Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Meat chickens 2018

Just finished cleaning up from our morning of butchering.  It was a good run, starting about 6:30 and done with the butchering and a lot of the cleaning up of equipment done by 9!  We took a bit of a break while our hatchet man got taken home and I dealt with the gizzards and such.  Then we did some fiddly cleaning and the final bagging, weighing and they headed to the freezer.  We had two adults, one 15 year old who just did the hatchet part, and an 11 year old observer/helper with legs and oil glands.

I ordered 23 cockerels this year, got 23 (no extra again) with at least one being a female who stayed really small.  Three of them didn't make it to butcher date, one I did take early and it weighed a whopping 2 pounds when skinned and cleaned.  One I had no idea was in trouble, was just gone 3 hours after I last fed it.  The other I knew was having issues, but I had hoped would pull through.  I should have butchered as it was fairly big, but it died.  I did harvest some of the meat to use in our dog food, but am not counting it in numbers at all.

Total costs (all feed was organic from DeLongs): $226.31
1 bag of starter, 6 bags of grower $185.81
23 chicks $40.50

Total break down of meat

2 pounds, 5 oz of cleaned gizzards
4 pounds, 9 oz of livers, hearts and a few feet

20 chickens at 8 weeks, 6 days provided 130.5 pounds of meat and one at 2 pounds = 132.5 pounds of meat in the freezer.

Meat costs $1.70/lb
Including organs (about 7 pounds) $1.62/lb