Cornish Cross 2 weeks old. can they go outside

[OPA Acres]

I prefer the long galvanized or plastic feeders, I don't use the round one for my meat birds anymore. The long ones with the hole on top is okay, but their heads don't fit when they get bigger. The long one with the rod going across on top is better for the bigger chickens, at least their heads can reach the bottom. I screw my feeder on a wood, so it doesn't topple over.

Awesome! We have steel long feeders for our chicken tractors and plastic long feeders when they are smaller... but at this age they go through so much feed that we use the 7lbs round feeders until they go outside. We use 1 round feeder per 10 chicks. It works for us.

Will be glad to get them out of the garage and onto fresh grass this week.

Appreciate your feedback!

 

[OPA Acres]

For the purpose of documenting what we did for other people in the future. We did put our cornish cross outside at 3 weeks old. We did not provide any heat source. They were far from feathered had a tone of bald spots... photos below were taken at about 4 weeks old -- so, they'd been outside roughly a week at that point.

As a reference, this was in June, and ay temps were 75-90 and nights were in the mid to upper 60s.

We did lose one bird -the day before had been extremely hot (90's) and we had really intense thunderstorms that night. So -- might have been a few things.

I hope this helps anyone who might be trying to figure out if they should out if they can/should put their birds outside.

I will also say - that our birds reached 10lbs at around 6 weeks of age, and were processed at 7 weeks with an average dressed weight of 6 lbs.