Am i feeding my broilers enough?

[alexnstacey]

I'm new to this...

I ordered 25 broilers from Meyers hatchery as a project for myself and my kids. We built an outdoor coop 8x10 fenced run with an 8x3 coop. We received the chicks on September 5th. I started brooding in my garage bay with a large cardboard box. Pine shaving and all that. First week i fed them first thing in AM with about 6 cups food in feeder. and again in PM about 6 cups of food. They never seemed to run out completely.

Week 2: i doubled the food amount to about 24 cups. again 24x7 twice daily. Never ran completely out.

Week 3: They stunk the garage up so bad that at 2.5 i placed outside in the coop. I now give them 12 cups AM and by the time i get home from work its gone. So I give another 10-12 cups. I check at dark (9-10PM) and its all gone. Now i have read not to give them 24 hrs at 3 weeks so i let them go until morning. But when i feed them in the AM they go nuts with the food!

So....should i give them even more food? Should I feed around the clock. 3 weeks will be up this Thursday. I have almost gone through 100lbs of food for 26 chickens. just curios of how much i should be feeding.

Thanks!

 

[Owingsia]

I would say try to up that to 1.5-2 cups per bird per feeding. I just finished my last 6 meat birds and they went through 100 pounds of food in 6 weeks. That comes out to about 4 cups a day per bird. Thats a lot of feed but they will pack on the weight and that = good eatin.

 

[DaveMorey]

I am on week 6 and just finished 200 lbs of feed for 25 birds. I have been feeding them 3x daily on fermented feed. I have just recently started supping their feed quantity a bit since they were eating it so quickly. I am down to 24 birds because I had to cull one for a bad leg last week. Live weights average 4.12lbs as of Tuesday. This is the first time I have raised CX and it is a project with my son also. I am not sure that they will reach the predicted weights by the time I am ready to process though.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

http://cdn.backyardchickens.com/a/aa/500x1000px-LL-aadf500f_rock-growth.jpeg

I found this to be VERY useful. I went through 50lbs in the first month for 13 chickens so that sounds pretty close, but you should be upping their feed REALLY fast from weeks 3-5.

Going nuts with food is normal, especially for CX's. They will act like they have been starved even if they have food IN THEIR PEN still. I will bring out an extra scoop of feed and they will trample their feed bowls full of food to get at the food I am putting in....