Raising Cornish Cross Meat Birds: Butchering Time
So it has been quite some time since my last update on our meat bird experiment. I figured maybe a quick recap of what we were trying to do was in order. We brought home a bunch of Cornish Cross chicks in the spring. We wanted to raise them as meat birds but do it a little differently than most of the more intensive methods I have seen.
Our feeding regimen was fermented grain from a local grainery plus lots of skimmed milk from Mabel, weeds from the garden, and kitchen scraps. We ground the grain for the first six weeks or so of their lives and then moved onto whole grain.
Their living situation provided them with a coop and a large run. We covered their run with bird netting to keep out the most common aerial predators.
At around 10 weeks of age it became evident that they were not going to do well through the heat. We had an early onset of hot temperatures this year and that hot week at the very end of May/beginning of June saw us lose a few birds to what appeared to be straight up heat stroke/death. So we began butchering them in June at around ten weeks of age. We started with the larger roosters and worked our way down from there over the next three to four weeks.
We aren’t set up for large scale processing so we would butcher 4-5 birds two or three times per week. We managed to finish them all off by about 12-13 weeks of age with a simple assembly line of kill, pluck, gut, and bag.
We don’t have a freezer so we did what you might call off-grid processing, which I will get to in the next post, Lord willing. I never did weigh one – we don’t even own a kitchen scale – but they were comparable in size to the Mary’s Organic Chickens we have purchased so I would estimate they weighed about 3.5 – 5 lb all dressed out, depending on the week they were butchered.
I was pleasantly surprised with how smoothly butchering went, for the most part. These birds are pretty easy to pluck but still, that was always the bottleneck as far as speed goes. We discussed how we would like to get a better setup if we do this again, perhaps with a cone killing station rather than a chopping off of the head.
I think all in all we ended up butchering around 28 birds. We lost quite a few to the heat the last few weeks and some to predators prior to setting up the bird netting. With the bird netting and an earlier (or later in the year) raising of birds, these things may be mitigated against in the future.
But in the end, we are very pleased with how the whole process turned out. I will share some of the cost breakdown per bird and how we processed them in a future post, Lord willing. But it was well worth it for us and we are very thankful for the meat and broth provisions.