2024 Meat Birds - 4 Weeks Old

What's changed in the last week since the last weigh in?  Well, for one thing, their feed trough.  I moved out the small feeders because they kept getting their heads stuck in it.  They're growing.  I replaced the little chick feeders with what we always use - a 10 foot PVC gutter.  It works perfectly.  Now all the chicks can gather around and eat to their hearts' content.  

We still have them on 18% (unmedicated) chick grower.  We keep feed in front of them all day long.  At night, I pull the feed away from them.  In the morning, they're presented with breakfast and kept with food in the gutter all day.  I can tell they are growing and still, no deaths.  0% mortality rate.  Let's see if we can keep that up.

I still feed them bugs at night, but we've had a string of cool nights and that's kept the nightly bug population down.  Although tonight, it's warmed up and so far they've eaten 60 fat beetles.  On my last beetle feeding trip to the chicken tractor, I grabbed an average looking bird and brought him back to the scale in the garage.  He plopped right down.

Surprisingly, the bird is calm and only made some slight noise when I picked him up.

I made sure to zero out the scale before we began.  Here's where ol' boy measures up on the scale for the week 4 weigh in.

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces
• Week 4, they weighed 44 ounces

That's a weight gain of 15 ounces over last week.  As I look at prior years' figures, we are still right where we need to be as far as growth is concerned.  We'll check in next week to see how they continue to progress.  Remember, our goal is a 6 pound bird at eight weeks.  We're still within range of hitting that target.