Wow! I never got around to making a journal entry for our Spring 2011 broilers! We did one batch of broilers this year in the spring and processed near the beginning of June. It was a pretty successful batch and I think we finally got our ration to a reasonably repeatable formula. The broilers did very well and I went and looked up the numbers so we could share them! We were VERY pleased with the outcome of this batch. It was the first and last batch of 2011 since we’re focusing more of our time on the house construction, but this next spring we plan to be raising broilers at the farm, so on pickup day when you come by and sit on the porch and visit and we’ll have a little more room and more chairs. Enough with the formalities, here are the numbers:
# of chickens processed: 86
age of chickens: 8 weeks, 0.5 days
culls: 1
birds >= 5lb: 76 (86%)
birds < 4lb: 3 (3.5%)
average dressed bird weight: 5.93lb
median dressed bird weight: 6.0lb
lb of feed used: 2000lb
total weight of dressed birds: 505.49lb
THE BIGGIE ... feed conversion ratio: 3.96 lbs of feed to 1 lb of dressed bird!!!