Raising Cornish-Cross Meat Birds: Week 9

I actually had to go back and look at the date of my last post to see how old these birds are. It turns out it’s been just about a month since our last update and things have definitely changed.

The first major change is that we got netting up over the whole chicken run. We were just starting that process last month and, not hours after I hit publish on that update, I came out to find a hawk going after one of the chickens. So that afternoon we all got out there and helped Stewart get the netting up. With hawks being one of our major predators, this has been a huge factor in the fact that, by last count, it seems we still have 35-36 chickens.

This is the netting we found fairly reasonably and that, Lord willing, we hope to get multi-year usage from.

The other major change is that the chickens’ growth rate has gone down. It was really noticeable about three weeks ago when all of a sudden they just seemed to plateau. So I upped their fermented wheat ration and skim milk ration and it seems to be helping… a bit.

To be clear, many people start butchering their Cornish-Cross chickens at this age. I would assume that by feeding the higher protein concentrate feeds, the chickens grow larger faster, since the general consensus is that more protein = more muscle. At this point, we are thinking we will start butchering some within a couple of weeks and end with a larger batch towards the beginning of July to finish off the whole process.

I want to weigh one because they seem to look bigger in real life than what these pictures represent. Even if we end up butchering at the 12-14 week point, I am really grateful for the way this whole process has worked out. It was totally experimental, to be sure. But in my very rough calculations, we are raising chickens at a fraction of the cost it would take to do it with commercial feeds. And that, for us, is worth the extra time it takes to raise the birds.

But we’ll see how things pan out when butchering time comes. And thank you all so much for your continued insights into raising meet birds. Feel free to share more input, struggles, or experiences in the comments!