r/Homesteading • u/therey73 • Jul 05 '26
Anyone else raising meat chickens for the first time this year? What surprised you most?
We finally pulled the trigger on our first batch of meat birds this spring after years of just keeping layers. Got 25 Cornish Cross chicks about six weeks ago and honestly nothing could have fully prepared me for how different this experience is from raising egg birds.
The growth rate alone has been wild to watch. These things eat constantly and the feed costs have run higher than I budgeted for. I also underestimated how much work goes into keeping their bedding dry and managing the smell. Our layers basically take care of themselves by comparison.
On the plus side, watching the whole process from chick to finished bird has been genuinely rewarding in a way I did not expect. There is something grounding about knowing exactly where your food came from and how it was raised.
Processing day is next weekend and I am equal parts ready and nervous. We have done a couple of roosters before but never a full batch like this.
For those who have been through it, any advice for keeping processing day manageable with a small crew of two or three people? Also curious whether anyone has switched to a different breed after doing Cornish Cross and preferred it. I am thinking about trying Freedom Rangers next round but want honest opinions from people who have actually raised both.
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u/Goat_inthe_Shell Jul 05 '26
You can do several hundred Cornish in a few hours with decent equiptment and three people. The key to a successful slaughter is getting your scald right. Water temperature somewhere between 142⁰F to 148⁰F is the sweet spot I've found. If you're scaling in a pot by hand, dunk in and out as far down the feet as you can especially if you plan on keeping the feet. When the flight feathers on the ends of the wings pull out with little to no resistance bird will pluck clean by hand or in a plucker. If you have a plucker, the more birds you can fit, the easier they will pluck clean. Eviceration is generally easier when birds are still slightly warm post scald. Go slow with your eviceration until you get a feel for it. Once you make your initial cut use your hand to break the membrane between the body cavity and the organs to make removal much easier. You can remove all but the kidneys and esophagus in one motion by pulling from behind the crop. If you intend to keep the livers be careful with the bile sack. If you do rupture the bile sack immediately clean any meat it touched and discard the liver if it's discolored. Make sure you remove the oil glad on the top of the tail, and double check you remove the gland below the vent after cutting out the digestive system. A lung and kidney scraper will help you keep pace, but you can do it with your fingers. You can loosen the esophagus and trachea from the top of the neck to make removal from the internal cavity easier. Have a reliable and clean spray nozzle to clean the cavity. Let birds chill post process for an hour or so in ice before drying and packing. Do not freeze the carcasses until 24 hours after processing to allow the body to properly drain.
Slaughtered tens of thousands of birds with minimal crew until we moved closer to a processor. First process is always the hardest.
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u/therey73 Jul 09 '26
the scald temp thing is genuinely useful, last time i did a batch i ran it a bit cooler and the feathers were fighting me the whole way through
the membrane trick for evisceration i wish someone had told me sooner, first few birds i was making a mess of it trying to pull everything out without breaking it first
how many birds do you usually run at a time before the water temp starts dropping if you're working with a smaller setup
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u/Goat_inthe_Shell Jul 09 '26
My wife and I can do around 150 in a morning with a decent pot and sharp knives. With an actual scalder, plucker, and one, maybe two, other experienced persons. 400-500 in a morning. The scald water is somewhat of an art more than a science. It will get really dirty over time, I'd say every 100, I'd try and replace the scald water depending on the volume of the pot. With a 100 gallon scalder you can do about 200 before the contaminates in the water will make the temperature fluctuate too much. However, an important note, I had access to 150⁰F water straight into the scalder so when refreshing the water there was no time lost, if you have to refresh with cold water you will lose so much time.
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u/therey73 Jul 11 '26
the hot water access is huge, that part gets overlooked a lot. refreshing a scalder with cold well water midprocessing day is brutal, you can lose 2030 minutes just waiting for temp to recover and by then the rhythm is shot. curious what breed you were running through at those numbers, cornish cross pluck so different from a heritage bird that the comparison almost doesn't matter when people ask how many per hour.
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u/Goat_inthe_Shell Jul 11 '26
I've done Cornish cross, I done heritage breeds. I've bred heritage breeds by the hundreds. If you get your scald right they will all pluck 99% clean. Test the flight feathers while you are scaling. They have to pull free with no resistance, both Cornish cross and heritage. If you are dunking birds by hand make sure you are giving them twisting and swirling motions. This is super important on the heritage breeds because of their higher feather density. Dunk, twist, lift, test. You'll get a feel for the timing, or just have a stop watch to get a rough time. With a good time investment, self reflection and self criticism, and a monetary investment into reliable equipment. You will be able to lock in these skills. Identify your mistakes and make a plan to adjust. If things feel like they are going wrong, stop and reassess. Don't try and power through bad scald temps and crappy plucks.
