Our First Processing Experience! (Pics)

[HHandbasket]

Your husband and my husband are a LOT alike. I have to show him this thread.... I bet he copies your husband's air compressor technique when the time comes for us to process our first birds. We do not plan to try that until sometime next year, though.

 

[HHandbasket]

BTW, I just looked at your location... now I know why my DH is so much like yours! Farmer Lew is from Lake Charles... I'm not quite sure where Pride is. We were in Baton Rouge for 3 years until Katrina and Rita chased us back out to California.

 

[NonnasBabies]

Quote:
Small world. Pride is right outside of Baton Rouge by Zachary.

 

[Neil Grassbaugh]

I became curious about the economics of this.

All the information I could find was that a typical commercial strain brown egg laying sexlink female is expected to need 12.4 lbs of feed to get to 17 weeks of age. POL.
These birds feed supply is restricted just a little to make sure that they are all a uniform size when they go to the layer house. So fed ad lib they will eat a little more.

There is no data on what feed it takes to raise the brothers of these layers. But since they start to outdistance their sisters in size at about 8 weeks of age it is reasonable to assume that they will eat considerably more in the same time period.

Looking at the aforementioned; would it be reasonable to assume that 20 week old cockerels ate 15lbs of feed to get to that stage? That would be about 4.25 lbs of feed to produce a pount of RTC meat.

The typical 42 day old broiler chicken will average 5.75 lbs live weight and it will eat just about 10 lbs of feed (1.75 FCR) to get there . The eviscerated weight of this average bird will be about 75% or about 4.3 lbs. This equates to 2.3 lbs of feed per pound of meat.

So it looks like it takes somewhat more than twice as much feed alone to produce sex link male meat as it does broiler chicken meat.

It also requires up to six months rather than six weeks to get to the end of the growing stage.

Three questions quickly come to my mind-
How much better can they possibly taste?
Why would I want to buy twice as much feed?
Why would I want to raise them for six months, well beyond the stage where they start to become difficult to deal with.

 

[NonnasBabies]

That's kind of the million dollar question isn't it???

Three questions quickly come to my mind-
How much better can they possibly taste?
Why would I want to buy twice as much feed?
Why would I want to raise them for six months, well beyond the stage where they start to become difficult to deal with.

Never had a Cornish X so I don't know what the comparison in taste is.

Not sure why YOU would but for me it was raising roo's from a hatch that we did ourselves. What else would you do with your extra roo's???

Not really sure why they would be difficult. I had them in a seperate pen the crowing didn't bother me at all!! Yes they prob did eat more feed but so what. For some people they try to go the cheapest route possible and that's fine. For others it's a substainable way to live and treat your animals! And guess what?? I'll keep on doing it. As long as you hatch your own chickens then you'll always have extra roos to contend with!!​

 

[coralanna]

I see this topic kinda got off track. I do have a question about skinning the chickens. Do you just pierce the skin once and keep it going till it pops twice. Also where do you usually put the air inflater in. Thanks for your reply`s.

Alan

 

[coralanna]

just an added look seems like you removed the wings. not a problem loosing the wings since they are mostly skin and bone anyway.

Thanks

 

[NonnasBabies]

Quote:
He had the chicken on it's back and just pierced it with the needle right around the breast area. You'll see it'll blow up like a ballon and when the air gets down towards the end of the legs is when you'll hear the 2 pops.

 

[NonnasBabies]

Quote:
Yeah we went ahead and removed the wings. That was one of the hardest places to get the skin off of. And your right there's not much meat on there.

 

[coralanna]

Thank you very much. I will give it a try and it looks like you don`t have to take the feathers off so that`s cool.

Alan