Black australorp broilers, part 1
We slaughtered our two biggest
cockerels on Monday to get a feel for
whether we should plan to kill all the birds from flock 1 this week or
wait a little longer. My goal is to get a two pound dressed
carcass,
and our birds are still a little shy of the mark at 1.86 pounds apiece,
so most of our flock will get a short reprieve.
Although the cockerels
were light weight, I was thrilled to see that their feed to meat
conversion ratio was 4.5 : 1 --- vastly lower than what we got last
year with dark cornish and also lower than published figures for any
broiler breeds other than cornish cross. Stay tuned to our chicken blog this week for more serious
number crunching.
In
addition to saving money on feed, these permaculture pastured chickens
will give us higher quality meat. I know it sounds unscientific,
but I'm starting to get a gut feeling for the gestalt of a healthy
chicken (probably based on cleanliness of the carcass and uniformity of
the internal organs.) As I pored over these birds' entrails, I
was so pleased with their quality that I cooked some chicken neck and
liver stew for supper. Sounds a bit crazy, but tasted pretty good.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We cooked one of ours a few weeks ago, and were really happy with it as well. Then last week, foxes got into our run and slaughtered our whole flock! Grr. They killed about 20 chickens and 2 ducks, and only took 2 chickens with them. Such a waste!
So, back to the drawing board for some fox-proof pens and we'll start rebuilding the flock.