Farm Raised Chicken

I shall begin the recap with highlights from the year. At the end of September, we processed the 21 Rangers we purchased as meat birds. After processing a few of our young layer roosters, which dressed to 2.5 lbs, I was hoping for a much larger, meatier bird. I was targeting the 3-5 lb range for each dressed bird.

The chicks were purchased online and mailed to me. They were raised inside for two or so weeks and then were moved out into a chicken tractor so they could enjoy the grass, the sun, the bugs and just be chickens. I did not withhold feed for 12 hours a day which is common with the Cornish Cross variety of meat bird. I cannot say that these birds never ran out of feed, because their appetite was voracious, but if they did, it was unintentional and soon remedied.

We processed the birds at 10.5 weeks. We butchered 20 of the 21, leaving a pretty hen to join our layers and see what would happen. It took two people 5 hours to process all the birds, but we did all the scalding and plucking by hand. Never again! Next year, I will rent a barrel plucker.

Our smallest chicken at 4.25 lb on a standard dinner plate.

Nice color, nice thighs, nice breast... but not overstuffed.

Overall, we fed the chickens 575 lbs of organic feed (8 bags of chick mash, 2.5 bags of grower pellets, and 1 bag of scratch). The smallest bird dressed out to 4.25 lb, way over my target low range of 3 lb. The biggest bird was 6 lb! The average weight was 5.18 lb and overall we got 103.75 lb total.

If you calculate just the cost of feed, the birds came out to $2.50/lb. If you add the original chick cost ($2), it comes to $2.88/lb. If you add in our processing labor (2 people x $7/hr x 5 hr), it's $3.50/lb. For reference, we were paying the farmer up the road $3.50/lb for organically raised Cornish Crosses last spring. An average bird cost $14.99. The Feed-Conversion-Ration (or FCR) of the birds was 3.52 live and 5.28 dressed. So it took 3.52 lbs of feed to make 1 lb of live bird. Those FCR numbers are not great, but I think I might know what is going on.

As a bird ages, their feed intake rate stabilizes but the growth rate slows. If I processed the birds two weeks earlier, I would have not only hit my target 3-5 lb range, but would have saved about 150 lbs of feed, which would really help my numbers. Next year, I intend to process at 8 weeks.

Was it worth it? To answer that, you have to go beyond the numbers and look at the quality of the bird. This is my first batch of home-grown birds, so I don't have much to compare it to. The farmer down the road who raised free-range, organic Cornish Crosses had some pretty tasty birds. My birds blew his away. He feeds the same feed so the only thing I can attribute it to is the breed of bird. I purchased a hybrid bird derived from French meat lines and these chickens remind me of rich, savory French meals. The meat is infused with fat, to the point that it beads on the surface. I found the chicken very rich and filling. It has enough calories in it to stretch it over many meals.

Very moist roast chicken. Lots of calories there!

Recently, my family visited and we roasted a whole chicken. It fed four adults, with second and third helpings, and then went on to feed two of us over five more meals, including chicken soup, chicken and black beans, chicken enchiladas, etc. The stock is solid at refrigerator temperatures and continues to live on.

I am a big fan of this type of meat bird, but it is not very sustainable for a small farm. For one, they are hybrids which means that even if I kept a breeding pair, I would not be guaranteed to get the same results. I did keep one hen and we'll see what she produces if crossed with a layer rooster, if she lives that long. She's going strong now, but definitely waddles around. We recently weighed her at 10 lbs live, so she's pretty big. Secondly, they need a tremendous amount of food to grow them so big, so fast, and that food comes from off the farm.

The hope is to eventually create a flock of true dual purpose birds, that both lay and grow to 7 lb free ranging. I will expound on that more in a later post, however.

In the meantime, these meat hybrids will be part of the farm next year, with a plan to order two batches of 25 birds in the summer. That will give us about a chicken a week for the year and a wonderful protein source.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Life on the farm is accelerating now, with more and more veggies coming into maturity. Two good friends came into town and gave us a hand on Sunday and the old say of "Many hands make light work" held true. I had a huge list of things to get done and they were all done by 2 pm!

On Saturday, after the horse show, we went blue berrying again and brought home 10 lbs of berries. We've ordered a pressure canning set online and will wait for it to arrive before we do any more canning, so this batch of berries is destined for blueberry pancakes, cobbler, or flash frozen.

The first beans of the year were sampled by my friends and we harvested the first tomato in the greenhouse. Things are just getting warmed up, we should have more in the coming weeks.

We also dismantled the wee chicklin pen since the flocks have been integrated in the main coop. Not everyone is with the new program and I have to round up errant chickens each night and place them in the coop by hand. Hopefully, they will wise up soon. The wees are still a month or so away from laying, but they look full-sized. We are getting just 6 eggs a day right now, so I can't wait for more pullets to come online and start laying.

