My Thoughts on Raising Meat Birds

I would definitely recommend raising your own roosters for butchering (as opposed to ordering mass quantities from a hatchery). We ordered 100 Buff Orpington cockerels from the hatchery, and it was a mess from start to finish. Checking 100 chicks for pasty butt every day is a long, tedious chore. Coccidiosis is a nightmare (it claimed about half the flock), and when you are away from home 12+ hours a day, it's super hard to find time to process the birds once they reach full size. Then, if they reach sexual maturity before you get time to harvest them, you have a fighting mob on your hands. If we'd processed them last September as planned, we'd have had a freezer FULL of nice, plump chickens. We didn't make that deadline, and ended up overwintering them, which was hard on us all. We lost another half of the flock over the course of the winter, mostly from their vicious fighting. They refused to even leave the roost on the coldest days of winter, so they lost weight. With spring they started ranging out much better, but they were fighting one another a lot, and constantly running/chasing. There is just no way we could get them back up to the size they were in the fall, before this much testosterone had kicked in.

I do not use the "hybrid crosses" because I feel that the creation of such birds is inhumane. Their bodies grow so much faster than their internal organs can support. Their bones grow too quickly and are susceptible to breakage, and can you just imagine the growing pains they experience?! All this rapid growth is bound to produce birds with inferior health. Their little livers cannot keep up with the purification needs of a full sized bird, to give one example. For all these reasons, we stick with heritage breeds of chickens. Last year I bought Buff Orpingtons and Black Australorps. This year I am doing my best to get Welsummer pullets. I will probably get some sort of bantam hen(s) to be setters for me, and we will butcher the cockerels that are born, but we won't buy cockerels for meat making purposes again. (I know, never say never...)