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Old 07-10-2012, 5:36 PM
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toyotaguy toyotaguy is offline
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Default Raising Chickens for Meat

Chicken watch 2013 Begins on page 6, post #206



2012
I've noticed a lot of interest in the last few months about growing your own food in gardens and as livestock, so I thought some of you might like to watch the progress of our meat birds.

We currently have 5 Cornish Cross that we will be slaughtering within a week or two, which are the industry standard for meat birds in the US, they grow extremely fast and get very large( they make up 95%+ of the commercial meat chicken flock). Because of these characteristics and the way they are bread they have inherent problems, they usually will not live past 3-4 months of age and often will not make it that long, they grow too quickly for their internal organs. Not problems for the commercial grower.

That being said they are still a great choice for meat birds, however in this thread I will show you our experience using heritage breed roosters for meat over the coming weeks. We have decided to try heritage breeds because they can naturally reproduce, they are very good scavengers, they have no problem living many years if you don't get around to slaughtering them on time. Heritage breeds do take longer to get to slaughter weight and will not get as large as Cornish Cross, but supposedly have better flavor. We want to eventually breed our own meat birds.

I have grown up raising chickens for eggs and sometimes meat, in recent years we have decided we want to know exactly where all our meat comes from. So we are not new to chickens but we are new to raising heritage breeds for meat.

We ordered 25 roosters or various breeds from Murry McMurry Hatchery http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html, they arrived at the post office on Monday July 9th at about 8:30 am. All chicks arrived alive and in great health, all were very lively and had lots of energy and where eager to eat and drink water immediately. The hatchery even threw in 2 extra meat birds and a "rare exotic chick" for free. So total of 28 birds, probably will keep the top hat chick that they threw in for free, so 27 meat birds.

All chicks are roosters, roosters typically grow faster than hens and will be slaughtering weight before they start crowing and fighting. And roosters are dramatically cheaper than hens.

We chose the following breeds based on much research, all of these breeds were popular choices for meat birds before the introduction of the Cornish Cross.
We have as follows:

5 Silver Gray Dorking
6 White Rock
6 White Wyandotte
5 Delaware
5 Dark Cornish

Feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to help you, I am no expert but I have been around chickens my whole life.
Picture Taken 7/10/12 Chicks are 4 days old


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Last edited by toyotaguy; 04-13-2013 at 5:46 PM..
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