Chicken Processing and Meat Bird Breeds

One of the best presents we've ever received is a Whiz-Bang Plucker built by my DH's wonderful mechanical engineer father. It has been fantastic! He made a few improvements to the design and fixed complaints that were discussed in the plans turning out a trouble free home built plucker! You can see it in the foreground of the picture below.

It's been interesting processing (in my mind it's butchering but processing is a more PC term I suppose) this year. We hadn't done much in the meat bird realm since moving here due to the difficulty of brooding off-grid.
Now, with a propane heat lamp, we have the usual brooding issues.

So our goal now is to start hatching our own meat birds. The Rainbows from S&H Poultry supposedly breed true.. we'll see, but whatever the case we've been pretty pleased with the birds we get from them. We started buying our meatbird chicks from them and continue to do so along with a couple other places.

My favorite meat breeds, in order:
Rainbows
Red Rangers
Freedom Rangers

Though I have a dislike for Freedom Rangers as they are the most apt to cannibalism if they get a little bit of stress. The Ranger roosters can be pretty mean. And thus far the Rainbows have had more breast blisters but in all breeds the blisters tend to only be on the roosters. Carcass wise, the Rangers seem to be a good all around bird and the Rainbows favor a higher weight for a better carcass. They all get to the size of small turkeys when full grown. Carcass weight being 8-10# for the roosters and 7-8# for the hens. When full size they have gorgeous fat deposits and a lot of it! I am most fond of the Rainbows because they are just plain pretty. They have no standardization of feather color. I sell feathers in a small amount and the variety of colors is rather helpful for diversity.

We're looking at trying S&G's Heritage White's this fall for a final batch for the year. They have a shorter grow time, which isn't normally ideal for us but they should be done before our winter really hits in January and February.

So why slow growers?  Because they have better flavor and health! I don't have the issues I would otherwise raising Cornish X. Nor are they as dirty. I've talked with many producers who dislike how lazy and dirty Cornish X are so I'm not making crazy claims! If you disagree please comment! Help me find some redeeming qualities in the Cornish X!

Goslings and Incubation

Goslings are the messiest, most ungangly little things... We have White Chinese. We like them for their appetite. Yes, we want geese for weeding, though we have yet to use them as such. At this point we're just trying to figure out how best to propagate them, as odd as that sounds.

These one were incubated and hatched by a friend of ours. There were 7 (out of 14) but two died for no real apparent reason. One he thinks got on it's back and died, the other, he has no clue. He's been raising waterfowl for some time and knows what he's doing but as he says, he's still learning. He's also the only one who's been able to hatch our waterfowl successfully. I don't have an incubator built yet to even try. I've been too busy with everything else. So we sent 12 more goose eggs and 60 Silver Appleyard duck eggs to him when we picked up these goslings. Hopefully they go well and we get ducklings and more goslings.

I do know we both use dry incubation methods. What does that mean? It means, you keep the incubator humidity down around 50% rather than the regularly recommended 80%. The eggs NEED to evaporate liquid out of them or the baby inside will drown in it's own fluids. By the time they're ready to hatch they should've lost around 40% of their liquid. Now at hatching time you do want higher humidity so shells don't stick, something like 70%.

But I digress...

P.S. I made some adjustments to their watering and feed. They are staying much drier and cleaner. The big adjustment was putting a small cake pan under their waterer. Ducks and geese are horribly sloppy with their water when cleaning their beaks...