not tired of waiting on you! I completely forgot about it to be honest. : ) I also keep forgetting to make a fishing date!
I was really looking forward to hearing more about your experience with the Broilers. I wanted to see pictures of them when they got to harvest weight and hear about processing and taste. My hubby is going to venture down this road and we are looking for all the info we can get.
Thanks for your input! I have a post on chicken processing here: https://greeneggsandgoats.com/2013/09/chicken-processing.html and one on making chicken foot broth here: https://greeneggsandgoats.com/2013/09/chicken-foot-broth.html I would love to answer any specific questions you have here or in a question and answer post I am planning! 🙂