2026 Meat Birds - Week Four

We're halfway there.  Cornish Cross Chickens take 8 weeks to mature for slaughter.  They go from being a chick weighing an ounce or so to a full grown behemoth weighing 8 pounds - all in 56 days.  I feed them three times a day, putting 18% protein chick grower in the two gutters you see below.  At night, I take the feed away and leave them only water and the occasional bug that flies in attracted by the heat lamp.  We still push them to fresh grass everyday.  By the time we move them the next morning, they've completed clipped the grass down to the dirt.

This evening I walked out to the chicken tractor as is our custom on weigh-in Wednesday, and picked out an average sized bird out of the 50 in there.  I took him to the garage.  He was heavy and hot to the touch.  

Let's put him up on the scale to see if they are putting on weight.  So far, week by week, here are the weights we observed:

At the end of week one:        8 ounces

At the end of week two:        20 ounces

At the end of week three:       33 ounces

And at the end of week 4:    49 ounces    (3 lbs. 1 oz.)

Last year at the end of the fourth week, they weighed 44 ounces, so we are a full 5 ounces ahead.

In four weeks we'll be butchering to put up our chicken in the freezer for a year's supply.  Hopefully, we'll get them there.  Today a neighbor told me that this week a mink wiped out his neighbor's entire flock of laying hens except for one.  I have the chicken tractor lined with chicken wire, but mink are cunning and vicious.  We learned about mink the hard way with our laying hens, you might remember.  I think I'll walk out and go check on our meat birds right now.