2026 Meat Birds - Week Six

Wednesday weigh-in for the meat birds is already upon us.  It is the once a week time we check in to see how they are growing.  Let's talk about feed.  We do have the birds out on fresh grass that we move them to each and every day, but we also feed them.  We are now feeding them an 18% Protein Chick Grower.  

There are several methods of feeding.  Some people keep feed available to them always from 7 AM to 7 PM.  In doing this, many experience problems as the birds will grow faster than their skeletal system, and this causes crippling because the legs simply can't handle the weight.  I feed them three times a day between the hours of 7 am to 7 pm.

Last week a neighbor down the road stopped in the driveway and threw me three 60 lb sacks of milled rice for free!  He has a cousin that works at one of the rice mills in Crowley.  Periodically they have what they call "sweepings" that they bag up and give away.  My neighbor, God bless him, shared with us some of his windfall and blessed us with some free rice. To me, it looks good enough to eat, but we'll run it through our chickens.

I mixed the milled rice half and half with the Chick Starter and it'll help 'stretch' the feed and save a little on our overhead cost of feed.  I'm sure the protein percentage is lower than the chick starter, so it's a dangerous experiment.  Maybe it will slow down their growth and weight gain?  I've been mixing it in the feed for a week now.  We'll see...

Let's check out the weight of an average bird sitting out there in the chicken tractor.  I picked one up, a hen this time.  I can tell it's gained weight since last week, but how much?  To find out, I put the six week old chicken up on our kitchen scale:

And here we are.  At the end of week six, the bird weighs 5 lbs 2 oz. or 82 ounces.  Last Wednesday the average bird weighed 4 pounds and 3 ounces (or 67 ounces).  That's a weight gain week over week of 15 ounces - almost a pound.

Last year at the end of week 6, the birds weighed 5 lbs 4 ounces.  So we are off by a nominal 2 ounces.  This is the first time this year we've fallen a little below the weight of the previous year.  It could be the rice, but we're still not far off from where we should be at this time.

Summary:

At the end of week one:         8 ounces

At the end of week two:       20 ounces

At the end of week three:     33 ounces

At the end of week four:       49 ounces

At the end of week five:        67 ounces

At the end of week six:          82 ounces

As we near the home stretch of a goal of an eight pound bird at the end of 8 weeks, we are within striking distance.  Tune in next Wednesday to see how things progress.