If you’ve ever had even an inkling of a thought about raising meat birds to put on your dinner table, let me encourage you to go for it! Raising Cornish cross chickens in your backyard isn’t hard but it is a commitment. In this post, I’ll share exactly what that looked like for us including cost of feed.
Disclaimer: this our experience and there are many ways to raise your own backyard birds where your experience will differ from ours. We highly encourage you do your own research. YouTube was very helpful but use discernment! Every vlogger on YT thinks their way is the best way. Only you can decide that.
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Why raise your own meat birds?
Meat birds, Cornish crosses, red rangers, backyard birds, whatever you want to call them, whatever breed; they are mighty pretty frozen in your freezer and delicious on your dinner table.
Many people are allured by convenience living that is sold to us all day every day for the last 50-60 years. It’s so much easier to grab a whole chicken at the store than it is to raise your own, I give you that.
But to our family, the more we’ve learned in the last 4 years about food, where it comes from, how it is grown, the more we’ve been pushed back to our roots of doing it ourselves. Knowing where our food comes from as much as possible is a big deal to our family. Quality over quantity, surely.
We can’t speak for all but for us, it’s the quality of food that’s valuable and why we chose to start raising meat birds.
I don’t have the space for raising meat birds
Yep, you’ll need some room to raise backyard meat birds if you want them to be of good quality by allowing them to forage clean grass or pasture every day. We have 1 acre but we raise our birds on less than 1/2 of it in the backyard.
If you don’t have the space for raising meat birds yourself, start asking around. Join facebook homesteading groups in your area, go to your local farmer’s market, look online. Before we started raising our own, we purchased a monthly pasture raised meat delivery system called Wild Pastures. In fact, we still use them now for pork until our 4 kune kune pigs (being raised on friends’ land) are ready.
If quality, American raised-food is important to you, you’ll do the research and find the solution that best fits your family’s values and budget.
How we raised our Cornish Cross meat birds
We have the land so some homesteading friends asked us to raise their birds alongside ours and they’d come help on processing day. At the time, 60 birds didn’t seem like a bad idea plus the offered help turned into our first “class” and may have opened the door to other adventures soon.
When our baby birds arrived from Dahline Poultry, our 60 we ordered became 71. Thank you, Hunter Dahline, for your generosity! We lost 3 the same day but ended our 2 month adventure with 68. Not too bad!
We built 3 chicken tractors to house all 68 and they worked beautifully.
For the first 3 days, the babies lived in two 64 gallon plastic totes with shavings, feed, water, and heat lamps. They very quickly grew out of those totes!
For the record, this was our second time raising backyard birds. The first time was in the spring with a whopping 15 (16 sent, one died)! Sixteen to 68 is a jump. But spoiler alert: we managed!
By day 3 I realized there isn’t enough room in the totes for 34 birds in each with food and water. So I made the decision to set a tractor inside my husband’s wood shop on a tarp, line it with wood shavings and set up 2 waterers and feeders on blocks so the birds wouldn’t poop in them.
Those babies were so happy to have so much more room! They were running from one end to the other. It brought me a lot of joy to watch them play.
Too big too fast
As you may know, Cornish cross are bred to only take about 8 weeks to reach full maturity. Not much time but also the longest time ever. There’s no planning vacations in those two months unless you’ve got a great homestead sitter!
Sixty-eight birds with one week of full access to feed then 12 hours of eating and 12 hours of fasting = a whole lot of poop. It didn’t take long to realize that even layering in fresh wood chips daily, this space in the wood shop was becoming very smelly!
About 2.5 weeks of living in the shop, I had to make the big decision to move them outside before all of their feathers had come in. A risky decision since the weather was changing much colder that same week. I went through with the move but with a plan.
Carabiner clips. They come in handy when raising birds in the style of chicken tractor we chose. We used carabiners to hang waterers and feeders as well as heat lamps!
The birds barely had their feathers and the nights were going to drop to around 45 degrees. Way too cold for them, so here was my plan:
The Grand Weather Plan
To protect the birds from the cold, I wrapped the open ends with old shower curtains (hey… homesteading is budgeting. It’s using what you have. It’s being innovative!) then old sheets.
I hung the heat lamp inside two tractors and tucked them in each night. Hanging the heat lamps by their hooks onto the cattle panel with carabiner clips allowed the birds to be warm safely as the lamps were high enough up and secured.
Every morning feeding, I’d unwrap the ends of the tractor and get heat-blasted in the face. They were plenty warm on those super cold nights. There was even steam coming from the inside of the tractors when I unwrapped them each morning!
Safe to say my plan worked.
Daily Moves
Each day each tractor was moved at least 2 times but most days 3 times to fresh pasture to forage on. Pasture for us means fresh backyard grasses and such.
Here is where the internet (other blogs) and mine don’t agree. I did not leave my birds feed all day long for 12 hours after week one. I filled up their feeders that held 10 pounds of feed each morning and when it was gone, that was it. The rest of their feed came from foraging on fresh grass and bugs, some scratch feed on the ground, and the occasional damaged garden veggie I’d throw in as a snack they’d chase each other for. Bonus: more exercise during the chase!
Since it was fall when we raised this group (September 11-November 11), pumpkins were a-plenty. Turns out, even meat birds love a good pumpkin too.
When moving each tractor, the birds were encouraged to get up and walk but I noticed our birds seemed to be very active up until about week 7 which is good because chickens who get to move around a lot tend to have better meat.
Cornish crosses are bred to eat and poop. They grow large breast and drumstick meat. Walking around isn’t their favorite activity. Perhaps it was the one feeding a day that was generally gone in less than 1 hour that encouraged them to walk and forage more. As long as you feed them, these birds will eat. If allowed, they’d eat themselves to death.
