2021 Meat Birds - Week Seven

Thursday afternoon and it is time to weigh the meat birds.  It has been a rough week for them, I think.  It has been on the colder side and I think, despite the heat lamps, they've burned a lot of calories staying warm versus directing that energy to growth.  We'll see what the weight shows at the end of the post.

As you'll notice in the photo below, we've started the chicken tractor on its journey back south.  Once it gets past the live oak, we'll turn it due east.  Next Saturday, it will be right where we need it to be for butchering.  Nine more days to go!  One other thing to notice, the 5 gallon buckets are filled with rain water that we catch off of the roof in catchment barrels.  The bucket stacked atop the orange one gravity feeds into the bell waterer in the tractor.  Some days those chickens will drink 15 gallons of water.  It is amazing, really.

Today, we thought we'd do something a little different.  Normally, we just pick up the first bird we can grab.  Today, I thought I'd pick the first rooster and the first hen to get a wider representative sample of weights, as we know roosters grow bigger, faster.  You can tell it is a rooster because of the bigger comb on top of his head and the wattle beneath his neck.  Here is the rooster:

Up on top of the scale, and he weighs...  4 pounds 15 ounces.

And here is the hen.  You can see a much less pronounced comb and wattle.

And she weighs... 4 pounds 14 ounces.  Surprisingly, they are approximately the same weight!

Sadly, though, they are the exact same weight as last week!  No weight gain.  How can that be?  I have a couple of theories.  One is the item I mentioned in the first paragraph.  In the cold weather, their calories were expended keeping warm versus growing.  However, I think the bigger issue is that I'm noticing once I went back to the chicken tractor and surveyed the flock, while most look about the same, there is not exact uniformity in size.  Naturally, the more aggressive, dominant, bigger birds were the ones in past weeks that would come closer to me (as they expected food) and those were the ones I selected for weighing.  When I wanted to purposefully pick out a hen and a rooster, I picked a more representative sample.  We are shooting for a 6 pound bird in 9 days, and I still think we'll get there.

Last week the bird weighed 4 pounds 15 ounces and this week they weighed roughly the same.  Here are the weights at this stage in prior years:

*Week 7 2021: 4 pounds 5 ounces

*Week 7 2019:  5 pounds 9 ounces

*Week 7 2018: 5 pounds 15 ounces

*Week 7 2017:  4 pounds 1 ounce 

*Week 7 2016:  5 pounds 14 ounces 

*Week 7 2015:  3 pounds 9 ounces

Next Thursday is the final weigh in.  We'll see you as we document their final weigh day.