My wife saw a post about these chickens on a forum she monitors. The writer claimed that the chickens were ready for slaughter at 6 weeks. She was impressed and we tried them. We ordered 24 chickens from Schrock's Mother Goose Hatchery. In short order we received a box at the post office with 26 chicks. The two extra were to allow for attrition in shipping. One arrived dead in the box, the second died in the brooder for no apparent reason.
They looked much like any other chicken. The first difference noticeable was that they ate voraciously. They also produce an incredible amount of manure. They lasted in the brooder one week. The second week they lived in a small, moveable pen. For the last 4 weeks they lived in a small pen we built for them (scroll down to picture at post on this board).
By habit they are sedentary. They would be happy to lay by the feeder and eat, getting up only to drink. I believe we put six bags of game bird food into them, and they were ready for slaughter at 6 weeks, as promised. The first week we gave them medicated game bird starter. I prefer to use a medicated starter here just to give new chicks a leg up on the local disease pool. The 5 remaining bags were game bird grower (unmedicated). They continued to produce a great deal of manure. We added straw to the floor of their pen every two or three days. I fed them twice a day – usually a matter of topping off a 10 lb. feeder twice a day. They required fresh water once a day. Other than that, they didn’t require any attention. They were uninterested in grazing, didn’t know what to do with stale bread we threw into their pen, and had no interest in perching. Occasionally cockerels would face off in mock fights, but they preferred to eat and lay about.
We started slaughter at the age of 6 weeks and a day. We hadn’t slaughtered chickens in six months or a year, so the first two went kind of slow. By the end of the run we were down to 20 minutes a bird; from clucking in a cage to a fully dressed carcass headed indoors for processing. I apologize for not having hard weights but we don’t have a scale at this time. Maybe 5 or 6 lbs, dressed, my wife estimates. I talked to a fellow at the CoOp one day, when buying feed, and he told me about a customer that raised Cornish crosses (a very similar breed, by reputation). This customer raised the birds in a house on a wooden floor covered with wood shavings. The Cornish crosses were ready for slaughter in six weeks, but he didn’t get them all done at that time. The customer gave the fellow at the CoOp an older bird that fed seven people at dinner – he compared it to a turkey.
Slaughter was slightly different from previous experiences I’ve had. My past experience has been with turkeys and buff orpingtons. Both birds seemed to have a fully packed abdomen, which made opening the abdomen and organ removal a task requiring a little finesse to avoid puncturing bowel or other organs. The white mountain broiler seemed to have ample empty room and this was the easy part of butchering. The tricky part with these birds was dressing the neck and crop removal. The breast was so large, and the passage along the neck so tight that some time and care had to be taken in freeing the crop and opening the chest cavity from the top. Both I and my wife are getting a little long in the tooth. We could have slaughtered and processed all of them in a day, but it would have been exhausting. We settled for 4-6 birds a day over the course of a week.
So, let’s talk dollars and cents… I figure about six bags of high protein feed – game bird food – at $14.00 a bag (to be pessimistic) which comes out to $84. Add to that the cost of the birds – about $1.00 each (including freight) to get each chick here – a total outlay of $108.00. A neighbor insisted on buying three fully dressed chickens for $6.00 each, so a total worth of product at $144.00. From a strictly financial point of view, you could not make a living at this on a small scale, but from the perspective of good quality meat added to the freezer, this is a decent value. I have not counted expenses in straw – less than a full bale at $5.00 a bale, but we have also gotten manure and the leftovers from slaughter – which will go into the compost bin and grow some fine vegetables for us in a year or so.
Unless we decide to experiment with something else, we will probably run another two to four dozen birds next year.
Regards,
Pat