This past Sunday me and the hubby attended Upstate NY ChickenStock 2010! Which was AWESOME. Now going into this Jeff said that he would NEVER help me process our animals when it comes time to butch, so I said yeah, sure what ever. At ChickenStock there was a processing demo and now Jeff is all, "That wasn't bad I could do that" :rollseyes: So these past few days we have been looking into what type of meat bird we want to get, and from all the feedback we got from the people at CS we decided to go with Freedom Rangers. They don't grow as fast as the Cornish Crosses that you would purchase in a grocery market and they don't get as big but they don't drop dead at 12 weeks either. Cornish X's tend to not move much so they have to be babied, they can over heat easily in the summer and they tend to lay around allot and get stinky, dirty and disgusting. The Freedom Rangers are capable of being raised on pasture and will forage for food therefor bringing feed cost down.
So today at work, Jeff called me to ask me if I knew how much they where, so I looked them up and gave him the pricing for 25, 50, or 100..... then he is like ok lets get 100.... uh huh yeah, ok great idea and where are we going to put these birds? The field has yet to be fenced and we can't just let them roam free, the local predators would end up eating them instead of us. So I think I have talked him out of getting that many to start out, for now at least.
Then while we where at ChickenStock Jeff saw some Blue Laced Red Wyandotte and if I hadn't of had the foresite to NOT bring our carrier with us we would be plus a few chickens right now.... I don't know how this happened I used to be the impulsive one and he was the voice of reason! Oh well.
On the other hand I got an incubator at CS and it currently has 3 eggs in it just as a test. It was used so it didn't come with a thermometer, so if this batch doesn't go well I have to go buy one and a hydrometer. They are due to hatch on the 24th but I should know if the eggs are developing by tomorrow or so.