2018 Meat Birds - Seven Weeks Old

It is week seven already!  The chicken tractor is making its final approach to the chicken butchering area.  We will wheel it right up to the location where we will bleed, scald, pluck, gut, age and cut the chickens up.  As last week's weighing showed, these birds have grown quickly.  After losing about 10 birds shortly after arrival, the Cornish Cross Meat birds were healthy and grew better than previous years.  In fact, as we'll soon show, I think we could have butchered them this weekend, if we didn't already have plans. 

As you can see, I have the kitchen scale set up right in front of the tractor.  The birds are lounging comfortably, oblivious to their coming fate.

Peeking in at them, you can see that some are still eating their Chicken Grower Feed Ration that I pour into gutters.  They serve as perfect feed troughs.

I always grab an average-sized bird and put it in a bucket to weigh.  Of course, I zero out the scale with the empty bucket on the scale, so I am just weighing the bird and not the weight of the bucket.

Would you look at this!:

At the end of seven weeks, the birds weight 5 pounds 15 ounces!  That shows a gain of 11 ounces over last week.  To look at previous years:

*Week 7 2017:  4 pounds 1 ounce -  we're almost two pounds heavier this year!
*Week 7 2016:  5 pounds 14 ounces - almost a carbon copy of the 2016 birds.
*Week 7 2015:  3 pounds 9 ounces - we are way ahead of 2015

So in the next few days, I'll sharpen knives, re-organize the deep freeze and get everything together as we will be butchering Saturday morning.  We'll show the process of how we do it and then we'll have an update on the numbers.