Free Range Meat Birds - 101

I have had a few questions on how we raised our meat birds. First, everyone does things different, so what we do might not work for everyone. We start our birds in our chicken tractors that my very skilled father-in-law designed for us:

We can keep them in here for quite a few weeks, depending on how many we are raising.  Each tractor holds about 12 comfortably.  Now, anyone who has raised meat birds know they grow fast, smell, and eat like ravenous pigs!  We usually feed them a little grain in the morning and night when they are in the tractors.  Now, with this year having our pen for our goats, we decided to move them into that area and cut their feed down to just some grain in the morning and let them free range the rest of the day.

They did great!  We butchered them last weekend and they ranged in weight from 4 pound to over 7 pounds for some.  We had no issues with birds struggling to move, in fact I had to chase down some of them to get a hold of them!  They free ranged on all the grass and bugs they could want, and we only gave them a small amount of grain once each day!  We are considering another batch before the summer is done.