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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