The 2015 Meat Birds - Two Weeks Old

A week following our last update finds our meat birds growing a little bit.  We put them on the scale and we'll show you the results in a minute, but first, I'll talk a little about the results from this past week.  We ordered these birds a month and a half later than we normally do with the thought process that it would be warmer and the birds would make more efficient use of their calorie intake in growing as opposed to staying warm.  Well...

Here's the part of the narrative where I tell you that chicken ranching is a lot harder than it looks.  I guess if it was easy, everyone would fill their garages with smelly birds and Tyson would go out of business.  The weather was supposed to cooperate, but it didn't.  Several days of near freezing temperatures and a strong north wind affected our birds, even though they were under heat lamps in the garage.  Despite our best efforts, we experienced the agony of defeat.

In last week's installment we had 111 birds.  Alas, we now have 103.  Eight birds succumbed to the cold weather.  When they get cold they bunch up in little piles under the heat lamp and the ones on the bottom are crushed.  I've composted those chicks in the garden and those 8 brave and noble birds will be feeding our garden soil instead of us.  Not a total loss, but there are cheaper ways of feeding your soil. On the bright side, if you are going to lose chicks, you want to lose them now - not after you have put a bunch of feed in them.

A casualty

I picked out our Cornish Cross and Red Ranger that we're monitoring and brought them to the scales for weigh-in.  They are bright and perky and appear to be very healthy.  You can see the wing feathers coming in and the tail feathers on the Cornish Cross.

Cornish Cross (left) and Red Ranger (right)

The Cornish Cross went on the scale first this week and weighed 6 ounces, up 2 ounces from last week.

Cornish Cross - 6 ounces

The Red Ranger stepped on the scale next and weighed 5 ounces, up 2 ounces from last week as well.

Red Ranger - 5 ounces

Here's a shot of the birds in one of our three brooders.  You can see the heat lamp is lowered to a good position and the birds in the center are scattered out - not piled on top of one another.  The birds on the right and top left are eating chick grower (feed).  The birds on the lower left are encircling the waterer and drinking to their heart's content.

In this photo below, if you look to the ground toward the 'brown' color, I don't need to tell you what that is.  Each and every day, we place new bedding on top of the existing 'stuff' and each and every day, they soil it very quickly.

Dirty Birds

I want to try to get these out quickly. but a glance at the 10 day weather forecast is a mess next week, with highs in the early week in the upper 70's followed by high percentage rain chances for 3 days and lows around 34 degrees on Thursday.  We'll see how it goes, perhaps next week at this time, I'll have them out on pasture, but it's not looking good.