Meat Chicken Update: The Big Day

The day had finally come nearly twenty weeks after these cute little fluff balls arrived.  This day was what had been planned from the very beginning.  I started out with an order of 25 chicks of the special heavy assorted package from cackle hatchery.  They were straight run at a discount price, so I was counting on getting a bunch of roosters and I was not dissapointed.

They shipped me a total of 28 chicks, all of whom survived the trip and began their life here in a back room in a makeshift brooder.  They grew quickly and I think I moved them outside after just 3 weeks since they were getting too crowded in the space I had indoors for them.  They spent the following weeks growing and exploring in their hoophouse shelter that I kept close to the house.  I think that some of the roosters started crowing when they were only eight weeks old, so they soon had to be moved away from the house a bit, so I could get some sleep.  As the weeks passed they grew into a beautiful group of chickens.

Once they were about 14 to 16 weeks old, they really started acting like roosters.  Out of the 28 original chicks, 26 of them turned out to be roosters.  At first the spats between them were short and almost comical, but as the weeks wore on they got rougher with eachother, and really rough with the hens.  Most evenings became a hysteria of squawking and flapping as the roosters took turns tormenting the two hens that they had grown with.  At about 16 weeks, we took our first rooster.  I was trying to thin out the chickens that were being the meanest since I didn't want that trait in any of my future flock if I could help it.  I choose one that I had repeatedly caught being harsh with the hens.  In the following weeks, I took two more roosters that were also being harsh to the hens and I noticed a pattern.  It seemed as though the Buff Orpingtons had formed a gang and spent their time terrorizing the rest of the flock.  There was always food being knocked over and water buckets being dumped multiple times a day from the ruckus they caused.  The Rhode Island Reds had developed a quirk of crowing early and crowing frequently also adding to the noise coming from the hoophouse.  I decided it was time to drastically reduce the flock to hopefully bring some peace to my garden again.  The bigger of the chickens were easily over five pounds, so I figured that I would get decent carcasses from most of the roosters.  So here at nearly 20 weeks old they are finally a size that I would be willing to harvest.

We took seventeen roosters out of the flock that day and since we were new at this, the process was slow and there was a learning curve.  We were on about the tenth rooster by the time we got a rhythm going in the process.  I had a great friend that lent me a chicken plucker, so the most time consuming part of the process was sped up immensly, for which I may be forever grateful.  Even with this help the first stage of processing the birds took us at least three hours from start to finish.  We knew that we had limited hours of daylight, so we killed the birds, plucked them, and removed the heads and feet and set them in a cooler on ice where they could chill until we had time to finish cleaning them.  We decided that we needed a serious break after the first stage, so as the sun started to sink below the horizon, we stopped for a good dinner.

Once we got back, we started on stage two of the process - gutting, and parting them out.  This was by far the most underestimated event of the evening.  I was happy that we were able to do it in the comfort of the kitchen, but again, being inexperienced at processing made the whole thing take a very long time.  I think my greatest struggle was to gut them properly and cleanly.  Parting them up was a much quicker process because I have cut up many whole chickens from the grocery store, so I knew what I was doing for that chore.  The gutting part became easier after about three or four chickens, but the whole process took two of us about seven hours to clean seventeen chickns.  Near the end we were getting exhausted, so we left four of them gutted, but whole for roasting.  All of the other parted up chickens went into ziploc bags that were labeled and then put into the chest freezer.  I saved the backs, necks, liver, kidney, heart, and gizzards to make stock with.  All told I put seventy pounds of meat into my freezer that day.  Each chicken averaged out to a little over four pounds which is pretty comparable to the size of bird you would get at the store.

Over all I am pretty pleased with the outcome of the whole experiment.  I think in the future I will raise smaller batches of chicks to make the work and the feeding costs more manageable.  I was on a pretty tight budget for most of the summer so smaller feed bills next time around would be nice.  I averaged out the cost of raising this group of chickens and it comes out to about $11-$12 per bird.  Considering the cost of an organic bird from the store, I think I came out a little bit ahead.  If I could get to a place to allow more foraging for the birds I think I could cut the feed costs down even further, making it even cheaper for me to raise my own chickens for meat. 

In the future I will be using my incubator to hatch out the next rounds of chicks.  I didn't put all the roosters in the freezer, but currently have five of them that I will rotate in with the girls to make sure that I have some good genetic diversity in my flock.   I know that they will be "mutt" chickens, but I am going to select for large birds with friendly personalities.  All of the breeds that I have right now are hardy to my region and are all dual purpose breeds, so I hope to breed a flock of good sized meat birds that lay plenty of eggs.