How many birds do we need .....

[big greg barker]

I'm not dumping on McMurray's in any way, but you can only get chicks in lots of 25 of one breed if I read their order form right. You can get more than one breed , but 25. Hoover's Hatchery in Iowa wiil seel you a few of these, a few of those a few of them in a batch of 25. The cost is a bit less, too.
Search the index under "Raising Baby Chicks," and GranHabano put a list of hatcheries out there for everybody about a month ago. Good reading, and a way to do some real indepth comarison shopping..........

 

[Brunty_Farms]

If your wanting to raise and hatch your own birds for meat and want to have a bird a week it's going to take some time.

I would start with 24 buff orpington roos and depending on how many eggs your family will eat, depends on how many hens to get. So say you eat 2 dozen a week, I would get 6-10 hens and that will give you about 2-4 dozen eggs a week depending on the time of the year.

When the roos get to be about 16-24 weeks butcher all of them but two. Pick the best two out as these are going to be your breeders. You need two in case something happens to one.

So when your making your coop design your hen house can be small but you want to make a grow-out pen for your roos. As soon as you can tell the difference seperate them so you can put them on a higher percentage of protein so they grow faster and fuller.

In your grow-out pen make it big enough to house about 25-50 chickens as when you hatch out eggs from your layers your going to get approximatly 50% hens and 50% roosters. Either raise both for meat or replace your hens with the new pullets every year. Either way your going to have about 50 cockerals throughout the first year and about 50 pullets from your original 6-10 Breeders.

Like I said either raise them for meat, sell the pullets, or add to your breeding / egg flock.

Lastly you will need a good incubator as you don't want to have to count on one going broodie. This way you can schedule hatches around family functions, holidays, and ect. It let's you have control over when you have chicks and when your ready for them.

Now before you go and buy these make sure this is what you want to do. As if you buy 50 broilers you can get 3-3.5 lbs dressed weight in about 6 weeks, the buff orpingtons will take 6 months to get the same results and eat twice as much feed! The best part is you have to raise these for 6 weeks and you have a chicken a week for a year and it's done. So if your trying to save time and money then the broilers are the way to go.

But if your looking to raise your own, from breeding flock to table: and if you want to enjoy the labor of doing this, then go for it. But in today's society it's not economical to raise dual purposes for meat. If you have the time, extra cash, and patience then dive in!!

 

[becky3086]

My suggestions would be to try the broilers and get a few BO's to try as well, then see which ones you like best. I wouldn't get 25 BO's until you are sure that is the best meat bird for you and you can't figure that out until you try a few first.

 

[greyfields]

I think a lot of people have this mental image of having a standing flock of meat or dual purpose birds, which they go outside and hatchet whenever they crave a chicken dinner.

It's really a misguided fantasy, though. There is a 'butter zone' for when chickens make for good eating. It's a combination of the chicken's age, their exercise level, their sexual maturity and the ammount of food you pour into them. For your dual purpose chickens, you're looking at 15-24 week timeframe which is about 3 month window of opportunity. After that point, it's costing you so much money to maintain the birds, you're better off buying organic chicken from the grcoery store.

Or even if you do stick with the BO's, you ought cull them all in one batch and freeze. You lose very little quality freezing the birds, espeically if you have a vacuum sealer.

 

[mamichi]

Great info everyone. Thank you! We will definitely think about this some more before we make any decisions.

 

[dancingbear]

The reason for butchering young birds for frying or broiling isn't how much fat they have, it's how tender they are. Younger birds are more tender. If you fry an older bird it may be too tough to eat. A fried, 6-month old rooster makes a dandy chew toy for the dog. They are wonderful cooked in the crock pot, though. Cook them til the meat falls off the bones. Yum!

The amount of fat on the bird, has more to do with breed, diet, and exercise level than age.
I have older mixed-breed and dual purpose breed roos in my freezer, with almost no fat at all on them, and have butchered broilers at 8 weeks old that had thick pads of fat.

While you're learning all the ins and outs of raising chickens, yes, the best thing to do is start with some layers, BO's or whatever you like the best. Get used to them, and set up some broiler pens, there are lots of posts showing pics of movable pens. I'd advise those for your broiler chicks, so you can feed them the correct feed, while feeding your layers their normal layer feed, and move them to clean ground as often as needed, so you don't have to muck out a nasty pen every other day. You might want to try the color rangers, they seem to have fewer health issues than the Cornish X's. If you butcher at 8-10 weeks you'll have big, fat, juicy, tasty birds. If I have that butcher age wrong for color rangers, I'm sure somebody will jump in and correct me.

McMurray requires a minimum number of chickens, but they can be any number of whatever breeds you want. There are separate minimum orders for separate species, so if you want ducks, you must order X # of ducks, but you can mix up the breeds, for example, 5 Khaki Campbell, 5 Pekin, 5 mallards, and so on, until you reach or exceed the minimum number. Same with chickens, guineas, geese, etc. You can mix breeds, but not species.

McMurray's a bit pricier than some of the other hatcheries, but you can find plenty of posts about the quality of the birds you get from the different ones, and who has the best prices. You may want to look at who's closest to you, to minimize travel time for the chicks, unless you find a local source where you can pick them up yourself.

Good luck, I hope it all works out well for you!

 

[JohnG]

You can mix your order with MM. When I orderd my hens I got Red sex links, Black sex links and RIR.

 

[jvls1942]

We just butchered 30 B Orp roosters today.. I'm sure they took longer to grow than the cxrocks but I do not really care..

I have a problem eating a deformed bird and I never butcher a sickly bird.. and I just cannot get past the notion that there is just something quite not right with a cXrock.. I have raised them many years ago, and I have also raised BB white turkeys.. I think a bird that just lays next to it's food dish until the feathers refuse to grow on it's belly is not normal..

that is just me, though.. in my opinion..

 

[ghulst]

If you want eggs I would only go with the Isa Browns They are much better layers the Buff Orpingtons.

 

[jvls1942]

Quote:
Only if you are getting more than 1 egg per day per chicken.. because I only get one egg per day from my buffs..