[Frank]

I new to all this.....

We have about 17 chickens for egg production, running in a very large grassed area. I would like to raise some birds for the table.

Am I right in thinking that a breeding trio of a suitable breed will be ok? Or do I need more than the two hens to one cock?
I'm assuming that I will have to house the 'table' birds seperately from the 'egg' birds to ensure that any of the other cocks doesn't cross breed.

Assuming that things go ok, and the birds hatch a clutch of chicks, do I have to seperate the mother and chicks from the other 'table' birds?

Sorry for the questions but I'm very much a beginner to this.

If anyone can recommend a good book I would be grateful!

Thanks

[BlueDaisy]

Hi Frank,
Lots of questions!
First you ahve to decide whether you want to raise hybrid table birds (bred to grow big in a short space of time) There are strains more suited to free ranging than others. Some eat so much so quickly they 'go off' their legs. But they are ready to cull by about 11 - 15 weeks.
Alternatively, you could look at a utility breed (there are many) Each has different supporters and different qualities, but most won't be ready to cull til about 22 - 30 weeks old. Which means putting up with crowing (and potentially) boisterous young stud behaviour!
Do you want to eat the girls aswell, or will you keep the girls for egg laying stock? Another consideration.

You will need to keep the chicks separate from the main egg flock.And also keep the table growers separate from the layers as you may want to feed them differently.

One cock will easily cope with 3 or 4 or 5 hens. You don't want to give him too many hens as you do want fertile eggs.
Another option is to buy in fertile eggs. Waiting for a hen to go broody may take long enough so you may want to consider an incubator or even buying day old chicks.

Sorry I seem to have given you more things to think about rather than answering any of your questions

[Frank]

Sorry I seem to have given you more things to think about rather than answering any of your questions

No that's great. Thank you for your response. Gives me a bit more understanding.

[benkt]

We've been basically self-sufficient in table birds for a year or two - even if this means eating a lot of cockerel casserole.
To keep a constant supply of birds, you need to have a few different runs for different ages - it might be different if you can do one big batch and freeze them all. Anyway, this is how we do it with utility birds (Light Sussex and Marans mainly)

Breeding run: for a cockerel and a his hens
Incubator: eggs spend three weeks in here until they hatch
Brooder: we use big plastic storage boxes for this and the chicks will spend a couple of weeks in here in the study under lights before heading out to a shed for another one to three weeks under lamps (depending on time of year) until they have their full set of feathers.
Chick run: A small coop and attached run that the chicks live in for perhaps another 5-10 weeks. At this point some of the hens might go to join our laying flock and the others move on to the final finishing run
Finishing run: Larger run that we keep them in until they are all eaten - I usually process a couple each fortnight until they are all gone. This gives us a variety of sizes of birds as they can be quite small and tender at say 10 weeks (treat more like poussin) going through to larger casserolling cockerels by the end.

For us, we can get through one or two chickens a week so I tend to aim to run batches of around eight to twelve through this system every couple of months depending on how many new hens are needed in the main laying flock.

Working backwards from this, to reliably get a dozen chicks surviving I need to put around 20 eggs in the incubator. I find fertility falls off fairly rapidly as the eggs are older than a few days so my breeding pen needs enough chickens to produce twenty eggs over say four days, i.e. five or six hens with one cockerel. I think if you only have a trio you will end up doing smaller batches, which means you might need two 'chick runs' and two 'finishing runs' as the birds spend most time in here and mixing different batches together has never gone well for me.

I'm sure there are many more ways to organise this but this is one method that works for us.

Ben

[Frank]

Thank you, that helps a lot.