"It must have had a lot of hormones!"...

[silkiechicken]

In the US, adding hormones to feed of poultry is ILLEGAL..

Hogs and cows can be given extra hormones as it is not illegal. Chickens, turkeys, ducks NOPE!

What makes them so big? Genetics. Why are so many American born Asians so small compared to their American born Europeans even though they grow up in the same area? Genetics. My mom is 5 foot tall and I'm a giant at 5' 2", but if my Caucasian friend just stands at her 6 foot tall height next to her 6 foot tall mom, I suddenly shink.


Commercial broiler houses maintain perfect humidity, temp, feeding and so on, with minimal movement of birds in the houses so all food going in becomes meat. If you free range your birds, they get treats, etc, they will not reach market weight at the same time due to expending energy, eating a less optimized diet (although perhaps more bland), and need to deal with temp variations if not housed in "ideal" temperatures.

 

[Neil Grassbaugh]

Quote:
THERE ARE NO HORMONES ADMINISTERD TO EITHER POULTRY OR HOGS TO ENHANCE GROWTH.

Such substances are not available, are illegal, would be cost prohibitive to produce and administer. They would also be especially ineffective on chickens so young.
Broiler chickens are bred to amass as much muscle tissue as possible and in the most critical body sections. Breeders are also selected for hardiness and disease resistance. And most people do not know this but appetite is an inherited charachteristic and broiler lines are bred to include insatiable appetites. That is really the reason they get so big so fast.
Commercial production practices, which include least cost feed formulation, get broiler chickens to about 5.25 lbs (as hatched) average weight in 42 days.
Birds performing considerably below this rate of gain are not being raised, or fed, in such a way that the genetic potential is being utilized. For all the well intentioned effort lavished on many backyard chickens the husbandry is just not what they need.

Regarding the feed store owner who feeds hogs hormones- well he must like telling whoppers. Except 300 lbs at 7 months old is not a whopper by any means.

 

[wjallen05]

well now I'm just confused. All this time I was under the impression that they are fed hormones. How can a chicken be 5 lbs at 6 weeks of age?? And the hogs?? He even told me they feed them hormones in the grain.

*sigh*

What am I doing wrong? I feed all my animals free-choice.

 

[jaku]

Quote:
I get 11 pound chickens in 8 weeks sometimes (live weight.) Genetics and feed. And only a Cornish X can do that, not other breeds of chicken.

 

[cassie]

She would have had a fit if she had seen our 16 pounders. No it wasn't on purpose. Processing was delayed for a number of reasons. And that was dressed weight. They looked like turkeys.

 

[terri9630]

Quote:
I weighed my largest and smallest broilers yesterday and the largest was a bit over 5 lbs and the smallest was just under 2 lbs. They are 4 1/2 weeks old. The smallest is half the size of the rest and looks really funny when you look at them and know that they are all the same age.

 

[dancingbear]

Quote:
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to say there. There has to be some way to get a 6 week old broiler chick to get so big. Mine sure as heck weren't ready to process at 6 weeks of age. The owner of our local feed store has hog houses and he told me that they do feed them artificial hormones and that they are over 300 lbs at 7 months old. Our 7 month old hog weighed 140.

Your feed store guy is either misinformed or likes to make things up. Cornish X broilers will easily make 5 lbs. (live weight) by 6 weeks. If you'll look at the supermarket birds, the dressed weights are mostly between 3-4 1/2 lbs. I don't know if that's what you are raising, or what you're feeding them, or what the temperature is, etc. They have been selectively bred for a long time, to eat and grow fast.

Some people make the mistake of thinking that any breed they raise for meat is a "broiler". While any chicken is fine to eat, they are not all broilers. I prefer non-broiler heritage and mixed breed birds myself, even though they take longer to grow out.

As for hogs, I don't know what breed you have, or what you feed them. We raised 4 hogs last year. It was out very first time ever to raise hogs. I don't know what breed(s) they were, but the parents were enormous. We got them in May. By the time the weather was cool enough to butcher, they were way bigger than we wanted, the largest (a castrated male) was around 350 lbs or so, the smallest (a female) was probably about 280 lbs. That was in November, they were 7 months old. They were over 200 lbs by the time they were 4 months old. We did not feed them any hormones or antibiotics whatsoever. We fed them pig grower feed, 16% protein, I added some distiller's grain to bump it up to 18%. They also got any extra eggs we had, (hard boiled) garden and kitchen scraps. They were in a large lot fenced with 3 strands of electric, with a good patch of woods on it, so they had a good amount of forage, too.

BTW, the desired weight for butchering a hog is between 200-250 lbs. Over that, they're just packing on fat, instead of meat. When large groups of hogs are sold for processing, the growers are penalized for any hogs over 250 lbs., because of the excess fat. So in the real world, people are not trying to get hogs to grow over 300 lbs, and even if they were, they do that easily in about 5 months anyway, without hormones added.

So your feed guy's feeding you false info.

 

[Lazy J Farms Feed & Hay]

Quote:
Actually the targeted market weight for market hogs in the USA is now in the 250 to 300 lb range, depending on the packer. One packer in Ohio prefers pigs in the 200 to 240 range, but they are the only one. The modern genetics allows us to feed to higher weights without the dramatic fat accretion typical of pigs fed in the not too distant past.

Jim

 

[wjallen05]

The pig we had was a Large Black/Yorkshire cross. The hanging weight was 140 at 7 months old. He was a small pig and the butcher said he was very lean. The chicken that we processed was a CornishXRock from Ideal. I do not know how much it weighed but it was very heavy, but the actual meat/carcass (not sure what you'd call that?) was 4 lbs 10 oz. It was 4 months old and a hen.

 

[silkiechicken]

Sounds like your cornish x rock was a runt or a white rock. At 4 months on even a restricted diet and free range, it would be well over 10lbs dressed.

If you accidentally got a white rock that happened to be a big un, which isn't a meat bird per se, 16 weeks old and 5 lbs butchered doesn't sound too terribly bad.