2024 Meat Birds - 7 Weeks Old

This week was an eventful week for the Cornish Cross birds.  A bad storm was coming through, promising hail and high winds.  After the weather scare when the birds were very young when we tried to hold the chicken tractor down in 80 mph winds, we had different plans this time.  We were getting weather reports of 75 mph winds an hour away from us.  I staked down the chicken tractor, but then had an epiphany.

The birds are older now and not as susceptible toy hypothermia.  I decided to remove the tarp from the top of the tractor.  This takes the wind resistance away and allows the wind (and rain) to blow right through.  Yes, the birds would get wet, but we could get the tarp back on as soon as the weather settled down, turn on the heat lamps, and all would be good.  Good, that is, unless we got hail that could kill the birds.  I made up my mind that we would butcher any birds that got killed by the weather.

Well, no hail killed any birds.  The strong winds blew and we got almost 2 inches of rain, but the birds made it.  All of them.  We turned the heat lamps on and the shaking birds quickly recovered.  What a blessing!  Well, today is weigh day.  I grabbed an average rooster and marched him in to the kitchen scale I have set up on a table in the garage.

He's a nice looking bird, I think.  He feels solid as I held him.  Let's see what the scale says.

At week 7 we are at 6 pounds and 2 ounces.  Remember a 6 pound bird yields a 4 pound carcass and that is what we are shooting for.  We've hit that for the average bird and still have a few days to go (and grow)!

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
• Week 5, they weighed 64 ounces
• Week 6, they weighed 84 ounces
• Week 7, they weighed 98 ounces

That's a weight gain of 14 ounces or just shy of a pound over the last week.  As discussed above, we've hit our goal.  I've compared to prior years and this one is right in line with where he needs to be.  Weather permitting, we've tentatively scheduled the butcher date to be this Saturday morning.  So far, we haven't lost a single bird.  Let's see if we can get all 32 birds to cross the finish line on Saturday.  Stay posted.  We'll keep you abreast (pardon the pun) of the poultry butchering extravaganza.

2024 Meat Birds - 6 Weeks Old

This morning my wife and I were reading in the book of Job.  You know the story well.  Job had many calamities befall him.  All on one day.  When he thought it couldn't get any worse after loosing his oxen and donkeys and sheep and servants, another servant came running up and told him that his sons and daughters were having a feast and the eldest son's home.  All of a sudden strong winds came forth and blew the house down on top of them, killing all of Job's children.

What did Job do?  He mourned.  Like anyone would do.  Then he said, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, Blessed be the Name of the Lord."  In all this Job didn't sin.  In fact, his wife told him, "Are you going to retain your dignity?  Curse God and die."  Job told her, "You talk as a foolish woman.  Are you going to receive good from the Lord and not receive the bad?"

First, I began to think of what a righteous man Job was.  I also began to remember when our meat birds were very young and the 80 mph winds blew, knocking over our pecan tree and causing destruction all around.  Tricia and I were in the chicken tractor, trying to hold it down and save our birds from calamity.  Little did we know that we could have been like Job's kids!  Not only that, lightning was flashing all around, crashing like nobody's business.

After the storm passed and I was cleaning up limbs, I picked up this branch that wasn't 150 feet from where we were in the chicken tractor:

Yep, lightning!  It popped a water oak tree in the front yard, burning the branch with considerable voltage and splintering the wood, sending it falling in the yard.  You can see way up in the tree in the photo below where, about 3/4 of the way up, another burned, broken off piece of the limb remains.  That was a close call!

Well, tonight is 'weigh day.'  It's the time I go out and pick out an average bird from the chicken tractor, march it into the garage where I have the scale set up, and weigh the bird.  We purchased straight runs, meaning they could be hens or roosters.  Roosters grow faster and bigger.  This one below is a rooster.

He felt heavy and hot.  I sat him up on the scale to see where he was.

Whoa!  He tipped the scale at 5 pounds, four ounces.

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
• Week 5, they weighed 64 ounces
• Week 6, they weighed 84 ounces

That's a weight gain of 20 ounces or 1 pound 4 ounces over the last week.  At five pounds and four ounces, that is precisely where we want to be at this point.  I've compared to prior years and this one is right in line with where he needs to be.  At this rate, we are on course for butchering at the 8 week point.  We'll check back in next Wednesday.

2024 Meat Birds - 5 Weeks Old

It's already Wednesday weigh-in for the meat birds.  The week has been mostly uneventful for the Cornish Cross birds.  They are steadily growing.  You can't really call them chicks any longer.  We had more than a 2 1/2 inch rain this past week, but it didn't phase them.  As young chicks, when they get wet, you can easily lose the whole flock.  Ask me how I know that little factoid.  They are older now and have feathers and put off a lot of heat.  

