Chick Check, Week One

Here are the Cornish Crosses and our Barnyard Mutts at two days old:

And here they are at a week and a day old: (use the small waterers as a reference for size)

The nighttime temps have been around fifty so I've had two heat lamps going at night.  Daytime temps are in the mid to upper 80's, so I just keep the heat lamps on at night.  Everyone seems happy and we haven't lost a single chick. 

The Cornish are almost twice the size of the smaller mutts!  We've gone through approximately 1/4 bag of feed (left over from Christine's Silkies) which is about ten pounds.  The past two years I kept pretty good records on how much feed we went through, although I can't for the life of me find what I did with those numbers.  I also wasn't blogging at that time, so I can't even go back here and find out what it was. 

So each week up until butchering day, I'm going to do a "Chick Check" here on Friday so I have a record of it, and so you guys can see how they come out.  But there is a slight problem with my feed / money outlays for the birds this year; I'm raising the Cornish with the mutts so I won't really have an accurate cost-per-bird for the Cornish.  I guess I could separate them and keep track of each of their feed intake, but I really wanted to try raising them together.  Oh well.

Although, if all works out well with keeping them together, I think we'd do it again next year so technically I'd still know about how much feed we'll need (assuming we hatch out & buy the same number).  We'll buy Cornish Cross day-olds for the freezer and I'll incubate our own eggs to be raised with them.  We'll keep the barnyard hens for layers and the roosters will eventually end up on the dinner plate.