Last month I wrote about raising your own eggs. I often also get questions about raising chickens for meat. Raising your own chickens to produce broilers, fryers, roasters, whatever you want to call them, might not be less expensive than purchasing them from the store, but some people enjoy the peace of mind of knowing where their chicken came from and how it was raised. Raising your own livestock also teaches children responsibility and helps them make the connection between farming and the food that they eat.
Using intensive management techniques, you can help transform a day-old chick into a 5+ pound chicken in about 6 weeks time. Chickens of this size are good for frying, broiling in the oven, or barbecuing. The good thing about raising your own chickens is that if you want a few larger birds for roasting on special occasions or for deep frying like small turkeys at the holidays, all you need to do is keep out a few birds from a batch you are raising and feed them for about 4 additional weeks, harvesting them at about 10 weeks old.
The following are a few links to more information about raising broilers at home:
This publication from Texas AgriLife Extension discusses raising a Home Broiler Flock
This publication from Mississippi State University Extension discusses Feeding Chickens
This publication from Texas AgriLife Extension shows how to Process a Chicken at Home
This publication from ATTRA (the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service) details Alternative Poultry Production Systems
