Tip 3: do you want hens to raise chicks?If you’d like hens to raise chicks for you (remembering odds are half that hatch will be males and grow up to be very loud roosters), then smaller breeds like Silkies and Pekins are great mothers and will happily sit on any hatching eggs of your choice (fertilised eggs which you can buy from a breeder).
Tip 4: are you looking for a good roast quickly?
The great thing about poultry is any birds you don’t want to keep long-term can be turned into roasts, but some breeds make better roasts than others. Commercial laying hens have just a few hundred grams of meat on them, and it tends to be pretty stringy as their genetics programme them for high egg laying abilities, not good meat.
On the other hand, commercial meat birds (Ross and Cobb) are available as day-old chicks for sale from the two main commercial poultry breeding companies:
Golden Coast Commercial- Ross
Phone 0800 495 463
Bromley Park – Cobb
Phone 09 236 7011
There tend to be minimum orders, and you will pay to have the chicks couriered to you but chicks are available all year round. You will also need to order a specialist chick feed for meat birds from your local rural supply store, such as NRM’s Meatbird Crumbles or you can use normal Chick Starter so long as you feed them for the final week of their lives on Meatbird Crumbles or Layer feed (as Chick Starter contains a coccidiostat that has a 7-day withholding period.
Meat bird crumble is more expensive to buy than Chick Starter, and usually has to be specially ordered in. You can grow them on a less high-powered diet so they will grow slower and be more active, especially if they are kept on a diet, allowing the meat to develop more flavour.
It can be difficult to make growing your own roasts economic - at best you can probably match the price of store-bought meat, however you will have free-range meat and depending on what else you feed them, much better tasting meat too.
Read part one here
Nadene Hall
NZ Lifestyle Block magazine
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