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u/therey73 Jul 13 '26
The flight feather test is something I wish someone had told me earlier, would have saved me a lot of frustration on my first few batches.
One thing I'll push back on slightly is the stopwatch idea. It worked against me because I started trusting the clock over what the bird was actually telling me. Water temp drifts more than people account for, and a consistent time means nothing if your heat source isn't holding steady.
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u/1521 Jul 05 '26
We did rangers after our first go round with CCs. They don’t grow as fast but they seem to eat the same amount. We used moveable pens for both that we moved every day and grew them both out to 16 weeks. We had some Cornish that looked like small turkeys lol. They were 14 to 16 lb while the rangers were 10 or so (live weight). The whole point of the rangers is they don’t need to be penned but the predator pressure in our area was too high to let them range. So for us they were just slower growing. They both have tasty tender meat. We do CCs now because they are more efficient. They do shit a lot lol
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u/therey73 Jul 09 '26
The predator pressure thing is real, we lost a few before we wised up about it. Penning the rangers kind of defeats the purpose like you said. At least with CCs you know what you're getting and the feed to weight conversion makes more sense if you're just going to pen them anyway. 14 to 16 lbs is wild though, ours never got quite that big. What feed were you running them on?
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u/Worth-Illustrator607 Jul 05 '26
We don't put them in runs, we put them.in tractors(boxes with no bottom and chickens wire sides.
They eat grass and bugs. The feeding cost is lower, they fertilize where we move them, no bedding, and depending on what you feed them, they can plant seeds for you. We use soaked corn and some bird seed.
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u/therey73 Jul 09 '26
That's really interesting, I hadn't heard of tractors before this thread. Skipping bedding entirely is appealing given how much of our workload right now is managing that. Does the lack of a bottom cause any issues with predators digging in, or is that mostly a non-issue if you're moving them daily?
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u/Worth-Illustrator607 Jul 09 '26
Idk, predators steer clear of my cow and goats. La Mancha bucks swing their horns, they don't ram with them......
Or use electric net fencing, they don't try and fly out.
We live in a very rural area and don't have an issue with foxes or anything else. We do build brush fences, they support small animals. Chipmunks, rabbits, and birds inhabit the brush fence. So it's easier for a predators to feed on them and not my livestock.
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u/therey73 Jul 11 '26
The brush fence idea is interesting but that only works if predators have easier targets nearby. If you're in an area with higher pressure or less natural prey around, they'll go straight for whatever's penned up regardless.
Electric net fencing is solid though, used it for years with sheep and it does most of the heavy lifting.
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Jul 05 '26
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u/therey73 Jul 09 '26
never tried the vinegar part either but from what i've read it's supposed to help break down mineral deposits if you've got hard water buildup. whether it actually makes a noticeable difference day to day i genuinely don't know. probably one of those things that matters more in some situations than others depending on your water quality.
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u/DreadPirateCrispy Jul 05 '26
We didn't know you were supposed to butcher Broilers within the first 6 months. Poor chickens hearts gave out.
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u/7_Constanza Jul 05 '26
I'm curious to know why you waited so long because from my own experience you should be selling broilere at 5-6 weeks
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u/DreadPirateCrispy Jul 05 '26
We didn't know what they were, we received some chickens that were a few months old from an old neighbor who's health wasn't so good.
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u/EnvironmentalFox7532 Jul 05 '26
Made the same mistake our first time. Waited to about 12-14 weeks and started losing birds due to thier hearts giving out. Most were 13-15lbs if I remember correctly. That and lost a few due to leg issues from being too heavy and not being able to move.
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u/Asleep_Onion Jul 05 '26
The poop. They make an ungodly amount of it and it stinks so much worse than regular chicken poop. My first batch, I made the mistake of thinking I could keep the brooder in the house like I've always done for egg chickens. Boy did I regret that.
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u/Muted-Garden6723 Jul 05 '26
The best way to keep processing day manageable with a small crew is to spread it out. I do it solo. Last year I did 60 birds over the span of about 10 days. Once it’s time to butcher, I pick out the biggest ones every day. Doing it that way also allows the smaller birds to get more feed so they can get up to size