I’m in a slight quandary. The BBW poults I ordered have been impacted by the USPS embargo on live animal shipments. I had planned on getting them 3 weeks before the nuggets (
Freedom Rangers) so I could process them all the same day when I have the rental plucking equipment. 13 weeks seems about the butter zone for size on the BBW roaster turkeys. Now, due to shipping delays, assuming no further delays, they’ll only be 11 weeks old on the current slaughter day I have scheduled. 12 weeks and I might have just accepted the smaller size, but at only 11 weeks old they’ll not really be worth killing yet.
The quandary is, do I just plan to process the turkeys by hand 2 weeks after the nuggets, or do I try to delay the nuggets for 2 weeks to maintain the 3 week age gap, or do I not delay getting the nuggets and keep them for 12 weeks instead of 10?
How well do Freedom Rangers continue to grow after 10 weeks? I’ve never kept them past that. I know
feed efficiency drops off the older they get, but if I keep them to 12 weeks will they continue to get heavier/bigger enough to be worth it?
If they’ll keep growing reasonably well I’ll go that route. A bigger
chicken is definitely ok.
For my meat chickens I am absolutely ruthless about culling anything that even hints at looking like it won’t make it to slaughter day. Last year I only had 2 out of 100ish that I had to process early, so if there’s a few more to process by hand that’s ok. But if it would likely run into the dozen or more level I won’t want to do that.