Meat birds but can't be roosters

I would like to raise 3 or 4 hens for meat as I don't want roosters.  I plan to butcher one at a time maybe each week.  Like what my Great Grandma talked about doing.  I have 3 laying hens in a coop that I would like to let out in the evening to forage for a bit and think I would like to keep these birds separate from the hens.  I bought electric poultry netting and also bought an A frame poultry chicken tractor that I raised some roosters in this Spring (they started crowing and I can't do it again).  It was great when they were old enough to stay out there in it but when they got older, they never went into it at night and roosted on top of it so I need to have something bigger they will roost in at night.  It's around 3 1/2 feet tall and 3  feet wide and 10 feet long.  Not sure how big I need but I want them to go inside because we have owls.  Surprisingly none of my roosters got taken though.  I guess I will raise hens as meat birds and wonder if anyone can share what I could keep them in out on my pasture with a poultry fence around it?  Thinking about Sagitta breed.  If I got Freedom Rangers not sure if they're sexed.  

Hi Beth,
I think an A-frame tractor could work, but it will take a little training and modifications. Chickens want to roost high, because it makes them feel safe. They will tend to go to the highest point they can get to. If there are several levels of perches, they wall want the top. If there is an A-frame with a nice "perch" on top, they will try to use it. Once they are used going inside, it won't be as big of a deal. I would add a couple pieces of wood on either end of the tractor's peak and string a tight wire about 4-6 inches above the peak. This aught to make it less favorable for perching on. Then you need to add some perches inside the A-frame for them to use. For the first week or so, you will probably have to go out take any dumb/stubborn chickens off whatever things they are perching on outside and put them inside. After they get into a habit, you should be able to just go out and close the door, but the first little while can be annoying. It does get easier though.

I just did a couple of really quick "One Click" searches. Freedom Rangers are available sexed. For less than 50 chicks female, male, and straight run are all the same price. Because you're talking abut only a handful of birds (3-4 layers), I don't think you'd be ordering more than a few at a time.
One thing to keep in mind is that the meat birds will get tougher, stringier meat over time. The older they get, the tougher the meat will get. The only benefit in having only hens would be the smaller size and the lack of potentially aggressive roosters after the 12 week point. Plus eggs, so there's that, too.

I had an A-frame as my first "real" coop. Still have it, though it's been repurposed as the "laying/nest box spot" and houses all the nest boxes for my flock.
Yes, the first birds I had roosted on top of it. I never could break them of the habit and they didn't have any real better roosting spot. If I were to do it all over, I would probably get a different design of coop.

For tractors, the best shape seems to be a rectangle on wheels. There are lots of plans out there, but the basic shape is some kind of structure, with wheels and an enclosed space with roosts inside it. You do need to make sure the roosting bars inside the tractor are higher than anything else the chickens have access to or you will end up with very creative chickens roosting all over the place in trees, on top of the tractor, in brush piles, ...
The idea of stretching a wire across the roofline is genius and would work beautifully. I wish I had tried it way back when.

If you are going to be able to process your birds before the cockerels start crowing, it wouldn't really matter what sex they were. The older they get, the noisier they would be likely to be, though. Living closer to other people, I know noisy birds can be a problem for some folks.

I checked into the Sagitta. They sound like a good type, with the implication that they are more of a meat bird than many of the dual-purpose hybrids, but with decent laying. In my "one click" search I found one hatchery that carried them, and they sexed their chicks, with male and female (unavailable for now) listed at different prices. The hatchery I checked for the information on Freedom Rangers also carried Sagitta, so that might be what you're thinking of. Since they seem to specialize in meat birds and large quantities of a small number of breeds/types, they have chicks available with many more shipping dates standing open. If that works for you, then great!!

It sounds like you have a plan and are taking the right steps.
I would recommend using the electric netting as part of a mobile chicken tractor set-up, with whatever model of chicken tractor that works for you. There are  a lot of options available, with several people on Permies who have talked about their designs and what they've learned.

Just wanted to add that in my own experience, cockerels are much more tender and meaty when killed before they start crowing.  Maybe something to do with the sex hormones?  We always kill before they crow (or at the first sign of crowing), usually around 8-12 weeks depending on breed.  One year we raised Australorps and we ate them at six months old;  they still hadn't crowed but were massive with very meaty legs.

Beth Mouse wrote:I would like to raise 3 or 4 hens for meat as I don't want roosters.  I plan to butcher one at a time maybe each week.  Like what my Great Grandma talked about doing.  I have 3 laying hens in a coop that I would like to let out in the evening to forage for a bit and think I would like to keep these birds separate from the hens.  I bought electric poultry netting and also bought an A frame poultry chicken tractor that I raised some roosters in this Spring (they started crowing and I can't do it again).  It was great when they were old enough to stay out there in it but when they got older, they never went into it at night and roosted on top of it so I need to have something bigger they will roost in at night.  It's around 3 1/2 feet tall and 3  feet wide and 10 feet long.  Not sure how big I need but I want them to go inside because we have owls.  Surprisingly none of my roosters got taken though.  I guess I will raise hens as meat birds and wonder if anyone can share what I could keep them in out on my pasture with a poultry fence around it?  Thinking about Sagitta breed.  If I got Freedom Rangers not sure if they're sexed.  

Working backwards on your post.  Freedom Rangers (from the original hatchery in PA) are sexed.  You can order all males, all females, or straight run.  Minimum order is 25 I believe.

Sagitta are OK as meat birds, but nothing like Freedom Rangers.  You'll get a much bigger carcass in a lot less time with Freedom Rangers.

Raptors are a problem everywhere.  The most effective deterrent I've found is fishing line strung every 10-15' with flagging tape or something flashy every 10-15' along the line.  The bald eagles in my area though got smart enough to hover down carefully and still picked off a lot of my hens this summer.  I might need to go tight enough with the line that they can't get down between them easily.

As others have mentioned, cockerels will work fine if you butcher them before they get noisy.  I'd probably just identify each bird as it starts to crow and take them in that order.  Freedom Rangers will often be barely crowing or not at all when they reach butcher age/size at 10-12 weeks old.  Obviously all females won't have that issue, but they're also much smaller.  Never kept any accidental females (sexing is 90-95% accurate, so you'll always get some small number of wrong sex birds) so I don't know how well they lay.

It take about 10 week for chickens to gain weight and reach maturity so I would say that you need at least 10 chickens, with each one being 1 week older than the pervious chicken. This way you will get to eat 1 chicken per week or 10 chicken/10weeks or 52 chicken per year.

But due to the fact that you plan on pasturing/free-range your chicken, they are going to take at least 2x as long to reach maturity so that 26week or 26 chicken.

And if you free range them a few of them will probably die so lets just get 36chicken at the start expecting that a few of them might not make it the entire 26weeks until they are mature and ready for the table.

Instead of getting a new baby chicken every week and instead of killing 1 chicken every single week you could also do it in batch, where every 2 months you get a batch of new baby chickens and you also harvest 2months worth of chicken and throw them in a chest freezer.


Now if all you want to do is collect eggs, I think that a total of 4 egg-laying chicken is more than enough.

If OP has land and freezer capacity raising a whole years worth at a time provides an economy of scale that can significantly reduce the per chicken costs.  Both in $$ terms and the time spent caring for the chickens.  It doesn’t take any extra time to feed and water 100 chickens than it does for 10.  And if she raised 100 she can keep 50 for herself and sell the rest of the 100 that survived to slaughter day and make back some/most of the input costs.  That’s what I do.

If she doesn’t have enough land for that, lacks freezer capacity, or is just committed to butchering as she eats them and never freezing them then obviously that won’t work.