I just posted this on another thread, but thought I would post here too since this seems to be the thread for cold weather meat birds!
We are doing the same thing, raising our own meat chickens. We raised two batches this year, one we got at the end of June and they did great, even with temps soaring to over a 100 this summer (however, we had them in a shady spot and always kept plenty of fresh water supplied).
Our second batch we are still raising, we got them the end of September and they just turned 9 weeks old yesterday. They are doing so poorly! We have been trying to figure out why they are not doing as well as the first batch and have come to the conclusion it is two things - cold temps (down in the 20's at night - we do have a red-light heat lamp on them, but they are still using valuable growing energy to stay warm) and less sunlight so they are not getting as much feed as the first batch.
Because we use a
Brinsea EcoGlow heater instead of a heat lamp when they are young, we never even considered adding supplemental light as that was one of the many reasons we decided to go with the EcoGlow. When it got colder and they outgrew the EcoGlow and we added the heat lamp, we decided on the red-light to prevent any pecking problems.
Now we are considering adding a light to increase their eating hours because they are not even close to the size of our first batch and we wanted to process them about the same age (10 1/2 weeks)... now we are looking at atleast 12-14 to get them just to process size of at least 4ish pounds! (our first batch carcass weight was about 8 pounds each!)
We want to raise at least 50 meat chickens a year, and wanted to be able to do that in 2 batches of 25 (so as not to have too many to process each time). I had planned on doing a spring and a fall batch, but after this experience, I am going to do early and late summer batches. I am hoping a batch in April to be ready by July and a batch in July to be ready by October.
Our plan for this coming year is to build a hoop coop. Part of it will be covered either with a tarp or with something more permanent/solid and part left open for the run area. We are going to make it 3 panels (so I think that would mean 8 x 12). I am planning on letting them free range some of the time - we free range all of our birds. We may or may not move the hoop coop around, we will see how that goes (we do have a pasture space that we can move it on). I want the chickens to process at 6-8 pounds carcass weight, so I am planning on them being 10-12 weeks old.
Next year we will raise Cornish cross meat chickens while I experiment with breeding our own dual-purpose meat chicks. I want to be able to let a few hens raise several batches of chicks each year and see how long it takes them to get to a 4-6 pound carcass weight. I have mostly dual purpose hens and will be putting a White Plymouth Rock, possibly a White Giant and maybe a White Laced Red Cornish roos over them.
I have even had the idea of waiting until one of my hens goes broody to order the Cornish Cross and stuffing them under her when they arrive
I have read success stories of people doing that - and have had my own success story putting a turkey poult under a broody chicken. If I am able to do that, I would get only 10 or 15 cornish chicks at a time and once they are big enough they would be free ranged with the rest of the chickens, penned in the coop at night.
