Meat Chickens - An Update

This post is a bit delayed and since these photos were taken the chickens have grown a lot and I will no doubt be posting about them again very soon.
So where are we at with the journey and what have we learnt so far.
Well I can tell you one thing for sure, these little buggers eat a lot!  In fact all they do is eat, poop, drink and sleep.
We are really treating this as an experiment in a a number of areas:
How do we feel about raising our own meat and butchering it ourselves?
How do we feel about a commercial breed vs a heritage breed for meat?
How much does it actually cost? Does this save us any money
What are the yeilds from the birds?
What is the meat vs fat ratio?
And importantly how do they taste?
It will be a while before we can answer all of these questions but we have already made some observations.

"What you lookin at?"

There are some behaviours that these chickens exhibit that I think has to do with the comercial breed and the rate at which they grow.  They seem to need to streatch a lot for one thing and you often see the streaching out a wing or leg.  Now I have to be realistic in the fact that we do not usually spend as much time looking at baby chickens (these ones spent a few weeks inside) and perhaps all little chickens spend time stretching but I am not convinced it would be so often.

They also seem to spend a heck of a lot of time sitting down.  This is something we knew to expect as the commercial breeds are so heavy.

It is always dinner time.

One final thing that has become obvious is that there can be big differences in the size between some of the chickens.  They were all hatched over two days but some of the chicks are twice the size of others.  Check out the difference between the three in the photo below.

The chicks are now living in their outside residence and I am quite glad to have them, the noise and (yes mum) the smell gone.  We have had some cool weather lately so they still have a light to keep them warm but this week should be the last week for that too since they are now fully feathered.

NB Apologies if there are spelling mistakes but blogger does not want to check it for me, grrrr.