2019 Meat Birds - 3 Weeks Old

Thursday night is weigh-in night for the birds.  These guys are really growing and have filled the brooder.  Since we checked in last Thursday night, we lost one bird.  It was a runt.  I'm not exactly sure what happened.  Perhaps it got squashed by some of the other larger birds.  This week we added a third feeding trough and put a second larger waterer in place of one of the smaller ones.

I had plans to move them out to pasture in the chicken tractor one afternoon after work this week, but things came up that prevented that from happening.  My goal is to get this done tomorrow.  They need some room to grow.  It is getting mighty cramped in the brooder.

Meat birds are unlike laying hens.  Laying hens run around all over their 3 acre pasture.  I don't think these guys could run 3 feet.  They eat, they sleep, they sit, and they poop.

As I like to do, I put a sheet of paper on top of the kitchen scale for the sake of cleanliness.  You can see this bird's crop is full of food.  You can also see that his feet are huge.

I made sure the bird stopped moving so that I could get a real good reading on the scale.  Here we go.  Let's see how we compare to last week and previous periods...

This week - Week 3 - the Cornish Cross weighed 1 pound 10 ounces.
Last week the bird weighed 16 ounces, giving him a weight gain of 10 ounces.
In week 3 of 2018, the bird weighed in at 1 pound 10 ounces.
In week 3 of 2017, they weighed 1 pound 9 ounces.
In week 3 of 2016, they weighed 1 pound 15 ounces.

This is some good data, showing us that we are right where we need to be at this point.  Next week if I can remember, I'll pick out 3 birds and get an average of the 3 to determine if there is an appreciable difference in weight among the birds.  Males are typically larger than the females.