With the beautiful sunny weather and the sun going down at a later hour, life on the farm gets busier for us! Between keeping the grass and weeds cut, the garden planted and tended to, summer home schooling and teaching horse lessons…we are Raising Chickens!
Being aware of how commercial chickens are raised in our country, we are always pretty picky with what we buy. Watch Food Inc. and you will know what we mean! It’s good to buy organic, free-range chicken…but It can also be EXPENSIVE! We will often times purchase the whole chicken (to cut the cost) and then cut it up ourselves or just cook it whole in the crock pot. I am always amazed at how small the chicken is at 4-5 lbs and $4.00+/lb.! Thus…the motivation to raise our own meat chickens!
A few years ago, we raised 20+ Cornish X birds. The gratifying feeling that we had home-grown chicken in our freezer was great! They were also 7-8lb. birds and lasted us almost a year! So we bit the bullet and purchased 30 Cornish X chicks in April. We built a separate “hen house” for them with their own free-range area and began the journey.
Starting out in brooders with a heated area (because it was cold back then!), the chicks grew out of their fuzzies and into their feathers pretty quickly. We lost 3 chicks, a 10% loss, which isn’t bad. The kids had fun feeding and caring for them! In 10 weeks time, these chicks grew into nice big, meat birds. The Cornish X birds are bred for this. It doesn’t seem quite right that they can grow so fast and eat so much feed! At least we have a say in what they eat, how they live and give them a good growing environment. Unlike, being raised in large chicken houses where they are pumped with antibiotics and don’t even see the sun….sad.
Now, last time, we put all of our adult meat birds into dog crates and took them to the “chicken pluckers” to get processed. This was pretty slick. We dropped them off, they did all of the dirty work and we picked up nicely packaged whole chickens already frozen in freezer bags. This year, we decided that we need to know how to butcher a chicken…
Well, that story is best kept for our next post… he,he
Below are some photos of the 1st part of our meat chicken journey >>
Stay Tuned!
From Our Family To Yours,
Kevin and Amy Jo
