[Clansman]

I never got round to this over the last few months but things are moving with it now. 

My original idea was to buy some year old broiler parent stock from a depleting commercial farm but that is proving harder than I thought!  or at least legally it is!

A broiler is the commercially reared chicken you see being sold for meat in the supermarkets.

They are hatched from eggs produced by parent flocks which are essentially two different strains of birds bred together.

I'm now looking at buying some day old parent stock which I can rear and breed myself, therefore allowing me to hatch out and grow my own broilers.

I'm not talking huge numbers, I'm probably looking at a flock size of under 20 which should give me around 50-100 hatching eggs per week for either hatching or selling.

This way I can have a constant supply of meat birds available.

rearing the breeders would ideally require a bit of care in respect of lighting and feed rationing etc,

these birds will pile on weight if fed ad lib/free ranged and really require to be kept to a lighting program during the rearing and laying period so probably more suited to an indoor environment if they are to perform to the best of their ability.

At a year old these hens should be around 4Kg with the cocks over 5Kg and that is with strict rationing, they are BIG birds.

I'm still talking to the breeding companies and don't have definite prices etc yet but they are quite happy to deal with the small numbers i'd be looking at.

Would anyone else be interested in some day old breeding stock?

A group purchase would be possible.

[Stereo]

I would first like to know more about the welfare of the breeding stock as some of the stories I hear are awful. But they may just be stories.....

At the end of the day, the hatched bird cannot survive for more than 8-20 weeks so that means the parents are 'odd' and I think have to kept to some pretty harsh feeding routines.

Instinct tells me not to go near it. But, if it can be done in a better way by caring folk, then maybe that is a good thing.

[Clansman]

Ok this is going off on a bit of a tangent but i'll do my best to answer any questions you have.

Breeding flocks, as with any commercial flock are kept within very strict welfare standards, yes you always hear about the odd horror story but this is down to individual people not doing things they should be doing, its not the common commercial practice.

I keep reiterating the point but it is NOT in the interest of any commercial poultry company to keep poultry in anything other than the best of conditions, from both a financial perspective and the fact that the welfare of poultry is now so closely monitored.

The days of poultry companies being in charge of their own practises are long gone, all the big supermarkets now have their own welfare teams crawling all over commercial farms so nothing is out of place.

The last thing ASDA, Tesco, Sainsubrys etc want to see is a welfare issue on the news from a farm which supplies them.

Commercial birds are kept in far better conditions than many back garden/smallholding birds are kept.

The poultry we should be worrying about are the ones kept in back garden environments, these are the ones I  see suffering.

It's wrong to say the hatched bird (the broiler) cannot survive more than 8-20 weeks.

they certainly can,  but its not what they have been bred to do and keeping them that length of time is asking for trouble, they will become too heavy for their frame and start to suffer from all sorts of problems.

These broilers are bred to grow as big as possible as quickly as possible, they were never intended to be kept over 8 weeks of age and from a welfare point of view it would not be allowed on commercial farms.

They will usually be killed between 5 and 8 weeks, i've never heard of standard broilers being kept over 8 weeks of age commercially and would not advise anyone to do so.

The breeder parents are indeed kept on rationed diets to keep them in breeding condition, they are bred to grow fast and to grow big.

if they weren't rationed and a check kept on their weight then by the time they reached breeding age they would be too large to breed and probably have lost a great deal in terms of fertility.

We cannot do it in a "better" way than it is being done by commercial farms, I worked many years on commercial broiler farms, all these people are caring folk and care about their birds, their welfare and quality of life.

[Stereo]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I suppose I did. I have a neighbour who is massively into commercial poultry and some of the things he comes out with freak me out. Like what time of day is best to hatch so the POL hen will have cost 2p less to get to POL etc.

I accept that the days of Ixworth as a commercial bird are over, other than for a niche market.

[Marches Farmer]

When I was growing up chicken was a once-a-week treat and even then it was a wing joint, not a whole bird.  If supermarkets supply cheap-as-chips broilers then intensive farming is the only way it can be done.  I don't ever buy 'em and I doubt very much that an intensively raised bird has a better life than my home-reared rare breed large fowl, and I'm certain they don't have a longer one, but it's horses for courses.

[Stereo]

Exactly but that's where we are. You can't compete in money terms and the industry does a good job of dressing it up well.

I wonder if there is a middle way to produce a decent broiler but in good conditions. Like Salatin maybe. It's got to be economic at the end of the day.

[Dave C]

What breeds are you looking to breed ?

And will you be doing the free ranger types ?

[Clansman]

I'm going for the Ross 308 which is the most commonly used one.

[vfr400boy]

I just buy my birds at a week old from a farm for 40p each it's not worth hatching your own

[Dave C]

If you do any of the Sasso free rangers I will buy of you.

[Clansman]

I just buy my birds at a week old from a farm for 40p each it's not worth hatching your own

If you're buying week olds at that price then its not! 

I reckon at that price they either have to be a wee cash sale or you have an admirer 

For me it will be worth it though

[Clansman]

If you do any of the Sasso free rangers I will buy of you.

I'm going for the Ross 308 which is the most commonly used one.

[Clansman]

I doubt very much that an intensively raised bird has a better life than my home-reared rare breed large fowl, and I'm certain they don't have a longer one, but it's horses for courses.

It all depends on your definition of better I suppose but try a little comparison with your birds and commercial ones.

Commercial, intensively reared broilers certainly don't live long, 5-8 weeks is the norm.

They are kept at a constant temperature, they never get cold.

They don't get wet

They aren't exposed to parasites, diseases, wild birds etc

They don't get killed by predators

They are fed a completely balanced diet at every stage of their life, they will commonly be fed six different rations to exactly match their requirements.

They have light usually 23 hours per day so the longest they are in the dark without access to food and water is 1 hour, birds reared in wintertime on natural light have to endure over 16 hours darkness without food and water.

So yes it is a short life but it is a comfortable one.

From a financial perspective it can't be done any better, as soon as a bird is exposed to lower temperatures it eats more to keep warm therefore the food costs rise, the amount of food they gain from free ranging sadly does not offset this cost.

This applies to all aspects of intensive growing, lighting, temperature etc all hugely affect the growth rate/financial cost

Unfortunately unless we want to go back to the one chicken joint per week way of life or become willing to pay a lot more for free range/organic type birds then we're stuck with this method of producing chicken.

[Fleecewife]

Clansman, you don't mention the right of all livestock to be able to express their natural behaviour.  Hens are forest creatures and need to peck and scratch around.  I think that constitutes a large part of their welfare, not just getting a carefully measured ration of food and being kept out of the wet.
Your concern only with the finances of production down to the nearest penny makes me very uncomfortable.

I would be perfectly happy to go back to the one chicken a week we used to have, as a Sunday roast. People use chicken breasts or wings or legs as the basis for a curry or stew, without even seeming to be aware they are eating an animal which has had a life and a death - to them they might as well be eating soya protein...which might be better.  When chicken is so cheap, it's not valued 

[NicandChic]

Lightbulbs in substitute for the lovely sunshine, I don't really like intensive farming full stop to consider it small scale seems even crueler  
Chickens love the rain, dust baths, insects to peck and fresh air to breath, acres to forage, puddles to drink from & places to roost!...I'd much rather pay the price for 1 smaller 'free range' chicken than a poor love that's been sat in a warm barn for 8 weeks & had a poor quality of life piling on weight to save me some penny's!