Raising Meat Chickens

Raising Meat Chickens

Raising meat chickens can be both gratifying and taxing. On the one hand, you have absolute control over what your chickens have eaten, and you also know that they were raised in humane conditions. On the other hand, you can get emotionally attached to them, and then it can be difficult to kill them.

Being more in-touch with the way in which meat gets to your table will make every piece of meat you eat more meaningful. This process is important both for thoughtful consumers and people interested in frugal living.

Raising Chickens

Raising chickens is a commitment, but the benefits you reap from the process can far outweigh the investment. For instance, when you’re raising meat chickens, you’re getting a higher quality product at a lower cost than at the store.

Your initial investment should not deter you from the project if you intend to pursue it over many years because the savings you reap far cancel out any initial output. Raising meat chickens involves the same basic housing, feeding, and possibly incubating requirements as raising egg laying chickens, so even if you decide at a later time that meat chickens are not for you, you can still keep a few chickens to provide you with eggs.

The thing about raising chickens is that chickens, like most animals, have developed to survive. There is no exact and perfect way to raise them. Certainly, young chicks need to be kept warm, and all chickens need certain nutrients, but as long as you prepare yourself before you get your chickens, they’ll be just fine!

As daunting as the process may seem, a single book about raising meat chickens will tell you everything you need to know. So, head to your local library and get started!

Broiler Chickens

When you’re raising meat chickens, you might consider raising broiler chickens. Rather than chickens that both produce both eggs and meat, these chickens convert most of their energy to becoming larger. When you buy a chicken from the store, that chicken is most likely a Cornish-Rock.

These broiler chickens can be ready to eat in only eight weeks, which means that you invest less time in raising them. However, there are a few other chicken breeds that can be used for meat production.

These include Cornish Game, Jersey Giant, and Bresse chickens. These chickens each have different benefits. For example, Bresse chickens are highly valued for their gourmet meat, and so they’re highly valuable.

Jersey Giants, on the other hand, are extremely large. When you’re choosing the chicken breed you intend to use, you should also consider dual-purpose breeds to maximize the use you get out of your chickens.

Free Range Chickens

When you buy a chicken at the store in the US, the label “free range” can be applied pretty loosely. The chickens that are farmed commercially need only have access to the outdoors to be labeled free range. Most commonly this means that there are hundreds of chickens in a huge shed, with one door open way on the other side, with only bare dirt to stand on if the chicken can fight it's way outside.

While we tend to throw around the term free range to mean maximally humane, raising free-range chickens may not actually suit your chickens best. True free-range chickens have their movement minimally limited by fences. This can be a pretty big problem for anyone with raccoons or other predators. So, free range isn’t always the best plan.

We let our girls outside during the day in good weather, when we are home, which is most of the time. At night they put themselves to bed in the good strong henhouse and we close and lock the door. This is the free range systems that works very well for out chickens, and they lay great tasting eggs!

What you might consider if you’re concerned about your chickens’ welfare is whether or not they could be happy with a chicken tractor or being yarded. Most people who aren’t running a commercial chicken operation don’t keep hundreds of chickens at a time. With a small number of chickens, you have lots of options for keeping them safe and penned while still giving them plenty of room for exercise and foraging.

When you’re raising meat chickens, it’s really only your own conscience that you need to satisfy in order to eat them. Certainly you want them to have happy lives, and to live under humane conditions, but free range isn’t the only solution to that problem.

If your chickens aren’t cannibalizing each other and they have plenty of room in a pen, you can supplement their diet with pellets and have no worries about their welfare. Part of raising responsible meat chickens is looking for rational and compassionate ways to deal with animals. Given the different options, you will certainly find something that works for you.

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