We also got a tree down, cleaned up some branches, did more work on the compost piles, weed wacked, and generally got things in order.

Starting next week, I will be out of state for training for my new job. I will spend four weeks away from home, although I get to come home on the weekends.

I am trying to get as much done as I can to ease the burden on my SO in my absence, but it will be most welcome to just be home for the fall. Foxhunting season starts in two weeks. Fall harvest will start soon as well: potatoes, perhaps some corn, squashes, beans, peppers, and eggplants.

Happy times.

The Month of June

June is almost over and with it, hopefully, my blog silence. Despite the rarity of posts, it's been a very busy month. The weather has been, er, difficult. It has rained every.single.day since June 8. That is 20 consecutive days. Sometimes it rains in the morning, sometimes at night. Sometimes it drizzles, sometimes it hails. Luckily, my little acreage is considered "well drained" so the garden has flourished instead of drowned. Some of my neighbors and friends have not been so lucky.

We are harvesting salad most nights now and can't keep up with the growth. We harvested our first 3 lb head of cabbage and it looks amazing, no rot or bug damage. The tomatoes and tomatillos are in full bloom. The Sweet Ann Sugar peas are about ready, sometime this week. The outdoor cabbage, brussels sprouts, and broccoli are looking like they may produce sometime this fall. The potatoes have been hilled and hilled again and are standing near 3' tall now. The beans are up and climbing up the poles every day.

First cabbage of the year, from the greenhouse.

Not everything turned out as planned. We had a fox steal a hen in broad daylight. We gave chase and he released her, relatively unharmed, but it did prompt me to purchase a .22 rifle. We lost our first batch of cucumbers seedlings and are starting over, but it may be too late. Our strawberries were decimated by our chickens. We placed a net over the plants and that merely slowed the chickens down in their carnage. The greenhouse broccoli got too warm so the heads were stunted. I waited too long to see if they would grow bigger and they ended up flowering. Broccoli produces lovely little yellow flowers. Who knew?

On the chicken front, we've had a definite slow down in egg production. Two hens have gone broody and have to be forcibly removed from the nest. The wee chicklins are not so wee anymore and are getting bigger by the day. We had two wee roosters begin crowing at 10 weeks and were causing mayhem among the rest of the chickens. I decided to butcher them, even though they were small.

Beer can chicken and cabbage fry.

The actual butchering went well. I had expected some pretty horrific things and the whole procedure took 15 minutes per bird and there was no blood, no smell, nothing gross. They dressed to about 2 lb, 3 oz, which is very small. I am expecting better results (near 5 lbs at 12 weeks) from the meaties that arrive in a couple of weeks. One of the roosters was the main course in our first "farm meal" tonight. We ate our rooster, our cabbage, our broccoli, our salad. Of course, butter and salad dressing were from off farm. But I feel like we are making some real progress.

So tonight we raise a glass of wine to the animal gracing our table, and to our vegetables, and to our labor. Cheers!

May you always have a clean shirt, a clear conscience, and enough coins in your pocket to buy a pint!

Tastes Like Swimming Pool

I have been going back and forth about whether to raise our own meat birds for human consumption next year. I would love to be responsible for more of my food and to also ensure the birds had a decent, pastured life before processing. However, there is little chance of me finding a processor near me who would process the birds for me. What USDA inspected processing plant cares about 30 broilers? So I either process them myself or forego. I mean, I want to "do the right thing", but I love my layer hens and I think there is quite a learning curve to processing your own poultry. I don't hunt and although I am not opposed to it, it's quite a mental leap for me.

What to do?

Then one of my dogs got sick when she ate chicken. And another dog. This is store bought "Manager's Special", boneless skinless chicken breast. Not even their usual disgusting discarded poultry frames. This is chicken meant for people to eat, and now my dogs, which have been fed poultry for, oh 8 years now, are getting sick when they eat it.

I did some research and found out that humans have an intolerance for store bought poultry, too, because in the US they dunk the carcasses in a chlorine solution after processing. Residual chlorine survives cooking (of course, cooking does not remove chemicals) and people ingest it and viola, they get sick. In fact, the EU has been banning the import of US poultry since 1997 and just recently voted to keep the ban. The reason? The chlorinated poultry.

It turns out, the solution they use to clean the carcasses is the same chemical they use to sanitize swimming pools. It is NOT the solution they use to sanitize municipal water supplies, which is, um, more palatable?

I've never been happier to be on a well.

Anyway, I don't know if my dogs are sick because of chlorinated poultry. In fact, it's probably a stretch. But they ARE sick from human-grade chicken breast I bought from the store. And when I have cooked up eggs (even store bought eggs) for them to eat instead, no sickness. Instant cause and effect.

So the decision has been made. I will be raising and processing my own poultry next year.