Saturday, October 10, 2015

Chickens 2015

It is kind of amazing that I even raised meat birds this year.  But they did get ordered and they were raised and small that they were, they were butchered.  I started with 21 birds and ended with 20, 10 males and 10 females.  Jilleen and I butchered 10 and 1 hen at 9 weeks and Korleskis and Turners helped butcher the remaining 10 and 2 other hens at 9.5 weeks.  We also did Turner's 3 hens that day as well.

So, I kept bad records on food this year.  Like I'm not 100% on how many bags we went through.  It was either 7 or 8 or 9...seriously, not good records.  I won't have an exact numbers, but will do a high/low instead I think.

So the most possible I spent on food and chicks was $178.36, but I believe that includes 3 bags of food for the hens.  The least possible I spent was around $140.  They just got Farm and Fleet food, but it was fermented with apple cider vinegar for most of their life.  They were slowed down at the beginning on purpose, but also at the end because I could not take care of them for about 2 weeks due to my foot impaling issue.

Total weight on the 20 meat birds was 78 pounds, 10 oz, which is about 1 pound more than my 15 birds did last year.  The first group of males averaged just over 4.1 pounds, the second group of females averaged around 3.7 pounds.  We got an additional 2 lbs, 6 oz of liver and hearts for consumption and saved the 40 feet as well.

We butchered 3 of our old laying hens and they weighed out at 10 lbs, 4 oz.  The variance was crazy...the Wellsumer was 1 lb, 14 oz, one of the Black Austrolorps was 4 lbs, 10 ozs!

We kept 18 birds, giving two to the helper families.  We also butchered the three additional hens which ended up around 8 lbs total.

So meat chicken totals are somewhere between $2.26/lb and $1.77.  Honestly I think it is closer to the 1.77, which is right where it was last year.  Hopefully I'll keep better records next year and hopefully they can grow out as well as they did last year!  But again, I am very grateful to have almost 90 pounds of home grown meat ready for my family to enjoy!