Speaking of heat, I still have them under the heat lamps at night.  During the day, I turn them off as it has been warming up into the upper 80's already.  I'm still feeding them bugs at night.  As far as feeding, we're still giving them an 18% protein, non-medicated chick grower.  I feed at breakfast, lunch and supper.  In other words, I keep feed in front of them all day long.  At nightfall,, I pull the feed and give them a 12 hour stretch with no feed.  In the morning, they are hungry.  They practically attack me when I open the door with the bucket of feed.

Let the sleeping chickens lie

I picked up a bird of average stature for the weigh-in.  Remember, there are 7 birds that are a week older.  I'm not weighing any of those guys.  You can see by this one's comb that he is a rooster.

This bird has some big feet!  I noticed them when I set him down on the scale.  Let's see what he weighs...

Exactly 4 pounds.

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
• Week 5, they weighed 64 ounces

That's a weight gain of 20 ounces or 1 pound 4 ounces over the last week.  At exactly four pounds, that is precisely where we want to be at this point.  At this rate, we are on course for butchering at the 8 week point.  We'll check back in next Wednesday.

The 2024 Cornish Cross Project

For those who follow, each year we purchase and raise day old chicks of the Cornish Cross variety.  Generally, in eight short (or long, depending on how you look at it) weeks, the birds will weigh six pounds and yield a four pound carcass.  We butcher them and have chickens to eat for most of the year until its time to do it again.  On March 23rd we purchased all the birds that our local Tractor Supply Company had.  That totaled 7 birds.  Purchasing this way rather than by mail saved shipping costs.  The birds were $2.99 a piece.  Big problem, however.  Seven birds in the freezer are not going to make many gumbos, fricassees, or chicken and dumpling meals. 

Chickens already under the heat lamp

The kind lady informed us that they had more coming in on Wednesday, March 27th.  On my way through town at noon, I passed by and snatched up all the Cornish Cross meat birds that they had delivered.  That totaled 25 birds.  So if we can keep them all alive, we'll have 32 in the freezer.  That sounds better.  I picked up two boxes of birds - 12 in one and 13 in the other.

Two boxes of chicks

I have a great old college buddy who is from Michigan.  I envied him for the snow that he always saw growing up in the north.  He always told me snow was great for about the first week - pretty, white, and picturesque.  And then, it turns ugly and dirty.

That's a good description of day old chicks as you see in the unboxing photo below.  The chicks are yellow and cute.  They are at their zenith.  Enjoy the photogenic moment while you can, because they change.  Quickly.  They get big and dirty and gross, to be honest.

Day old chicks

We put the day old chicks under the heat lamp and the seven (one is hiding) chicks we got initially moved out of the garage and onto green grass on a beautiful day.  We like to get them outside as quickly as possible.  They start eating grass and bugs almost immediately.

Pastured Poultry from week 1

So each year, on a weekly basis, we put the chicks on a scale to chart their growth.  I put some old rags on top of the kitchen scale to protect its cleanliness, zero out the scale and put one of the chicks on top.

Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!

And here's the verdict on day one of having the 25 birds home.  The average bird weighs 3.5 ounces.

So a quarter of a pound, basically, at day one.  In addition to grass, we feed them an 18% protein chick starter.  Oh, something else, too.  Right now, in our area, we have an influx of big beetles.  I call them June bugs, but it's not June and I don't think that's their proper name.  At night, they are attracted to the outside lights.  I catch handfuls of them and toss them to the chicks.  They instinctually know they are food and they run around, snatching them up in their little beaks and then run away so the others don't steal their meal.

Next week we'll see how much they've grown.

2021 Meat Birds - Week Eight

Well, we are at the end of the road for the meat birds.  Today marks eight weeks.  We got them delivered when they were one day old baby chicks.  In eight short weeks, they have grown into monsters.  I have sores on my hands from them pecking me when I feed them each day.  They are ravenous and fly around when I bring feed, pecking at my hands and scratching my legs with their claws.

The goal, as I've communicated, is to have a 6 pound bird on butcher day as that yields a 4 pound carcass.  We have 50 birds that we'll be butchering.  We've only lost one bird over the eight week period.  We will butcher on Saturday and will show you the process we use.  We've perfected it over the years.  We still have lots to learn and try to improve the process each year.

As you can see below, the birds have grown such that they've filled the tractor. 

On this final 'weigh day,' I wanted to look at it a little differently.  In previous weeks, we've grabbed a bird and weighed it to get a good idea of growth rates.  Last week the bird we weighed was 4 pounds 15 ounces.  This week I picked out the biggest bird and the smallest bird to see where we are.

Here is the biggest:

He weighs 6 pounds 6 ounces.  He is a nice specimen!  He'll exceed our target weight when we butcher on Saturday (day after tomorrow).

Let's look at the smallest bird.  He is an anomaly.  There are no other birds as small as he is.  The runt of the litter, I guess.

