Author: Anna & Mark

Chicken growth rate

August 1, 2011 Posts 2 Comments

Chickens roostingWe
keep a close eye on our flock, and I’ve started noticing that chickens
don’t hatch from the egg and grow steadily until they reach full
size.  Instead, just like humans, they go through a series of
growth spurts.



My obsessive
note-keeping on feed
conversion rates as we
slaughtered our broilers confirmed my observation.  Just like last
year, I got the best feed to meat ratio from birds just shy of or right
at 12 weeks.  As our pullets and cockerels reached the end of
their third month of life, they were growing so fast that I felt like I
could see a difference in size every day.  Just a week later,
though, the chickens hadn’t grown at all, which set my feed to meat
ratio plummeting.  No wonder heritage breed broilers were
traditionally slaughtered at or before 12 weeks — that’s simply the
economical way to raise them.


Chicken growth rate

After extensive internet
searching, I compiled the data above, showing
the growth rate of various breeds of chickens over time.  Cornish
Cross, of course, is the primary commercial broiler breed, Paraiso
Padres is a Brazilian broiler, and ISA is a commercial brown egg layer.



Chicken tractorWhat I found interesting about
the chart is that you see the growth
curve peak at 6 to 10 weeks for each type of chicken.  This is why
the big chicken farmers kill their broilers at 6 weeks — their
chickens have reached the peak of their growing curve and will probably
start eating more feed for each pound they put on in the future. 
Of course, with heritage breeds (and especially if growing layers for
meat), you have to weigh the con of lower feed to meat conversion rate
with the pro of a heavier bird that’s more worth your while to
slaughter and dress.



What I don’t know is
when (or if) further growth spurts occur, and
whether if we waited until the traditional fryer age (14 to 20 weeks),
grain conversion efficiency would rebound.  I suspect that people
grew chickens to the fryer stage not for efficiency, but to allow the
characteristics of individual birds to become clearer so that they
could cull  those they were less interested in from the flock, but
perhaps chickens go through another growth spurt?


Our chicken waterer makes raising broilers a
breeze, cutting daily chore time in half.

Butternut squash in the chicken pasture

July 29, 2011 Posts No Comments
Damaged butternut

Trellised butternutOf all the annuals I’ve
planted in the chicken pastures, the most appropriate seem to be
butternuts.  (Actually, I didn’t plant them — volunteers
came up from the compost pile.)



The chickens were absent
from the pasture long enough for the squash leaves to get big and
spiny, so when the flock was rotated in, the birds mostly left the
butternut plants alone.  They did damage the developing fruits so
much that the squash won’t be able to be harvested for humans — the
day after taking the first photo, that butternut was about a quarter
eaten by our smart chickens.  But that’s a good thing since the goal of
plantings in the chicken pasture is to make chicken food.



In fact, the butternut
vines that made a jailbreak and tried to enter the main garden (which I
then trellised up the pasture fence) will probably make some extra
squash for us.  So I guess our butternut was a dual purpose
planting — some for the chickens and some for the humans.



Broken sunflowerWhat failed?  Most of
the sunflowers were too shaded to do much, but a few made big
blooms…then got trampled by our ravenous hordes.



The ground
cherries came up and
got lost in the weeds.  They might still be there — I’ll know
come fall if their distinctive fruits stand out.



Grain amaranth and pearl
millet either didn’t come up or didn’t grow fast enough to reach above
the weeds.  I planted all of these annuals in spots scratched bare
by the flock, but it didn’t take long for the wild pasture plants to
regain their toehold on the empty ground.



Despite the butternut
success, I still think that planting
perennials and building the diversity of the chicken pasture is a
better strategy than
trying to plant annuals specifically for the chickens.  But it’s
good to know that at least one plant can stand up to moderate chicken
abuse.


Our chicken waterer kept the flock happy as they
explored their new pasture.

How to catch chickens

July 25, 2011 Posts 1 Comment

Stalking a chickenNow and then, you’ll need to
separate a chicken from the flock.  For us, this happens when a
chicken is being picked on (unheard of now that our chicken waterer gives the flock something
else to peck at) or when we want to eat the chicken for dinner the next
day.  We’ve tried all of the hard ways to catch a chicken, and
here are the ones that really don’t work:

  • Run after a chicken. 
    Boy is this funny to watch!  We’re actually able to catch our
    Golden Comet hens this way, but only because they crouch down when we
    get close.
  • Throw a towel or sheet over the
    chicken    .  Although this technique works to some extent if
    you’re in an enclosed space (like a coop), it still tends to resemble a
    Three Stooges routine.

Holding a chicken
I’ve read that old timey farmers had a tool with a long handle and a
loop on the end that would snag a chicken’s foot and make it trip, but
I’ve always been afraid to try this for fear I’d injure the bird’s
leg.  Instead, when we think far enough ahead, we do it the easy
way — just grab the chicken off its perch at night.  Once night
has fully fallen, chickens don’t want to move because they won’t be
able to see to get back up to their safe roost, so they just let you
pick them up.  (Be sure to hold your hands around the chicken’s
wings in case it gets excited.)



You probably don’t want
to kill your chicken at 9 pm (and shouldn’t anyway since it’s best to
keep them off food overnight so that they have an empty crop, making
the carcass easier to clean.)  So you’ll also need an isolation
pen.  A wire cage can work, but Mark likes to keep our chickens as
happy as possible even when they’re on their way to the slaughtering
block, so he separated off a small section of one of our chicken
tractors to give the birds a more gentle spot to spend the
night.  By keeping this space small and making the opening on the
top, it was easy to grab our cockerels when we wanted them.

Chicken isolation pen