2016 Meat Birds at Nine Weeks Old

Last Saturday we butchered all of our Cornish Cross Meat Birds that met our butchering goal of 6 pounds since a 6 pound birds yields a 4 1/2 pound carcass. Out of 26 Cornish Cross meat birds, 13 of them met those standards.  We butchered them and they now reside in our deep freeze.  I figure that we'll probably butcher the remainder of the Cornish Cross birds this Saturday and that will leave just the Red Rangers to grow for another 4 weeks.

With 13 less mouths to feed in the chicken tractor, I was thinking that the birds would have more space around the feed trough and thus less competition for feed and they should grow faster.  Let's see how that theory played out.  Since the Cornish-X bird we were tracking with the zip tie around his leg was butchered, I just grabbed an average sized bird out of the 13 left.

One of the remaining 13 Cornish Cross birds being weighed

Whoa!  How about that!  He weighs 6 1/2 pounds.  Yes, he's ready to go on Saturday.

6 1/2 pounds

The Red Ranger still has his zip tie on so I brought him into the garage for weighing.

Red Ranger sitting on the scale

Now this is mighty strange.  This week the Red Ranger weighs exactly 2 pounds 15 ounces.

2 pounds 15 ounces

That is not good at all.  He weighed 2 pounds 15 ounces last week!  What's going on here?  My theory tested out for the Cornish Cross birds, but not the Red Rangers. To be honest, I don't know what happened there.  

As the table above shows, the Cornish X bird grew about a pound from last week and weighs a pound and a quarter more than at the same time last year.  The Red Ranger (disappointingly) weighs exactly the same as last week, but is still 10 ounces heavier than at the same time last year.  Hopefully, he'll resume a nice weight gain again. 

We'll butcher all of the remaining Cornish Cross birds this Saturday and then that will leave just the roughly 25 Red Rangers in the Chicken Tractor to grow for another (maybe) four more weeks before butchering.