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This summer has been rough…with our crazy busy schedule we ended up losing more chicks then I had hoped, mostly due to hawks and raccoons. However, we currently have 7 chicks of varying ages in the meatbird run! These birds seem to grow so slowly for the first 3-4 weeks (at least for meat...

I had wondered how my NH birds would stack up against the other birds at the county fair...turns out, pretty well :) Pretty Boy, the 11 month old cockerel, took 2nd place in his class (and that was even with some unwanted little feathers on his legs...can't remember what the judge called them?)...

The new batch of chicks were weighed today at 4 weeks old. They are roughly 0.1 to 0.2 pounds ahead of the last batch, so I think the meat bird feed is making a difference.

Update: While I was entering the new batch of 5 chicks into my flock management software, I made it a point to go back and look at my gender guesses on the five remaining chicks from the June 1 hatch based on their coloration variations -- I'm happy to report that out of 4 birds, I had 100%...

Meat bird crumbles purchased this morning…we will see how the weights do, and I am also adding a reminder to weigh the newly hatched chicks at 4 weeks and see what they weigh, as that will eliminate the weather factor for the most part (since both batches are being raised in the hot humid...

Interesting! Might have to prioritize a trip to the feed store this evening!

To me they feel like they’re growing super slow compared to the other batches…but then I looked back at hatch date and realized they’re only 3 to 4 weeks old right now; I weighed two of them today, they’re just under a pound. I don’t have any weights from previous batches at this age, so I’m not...

I didn’t get any pictures, I just noticed it as I picked up the carcass, which happened to be torn open on the bottom of the abdomen, right where I cut when butchering, and there was so many flies around I was just trying to get them moved as quickly as possible. I was mentally comparing her to...

Picture of the cuties in the brooder, just because…

Another update: we've been battling a rash of nightly raccoon attacks; while my coop of meat birds has been mostly untouched compared to the layer coop, for whatever reason, one night 4 of my hens/pullets didn't go into the coop, so when my son closed it after dark, they were locked out. Lost...

Quick update: one of the young pullets has started laying. Leg banded everyone yesterday to help determine which one it is, because she just earned herself a free pass as a lifetime member of the flock…she started laying right at four months old!! All the pullets I held back, even the couple...

For those wondering how these hens are laying…my husband thinks I’m crazy that I have not one, but THREE of my cameras on their nest — but I have been able to confirm that one of them has laid 4 eggs in the past 12 days (with two of those being double-yolked eggs) and the other one has laid 8...

The hen I processed around 7 months had normal looking insides and no more internal fat than the ones I just processed at 14 weeks. That being said, obviously a lot can change in 4 months. I was planning on processing one of my 7 month old roosters soon, but maybe I will just hold on to him...

I remember wondering if they were ever going to start laying lol

I don’t have it exactly noted, but looking it up with other events I remember happening before/after, I think they were right at 6 months when they started laying. And we incubated about 6 weeks after they started laying…two chicks from two eggs set for that batch 😁

They were every bit of six or seven months before they started laying. Let me check and see if I made note of when they started. It was a couple months before we incubated, not because of waiting for eggs to stabilize or anything, but simply because we had layer eggs in the incubator before that...

7 birds processed today — processed weights of 4.3 to 6.5, with processed weights being 55-60% of live weight. Had planned to do 9 but weather caused issues, so two hens got a pass. May process them later, may let them become layers. May just wait until point of lay to process the last two to...

Weighed all the meat birds tonight before processing the last nine tomorrow… 15 weeks old on Monday…males range between 9.9 to 11.7 pounds live weight; females range 7.4 to 8.6 pounds. I thought about giving the females a few more weeks, but since only three of them are going to be processed...

Thanks so much! This helps a ton!

Do you know of any videos or pictures or anything that show this way of skinning? I found some black and white drawings showing the direction to make cuts but not really much other than that where I can actually see what they’re doing. Right now I skin on a table, starting at the neck, but I’d...