And he weighs 4 pounds 10 ounces.  He misses our target weight by quite a lot, but I'm thinking our average weight by bird will exceed 6 pounds and pull our overall average up.  We shall see.

In the meantime before Saturday, we will be sharpening knives, purchasing zip loc bags and setting up the killing cones, scalder, plucker, eviscerating tables and tubs of water so we can get a good start on Saturday.  It's supposed to be cold (in the upper 20's!).  We may not need to buy ice!

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.

2021 Meat Birds - Week Six

We are in week six of the Cornish Cross Meat Bird Project.  In checking our inventory of frozen birds in the deep freeze, we will be right on time.  We only have two chickens in the freezer.  With 50 birds approaching butchering, we will fill the freezer back up, and it is right on time.  It is 'gumbo season!'  With the winter chill setting in (or as much winter as we get in South Louisiana), nothing hits the spot like a big bowl of Chicken and Sausage gumbo.

These are real chickens.  I noticed this week that Kentucky Fried Chicken began selling a product they call "Beyond Chicken."  They are nuggets made of soy and wheat protein fried in oil.  This is America and people are free to eat what they want.  We'll eat vegetables from our garden and real chicken and real beef from our pasture, not vegetables pretending to be meat!  But to each his own.

Tonight it will be in the upper twenties (b-r-r-r-r-r-r!) and the north wind is steadily blowing at 18 mph.  It is very cold.  We have a fire burning in the fireplace and I've staked down the chicken tractor so that the winds don't blow it over.  The chickens are huddled up under the heat lamps and the tarp breaks some of the wind, but those birds are cold.  We still haven't lost but one.  It would be nice to get all 50 to the eight week period.  We shall see.  It will be in the twenties for the next three nights.

As is our custom, Thursday afternoon is 'weigh day.'  I walk out to the tractor and pick out the first bird I can put my hands on.  The bird tonight is a rooster, so he's a little bigger, but most of the birds are within a half pound of each other, I would assume.  He feels heavy, solid, and healthy.  We are still feeding them 3 times a day and still feeding them an 18% protein ration.  Some people really pour the feed to them and give a higher protein percentage ration, but we are only trying to get them to about 6 pounds and aren't interested in rushing it.  These birds will overeat and can get so heavy that their skeletons cannot support the weight, resulting in leg issues.  We'll just go slow and steady to avoid that.

Let's see what the scale says.  On Week Six, the bird weighed 4 pounds 15 ounces.  That's some nice, sustained growth.  I'll bring this fellow back to his flock.  They were all sort of piled up in the tractor, trying to stay warm.  Hopefully they won't suffocate one another.  We've had that happen before when they piled up.

The weight of the bird I picked out this week to weigh was 4 pounds 15 ounces. Last week the weight was 3 pounds 7 ounces, so they have gained a pound and 8 ounces this past week. This is how we compare with previous years at this time period:

Week Six 2019: 4 pounds 5 ounces.
Week Six 2018: 5 pounds 4 ounces.
Week Six 2017: 4 pounds 8 ounces.
Week Six 2016: 5 pounds 1 ounce.

The birds are right where we need them to be and are on schedule for butchering in two weeks.  Tune in next week for the second to last weigh in.

2020 Meat Birds - Week Seven

Well here we are in the last week of our Annual Meat Bird Project.  From what we saw last week in Week 6 in the weigh-in, the bird we put on the scale was 6 pounds 4 ounces.  This means they are ready.  We always shoot for a 6 pound bird.  That yields a 4 pound carcass.  We know last week we were at our goal.  This last week was just lagniappe.  We wanted them to grow, but not too much.  Maybe it is just our opinion, but a bird in the 4-5 pound carcass range just seems to taste better to us.

This week nothing eventful happened.  We still only lost 3 birds out of the 50 we started out with over the 7 1/2 week project.  We continue to feed 3 times a day and keep clean water in front of them and we push them to fresh grass two or three times daily.  Tomorrow we'll pick up the chicken plucker that a friend was borrowing and then Friday night we'll set up the outdoor slaughterhouse.

It's Wednesday weigh day.  Let's get this show on the road.  Today I decided to weigh a hen and a rooster.  Roosters grow faster and gets bigger, so I wanted to see how both are doing toward our goal.  First, the hen:

I zeroed out the scale with the box and then set her in it.

5 lbs 12 ounces today.  By the time Saturday morning butchering rolls around, she'll be a tad over 6 pounds.

Now for the rooster.  He's a big guy.  His foot was poised to hop out of the box.

He weighed in at 7 pounds 2 ounces.  Wow.  That's the biggest I think we've ever had.

At the end of seven weeks, the hen and the rooster averaged about 6 and 1/2 pounds. 

To look at previous years at this same time:
*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

We will butcher on Saturday and will have plenty to post about that.