When to butcher broilers

If we were raising Cornish Crosses, our eight week old cockerels would be just about ready for slaughter.  Instead, our Dark Cornish broilers are starting to get heavy (and we even heard one crow!) but are still at least a month away from butchering.

Actually, I'm not quite sure when we should plan to eat them --- some folks seem to butcher their Dark Cornish cockerels at 12 weeks for a small bird, while others keep them growing until 20 weeks.  Unless someone chimes in with their own experiences, we'll probably slaughter our birds in three stages to see how weight and taste varies between 12 week, 16 week, and 20 week old birds.

So far, we've spent about $2 per chick on feed and the same again on buying the chicks, proving everyone right that it's not really cost effective to raise slow breed chickens as broilers compared to buying commercial meat at the grocery store.  Large scale production of organic Cornish crosses ranges from $5 to $6 per bird raised to slaughter age --- ours aren't quite organic since we didn't pony up the extra money for organic feed, but I figure the bugs they eat makes them about as healthy for us as commerical organic chickens.  I'll let you know the final cost per bird, weight, and taste test results when the time comes.

Of course, our costs would go way down if we managed to get a breeding pair and raise our own chicks in later years.  We still can't tell if any females slipped in amid the males, but if our broilers are as tasty as they look, we'll work toward having a self-sustaining flock.