10+ tips to fattening your roasts
Timing is everything.
Cross-bred or heritage birds
You will have to wait for the birds to mature – around when the males start crowing – before you attempt to fatten them.
Adding kitchen scraps and garden waste to their normal diet will help to fill them up. However, it will also cost you more in poultry feed as low quality foods aren’t high in fat, so it will take longer for birds to grow to an edible size.
A heavy breed heritage rooster will reach 2-3kg by the time it’s 6-10 months old. They’ll need careful management during this time.
Separate roosters from the rest of the flock as soon as you can tell them apart from the hens. Give them plenty of space or they will fight and bully each other.
Ideally, process them when they are around six months old to avoid behavioural issues.
To help them lay down more fat, feed meat bird crumbs for the last 3-4 weeks.
Meat birds
Cobb or Ross meat chicks are bred to grow incredibly fast, and to pack on large amounts of meat in a short time.
If you keep them warm, contain them in a small area and make sure they always have access to feed, they’ll get to around 3kg in 6-8 weeks. You can:
• feed meat bird crumbs from Day 1 to grow them as fast as possible, or;
• feed Chick Starter for 4-6 weeks, followed by 2-4 weeks of meat bird or game bird crumbs. This mix of feeds means they will grow more slowly.
To slow down their growth even further, you could feed Chick Starter for 2-4 weeks, at a restricted amount per day (see page 74), followed by Grower feed for another four weeks, then 1-2 weeks of meat bird crumbs. This will still give you a heavier, meatier bird in less time than a traditional heavy breed rooster.
You can also slow down growth by feeding a lower energy feed and/or supplement their daily feed with scraps.
Cobb or Ross meat chicks grow incredibly fast, and you need to carefully manage their feed and exercise to keep them healthy. They will require:
• a daily feed allowance, weighed out
• plenty of outdoor exercise
• bulky, no-calorie feed options, eg grass, silverbeet
• minimal extras, eg kitchen scraps For example, you could feed two weeks of Starter, followed by Grower feed or a wheat/ oat grain mix (not layer feed), plenty of vegetation and grass to peck on, and not too many kitchen scraps.