As to culling, raising, and breeding:
Mostly, This is my take home point from this year: Cull young, Cull heavy.
There is a great and noble principle in raising birds for meat, but in the end, you just fill up space and make more feed costs for yourself. This also causes the remainder of your birds to be stressed, feather-picked, and grow less efficiently. Then when butchering time comes, you have very little use for the 50-100 extra birds that you have running around and no one to buy them, at least for even break-even price. For me, I don't have time to butcher 3, 4, 5 times a year. Once is plenty and I don't need or want a freezer full of whole chickens. If I can have about 20 birds, that's plenty for me. Frankly, there is always a chicken running around that can't remember why I kept and will make a great Sunday meal. So here's my point. I would rather cull a bird that is less than 3 pounds and keep the best so that the best can be even better.
I had some pretty wild combs, slow growers, birds that were pretty obvious culls. Unless I can find someone that wants them little, next year, they are going to get the axe pretty quick. I want to hatch 200 chicks next year and raise 50. I figure I can make the same from 50 good birds as 150 junk ones.
One more point: All the weighing, egg checking, data collecting is wonderful. In fact it is essential to excellent breeding. But I would like to echo what Lou Horton said in the last Poultry Press: "One of the most common and largest mistakes on beginners (and, in my opinion, of even experienced breeders) is to buy birds, hatch birds, acquire birds that do not have very adequate and very secure (varmint-proof) housing." I think the bigger point is that we need to develop a decent system before we try to get excellent results. A good system in and of itself can produce some very good results, even for a rather inexperienced breeder.
My point is this, I thought I was in pretty good shape on housing this year. I have 5 pretty big run pens and right now they have about 30 in each pen. They shouldn't have more than 20 in any on them. 15 would be better and I'm going through a bag of feed a day mostly for birds I know I'm not going to keep. All that data we collect has to go toward making raising poultry more efficiently, effectively and profitably. We are better off with no data and a good system and a good eye than all the data in the world and a poor or mediocre system that makes it basically worthless. Good data produced in a bad system is actually bad data. I speak to myself first.
And another thing, I like collecting data, but I'm so busy, I don't have time to it as much as I want to. It ends up being just another stressor in my life. I'll be durned if my chickens are going to cause me to dislike my life. I'll do it when I can, compare it with my observations and let good thinking and a good system do the bulk of the grunt work. I won't be a slave to my hobby just because that is the best way to do it and I'm a perfectionist. It's still my hobby and it's supposed to make life less stressing, more enjoyable.
Someone will approve you, but it may not be until next week.
