NEW WAY Of Raising Cornish Broilers - Back To The Way We Use To Raise Cornish Cross Chickens On Our Farm

We Have Changed The Way We Are Raising Our Cornish Cross Broiler Chickens...Back The Way We Use To Raise Them!

We have decided to go back to raising cornish cross chickens the way we use to do it, & that is basically letting the broiler chickens free range inside poultry fencing.

When we originally started raising broiler chickens for meat, we wanted them to be able to walk around outside, not confined to a coop, & basically be a free range chicken. And we did raise our cornish chickens like this for quite some time. We had an A-Frame style chicken tractor on wheels, that we moved every day, & we set up an electric poultry netting around the perimeter of the chicken tractor & let the meat chickens out & have free range of that area, but one week a hawk found them & took out 5 chickens in 3 days! So we had to change the way we raised our broilers from that point on.

I tried several things to deter the aerial predators but nothing seemed to work. So we made the decision to make a Joel Salatin style chicken tractor for our meat chickens, bc the Joel Salatin chicken tractor is fully enclosed & that we protect our chickens from any aerial predators we might encounter from this point on. But from day one of us using the Joel Salatin chicken tractor, I did not like it. I did not like how they seemed so confined, & not to mention how difficult the Salatin tractor was to move for us, & how hard it was to get the feeders & waterers in & out of, & also how hard it was to try & get the chickens out of as well.

After a year of using the Joel Salatin chicken tractor, we decided to come up with a chicken tractor that would work best for us, & that is what we did. We now use a hoop style chicken tractor. This new chicken tractor is way lighter, & you can actually walk inside of it, which makes all those daily chicken chores, so much easier & not near as time consuming as the Salatin chicken tractor proved to be for us.

Well we have been trucking right along with this new hoop style chicken tractor for quite some time, moving it everyday, but I still really wanted our cornish cross chickens to be able to actually go back outside all day & be raised like we originally wanted to raise them. Well we got really lucky a few months ago. We were contacted by someone that was wanting to give us all of his heritage breed egg laying chickens he had, bc he was moving & couldn't take the chickens with him, & he also had lots of other chicken related equipment that we purchased from him & one of those was two 100 foot electric poultry netting. Which was twice as big as the one we had. So we bought all of his chicken equipment & fencing, & that gave me the idea to try & go back to raising our meat birds like we wanted to originally, since the netting was so much bigger, & the bigger area, would still allow us to move our chicken tractor everyday, while not having to move the poultry fencing everyday, which can be a bit aggravating at times.

The hawks seem to only come around when it cools off here, so my plan is to take a 2x4, place some string on it the width of the area the meat chickens are in, & pull it over the top of the free ranging area, & when we move the chicken tractor & poultry netting, to roll up the string around the 2x4, & move the chicken tractor, & then roll the string back out, & this should really deter any anything coming in from the top of the free range area, but I am so happy that we decided to go back to raising our cornish broiler chickens this way & I know the chickens are too.

Thanks for watching & hope y'all have a wonderful day!!!

Cog Hill Farm - 2017