Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
The meat can be tough depending on how much space they have to roam. I used to have chickens that roamed all day long on a hill and the woods.
The meat was very tough.
Yours weren't meat birds though? Like the white hardly can walk at 3 months because they grew so fast type?
We've tried some traditional meat breeds like Dark Cornish and they are OK, tougher than a grocery store chicken by a lot, but still less tough than a decent steak. The downside is that they have about 1/3 the meat as the new meat mutant breeds.
We now mostly do the white factory farm meat mutants, but run them on the lawn/pasture and separate the water and food by 20-30' to make them move. Typically we choose all females as they grow abit slower and mortality/injury is very low.
They eat quite a bit of greens and bugs too, especially when the are young, and the fat and cartilage often gets quite yellow, same as the layers egg yokes.
We've thought about selling them, but most people can't get their head around $5/lb $30 chicken, so we don't bother.
You can raise a few in the backyard though, there are lots of mobile chicken tractor plans that keep them on fresh grass and safe from predators. And plucking and cleaning a couple chickens isn't too hard either.