Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (94 page)

Range feeding is similar to pasture confinement, except the birds are allowed to come and go freely from their shelter. The extra activity creates darker, firmer, more flavorful meat but also causes birds to eat more total ration because they take longer to reach target weight.

The time-honored method of range feeding chickens, widely practiced in the days before confinement became conventional, is traditionally called
free ranging
. But since the term “free range” has been corrupted by the USDA to mean “the poultry has been allowed access to the outside” (but not necessarily requiring that chickens actually go outside), the latest descriptive phrase is
day ranging
, as described by Andy Lee and Patricia Foreman in their book
Day Range Poultry — Every Chicken Owner’s Guide to Grazing Gardens and Improving Pastures
.

Range feeding involves less labor than pasture confinement because the shelter is moved less often.

Range feeding involves less labor than pasture confinement, because you don’t have to move the shelter daily, but more labor than indoor confinement, because you do have to move it periodically. Compared to either form of confinement, ranging requires more land — enough for the shelter itself as well as pasture for grazing (and trampling), multiplied several times to allow for periodic fresh forage.

Utility breeds take to grazing quite readily because they retain some of the foraging instincts of their ancestors. Commercial strains don’t think too much of getting out and around, but they will roam more than they do in confinement, and the energy used during roaming slows their growth and makes them less susceptible to leg problems. The end result is a trade-off between faster growth and better health.

If you raise straight-run chicks, you’ll have to separate the cockerels as soon as they become sexually active; otherwise they’ll harass the pullets, and neither will grow well. Sexual harassment is not a problem with confined broilers, since they go into the freezer before they get old enough to notice the opposite sex.

Not everyone is willing to raise broilers an extra few weeks, and not everyone appreciates the full flavor and firm texture of naturally grown chicken. As a result, backyard pasturing is less often used for growing meat birds than for keeping laying hens.

A wide variety of meticulously formulated starter, grower, and finisher rations has been developed with one thing in mind — to keep feed costs down. Newly hatched chicks need a lot of protein. As chicks grow, their protein needs go down and their carbohydrate needs go up. Since protein sources (legumes and meat scraps) are more expensive than carbohydrate sources (starchy grains), switching to rations with progressively less protein saves money.

To precisely target the protein-versus-energy needs of meat birds according to their stage of growth, big-time growers formulate their own rations and have them privately milled. We small-flock owners are at the mercy of local feed providers. Depending on where you live, you may have little choice in the available combination of starter and finisher or starter/grower and finisher.

How much that matters to you depends on your method of management. A confinement-fed broiler eats approximately 2 pounds (1 kg) of feed for every pound (0.5 kg) of weight gained. If you raise your birds to 4 pounds (1.8 kg), each one will gobble up at least 8 pounds (3.6 kg) of feed during its lifetime. A purebred strain may eat twice that much, a factor you can somewhat mitigate by letting your birds forage for some of their sustenance.

In any case, if all you have available to you is one all-purpose starter/grower ration, nothing is inherently wrong with using it from start to finish. But don’t expect the same rapid growth or low feed-to-meat ratio you would get with a more targeted ration. If you do have a wider choice, follow directions on the label regarding when to switch from one ration to another. Each manufacturer’s feeding schedule is based on the formulations of its particular rations.

Unfortunately, standard commercial rations may not contain sufficient nutrients to sustain the rapid growth rate of Cornish-cross broilers, and as a result, they develop leg problems. If you raise a commercial-broiler strain, supplement the rations with a vitamin/mineral mix, added either to feed or to drinking water according to directions on the label. Some backyard growers withhold feed overnight to limit growth in an attempt to prevent lameness.

The older a chicken is, the less efficient it becomes at converting feed into meat and the costlier it becomes to raise. The conversion ratio starts out below 1 in newly hatched chicks and reaches 2:1 at about the fifth or sixth week. During the seventh or eighth week, the cumulative, or average, ratio reaches 2:1 — the point of diminishing returns.

From then on the cumulative ratio has nowhere to go but up, and the amount of feed eaten (in terms of cost) can’t be justified by the amount of weight gained. Although the most economical meat comes from birds weighing 2½ to 3½ pounds (1 to 1.5 kg), most folks prefer meatier broiler-fryers in the 4- to 4½-pound (1.8 to 2 kg) range. If you want nice plump roasters, be prepared to pay more per pound to raise them.

Growers of pastured or range-fed broilers fall into two distinct camps, those who feed a high-protein diet and those who favor a high-energy diet. The high-protein group focuses on economics; the high-energy group focuses on flavor.

Muscle (meat) growth relies on protein. Broilers with access to pasture, and that are expected to grow as rapidly as confined broilers, may be fed a ration of up to 30 percent protein. Using a ration with as little as half that amount of protein can reduce the growth rate by as much as 50 percent. Broilers taking longer to grow eat more total ration. Therefore, feeding the less-expensive low-protein ration may cost more in the long run than feeding a pricier high-protein ration.

A diet that is high in nutritional energy, in the form of grains, reduces the growth rate of muscle and increases the development of fat. Grain-fed fryers therefore aren’t politically correct among cholesterol-conscious nutritionists but are trendy in natural-food circles, where the goal is to avoid feed additives by using so-called organic grains. The problem is that unless you grow your own, organically grown grains are hard to come by and sometimes mislabeled. Chances are good the scratch you feed your chickens is the same stuff used, in ground-up form, to make commercial rations.

The feeding method developed by producers of France’s famous Red Label (
Label Rouge
) organic poultry has become a model for American organic-broiler growers. The Red Label ration is of 100 percent vegetable origin, supplemented by insects and plants the chickens find in the pine forest where they actively forage. These broilers are not of the Cornish-cross commercial type but are a cross between the slower-growing heritage Cornish and other old-time breeds. These broilers do not have white plumage like industrial broilers, hence some of the trade names for similar hybrids in the United States include a reference to color: Black Broiler, Color Yield, Colored Range, Freedom Ranger, Kosher King, Red Broiler, Redbro, Red Meat Maker, Redpac, Rosambro, and Silver Cross to name a few.

The main element in the diet of the French broilers is corn, produced by the French farmers themselves. The corn is crushed and mixed into a ration consisting of:

80 percent corn (for energy)

15 percent soy (for protein)

3 percent minerals and vitamins

2 percent alfalfa