The birds were split into 3 tractors at day 33 to allow for more space and less poop per tractor space.
Signs of heart failure, bully birds, and runts
Keeping an eye on your flock each time you move them is crucial. You need to be looking for signs of distress or failure to thrive. We had some of each:
Failure to thrive
The first separation came when I noticed two small birds. Every one else appeared to have all of their feathers in except these two in this one tractor. They were noticeably smaller as well. So I moved them out to their own place— my son’s largest rodent trap! Whatever works on your homestead is fair game!
These two “meat heads” we called Little Dude and Little Girl lived in their own digs for about 3 weeks where they were moved to fresh patches of clover daily and slept with a heat lamp at night. I was still able to wrap them each night with something my daughter made in the wood shop plus some shop rags and also feed bags. Those things repurpose wonderfully into weatherproof coverings!
These two got a lot of free range time out of the rodent trap each day. So much so they followed us around the yard a lot. We came to like these two little ones.
I’m happy to report Little Dude and Little Girl caught up in weight mostly and were able to be moved back in with the flock during the last week.
Bully birds
One bully had to be separated for a few chilly nights with little covering and no heat lamp. I don’t even feel bad about typing that. He deserved it after almost killing 3 other birds. He was just plain mean. I watched him waddle over to random birds in his tractor and peck them hard enough to bleed for no reason. So husband reached in and tossed him out one evening. I rigged up the most minimum security prison I could with a water bowl and said if he survives the woodland creatures of the night and neighborhood dogs, then good on him.
He did. For 5 straight nights of cold and one rainy day, I think he learned his lesson. When we added him back to his flock, he didn’t bully any other birds.
Heart failure signs
Three different birds exhibited signs of heart failure which isn’t uncommon in meat birds as they grow so fast and if not active enough, can basically die of a heart attack.
Signs I noticed were: not moving around like others, struggling to breathe (noticeably stretching the neck and gasping), shivering, and getting trampled on by other birds. Again, I removed each bird when I noticed this to the “ICU”. This was a cardboard box with a hardware cloth over top to prevent any possible escaping set inside the wood shop and with a heat lamp.
With each sick bird after 6-8 hours, he/she was fine and after an overnighter just to be safe, were moved back with their flock and survived.
Last Move
In the last week before harvest, we moved all 68 birds, and 2 tractors for weather protection, to the inside of our Premier 1 poultry netting. They were able to forage and be active for their last week as much as they wanted. We did have to move the netting 3 times in that week because of all the poop. After 24 full hours, there was very little fresh pasture even with 100 ft of netting to arrange.
The birds appeared to be very happy with their larger space to roam. But as with any flock of multiple roosters, there was a lot of fighting. Thankfully no wounds! Just jerks trying to prove who was the baddest.
Raising Meat Birds: THE FEED COSTS
Oh my gosh the feed! Feeding 15 in the spring was bad enough but I didn’t realize how much 68 birds would need.
About half way through I realized I needed to switch brands and go ahead and buy all that was needed. Sixty-eight meat heads were going through a 40lb bag of feed within 48 hours when there were 3 feeders to fill. Switching to 50lbs got me barely 3 days per bag.
Raising meat birds will have you mathing so here’s mine:
FEED AMOUNT AND COSTS AVERAGE
Our birds consumed 775lbs of feed from September 11th to November 10th. This was 17 bags of feed with the 18th opened.
Eight bags of 40lb Nutrena Meat Bird feed from Tractor Supply at $21.99 totaled $175.92 before tax.
Eight bags of 50lb Kalmbach Meat Bird feed from Agri Supply at $22.21 totaled $177.68 before tax.
One bag of 50lb Kalmbach Soy free 5 Grain Premium Scratch Feed for afternoon treats at $21.25 before tax.
(I am not including tax because I live on the NC/VA state line and some feed was purchased in NC and some in VA with different tax rates and I didn’t keep up with which bags came from where.)
Feed total was $374.85 which was $5.51 per bird to feed for 8 weeks.
Bird cost was $161.60 for 60 birds but 68 were received and grown out which makes each bird $2.38.
Each bird cost $7.89 to raise.
Of course these costs do not include any materials needed to construct a chicken tractor or netting, wood shavings, nor the cost of waterers and feeders.
NOTE: these feed prices were September through November 2023. For our Spring 2024 birds, I’ve noted the Kalmbach pricing to be $20.38 per 50lb bag.
Processing
A detailed description of processing may have to be another post but for now here is a video of one bird, start to finish. Only part missing from the video is the bagging. We used small American business Texas Poultry Shrink Bags found on Amazon but we bought direct from their site.
Killing cones or processing cones or hugging cones as some call them were handmade for less than $5 each and here is that how-to HERE.
Our first time raising meat birds in the spring we harvested them just before 8 weeks old. They averaged about 3.5 pounds. This fall our birds were harvested just over 8 weeks and they averaged about 4.5 pounds with a few being over 5lbs. Not too bad.
These weights above are after processing and then bagged.
They say you can go over 8 weeks but I could tell my birds didn’t need much more time. Two of 3 heart failure birdies were in week 7 that I was able to nurse to health. We are pleased with how well 68 birds were raised, that we didn’t lose any, and their size was nice for our family of 4.
In Summary
I’m not sure I’ll be raising meat birds of that quantity again. We ordered 60 but received more and I made it my personal mission as their chicken tender to not lose a single one after that first day. And I didn’t! But 68 is just a LOT to take care of one 1/2 an acre for 8 weeks. Not impossible as I have proven, just a lot.
To eat one bird a week for a year, it would be wise to raise 26 in the spring and 26 in the fall or 52-55 all at one time. The choice is yours but for time and energy if there’s only 2 adults on harvest day, less is better.
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