Meaties 101

[mcf3kids]

How sweet to have a couple of hens go broody and supply HEAT! Very lucky for everyone!

 

[AlbionWood]

Yes, exactly! It was sooo much easier, not having to worry about getting the right temperature, piling, or any of that. It was also hilarious to see those hens with all these roly-poly chicks under, around, and on top of them. I'll be doing this again next year.

 

[WishboneDawn]

Thank you for this post! We've got 25 Cornish x chicks and your information has been invaluable. They're 3 1/2 weeks and spending their first night outside (we've had the heat lamp off and them going out in the day for a week now). Haven't lost one, even a runt with some vent issues.

I keep hearing about how these chickens are horrible but we've been charmed by ours and found that proper research seemed to stem most of the issues we might have had so far.

 

[PickawayCountyFarmer]

How much pasture does it take to raise them in that one tractor? About how long before you can go back over an area that was already done? I have about an acre that would be available to pasture them on. Not sure if that would be enough for 1 tractor or not.
Also, when using the 12 hrs on feeding schedule, how accurate does that have to be? I currently work 12 hr shifts, so 1 shift would be at least 13 hrs. Also, how do you handle that feeding in the tractor? Is the feeder removed? or is it coverable?

 

[Jynx21]

Terrific post.
I have layers at the moment but have wanted to get some fryers for the past couple years. It always sounded so intimidating to raise them, but your approach sounds do-able for me .
Thanks

 

[AlbionWood]

Quote:
Bigredfeather should be the one to answer this but I'll take a shot for now:

You can figure out the minimum land requirements from the size of your tractor and assuming you need that much space every day. If your tractor is 10x10, that's 100 square feet; there are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so you'd have room for a maximum of 435 moves if you could fit everything in perfectly. Of course that's not possible, you probably need at least 50% more space depending on how the land is situated (if it's a perfectly flat, square acre with nothing on it, you might come close to 90% coverage, but otherwise you lose area.) Still, an acre is more than enough room for one batch. If you put them on the grass at 2 weeks and process them at 10 weeks, you'd need (8 weeks x 7 days/week x 100 square feet per day) = 5,600 square feet of useable area, about 75 feet square. Hope that helps.

 

[bigredfeather]

Quote:
Bigredfeather should be the one to answer this but I'll take a shot for now:

You can figure out the minimum land requirements from the size of your tractor and assuming you need that much space every day. If your tractor is 10x10, that's 100 square feet; there are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so you'd have room for a maximum of 435 moves if you could fit everything in perfectly. Of course that's not possible, you probably need at least 50% more space depending on how the land is situated (if it's a perfectly flat, square acre with nothing on it, you might come close to 90% coverage, but otherwise you lose area.) Still, an acre is more than enough room for one batch. If you put them on the grass at 2 weeks and process them at 10 weeks, you'd need (8 weeks x 7 days/week x 100 square feet per day) = 5,600 square feet of useable area, about 75 feet square. Hope that helps.

I only have a little over an acre, and I ran 400 of them on it this Spring. Towards the end I was starting to reuse space I had used first. For the first few weeks a tractor is moving with young birds, it will only take a few days for the pasture to recover. When they get to 6+ weeks, you would think it would never recover by the looks of it, but within a week, you could hardly tell it had been used (except for the lack of clover). Of course as much rain as we had this Spring, it recovered very quickly. I was able to utilize almost every square foot of ground out there because of the way I ran the tractors. I did miss one strip about 5 feet wide, and you could tell because the vegetation wasn't as green or as big as the stuff where the tractor had been.

 

[firstbatch]

excellent post. I would like to pick your brain just a bit. After they are processed and resting for a couple days, I do not have fridge space for 40 birds. Last year (our first) we put them in coolers and kept them in very cold ice water - we have an icemaker in the shop so it is easy to do. This year we will do the same, but i was wondering if I should salt the water. I thought i had read somewhere on this site that some people do that, but am having a hard time finding what i thought I read. Any input?

 

[bigredfeather]

Quote:
I do not use salt in the water, but you certainly could, as you're right, I have seen that on here before as well.

 

[tiny529]

This post was really helpful. We are just in the "considering" stage of meat chickens and I've been so back and forth on what to try. We have a hatchery in town that does Cornish X and K-22, so we figured on trying a few of each in the spring and see how it goes.

Can this post be stickied? It would be nice to easily refer to it again without having to search for it.