The 2015 Meat Birds - Six Weeks Old

Today's the day for the weekly weigh-in to see how the birds are growing.  We keep food before them for most of the day.  I feed them at about 6 am every morning and Tricia feeds them around noon and when I get in in the evening, I feed them around 6 pm.  They eat a lot of food.  That means they poop a lot.  Each afternoon, I push the chicken tractor to fresh grass, because over the course of a day, they completely soil the area.  They also drink a lot of water.  I work hard to keep the bell waterer reservoir full of fresh water.

I walked out to their chicken tractor with a 5 gallon bucket, lifted the lid to the tractor and reached in and pulled out an average sized Cornish Cross and an average sized Red Ranger.  A few weeks ago I had marked the ones we were weighing with paint on their heads to ensure we were weighing the same ones. Well, the water-based paint wore off.  From here on out I'm just grabbing an average sized bird from each breed to weigh.  First up, the Red Ranger.

Red Ranger

The Red Ranger stood very still on the scale.  This bird weighed 1 pound 5 ounces and that is a gain of only 3 ounces from last week.  That's not good news.  I would have liked to have seen more growth this week.

Red Ranger 1 pound 5 ounces

Now for the Cornish Cross.  I put her up on the scale that I've protected with a sales circular and waited until the bird was perfectly still so that I could get a good reading.  Sometimes the birds are so jumpy, the needle moves, making a good reading next to impossible to get.

Cornish Cross

Today the Cornish Cross weighs 2 pounds 9 ounces.  That is a gain of 5 ounces from last week. Again, not where we'd like to be at this point.

Cornish Cross 2 pounds 9 ounces

One thing to keep in mind.  We are going to raise them until they weigh 6 pounds as that yields about a 4 and a half pound dressed carcass.  If that takes 10 weeks, so be it.  One thing I noticed from comparing this week's bird to last week's is that the Cornish Cross this week I selected for weighing is a female and last week's is a male. I'll select males from here on out for the sake of comparison since males are almost always larger than the females.

Next week will be week 7 and we'll continue to track their progress.