Keeping Chickens for Meat

29th March 2018
I am keeping a diary of the progress of Ewe 0004 and her lamb, but I am going to publish it all at once when I know what the outcome will be. As you can tell, we still have her but her future is unclear.

For now, meat chickens.

Ixworths
We have a trio of Ixworth chickens from which we have been hatching eggs for the last couple of years. We have a conveyor belt going, 18 eggs into the incubator, from which typically 12 have been hatching. We rear them for the first four weeks indoors in an old hamster cage under an electric hen, a heat pad under which the chicks can take shelter.
After four weeks, the next batch of eggs are hatching and need the electric hen. So they go into the garage in a brooder ring, a giant Correx circle. Heat comes from an overhead heat lamp.
When they are ready, they go down to the main chicken pen, but in their own small compound until the other chickens have got used to them and they are big enough to go free range.

This has been pretty successful for the last couple of years, but to be honest we have been getting a lot more leg meat than breast. Now I like legs, but I like a bit of breast too!

This left us in a quandary. Perhaps the only way to get a bird with a decent breast is to be cruel and raise something that is so inbred that it has heart problems and can't stand on its own two legs.
If this were the case, then maybe we should accept the Ixworths as the best option or stick to Muscovy ducks for meat instead.

Industrial Chickens
I refuse to call these anything else. Chicken production is not farming, it is an industrial process and it is not pretty.
Four months ago we took on a dozen chicks which had come from a unit. These birds are bought in as day olds and reared 50000 at a time until about four weeks old, then they go off somewhere else to be further fattened up. But they are not destined for roast chickens, they are for processing. They are given as much food and water as possible and as little exercise as possible. High mortality is an accepted part of this.

The birds we got did not profit the unit they came from. They were taken into a school to show the children and then could not go back into the unit because of biosecurity.
I was curious as to how they would fare if reared alongside our other free range chickens.
They are now 18 weeks old and getting big. So far there has been nothing cruel about keeping them. Yes, they eat a lot and drink a lot, but as long as they are encouraged to roam and look for their food then they don't just sit there. They have legs like tree trunks and are clearly very big-breasted. Their growth has been much quicker than the Ixworths too.
In fact, they look ready to go now. If they get much heavier they do look like they might struggle, so we will probably cull a couple of them quite soon and see just how much meat is hiding under those feathers.

'Commercial' chickens
With our industrial chickens almost ready to go in the freezer and with spring upon us (though you wouldn't know it), we needed to think about 2018's plan for meat chickens.
Friends of ours have been going through a similar process of trying to find the right meat birds and each year buy in day old chicks. These are of no specific breed, but instead have a number assigned to their strain.
Our friends have been happy with these 'commercial' chickens so far, so we asked them to get some in for us this year.
And so today they arrived. Here they are.

For the next four weeks we will have a noisy and occasionally smelly front hallway.