Show Broilers

[TallTexan]

What is the point of keeping them up?

[yanta61]

What is the point of keeping them up?

every time you go into the pen and move them around they start eating. The more there away the more the eat...

[JRtracker]

If they are up they will eat.

[kyleseipp]

Take a Deer feeder off the barrel, on the ends of the spinner plate , connect a welding rod
Screw the feeder to a wall In your coop, put a piece of tin behind it, when the feeder goes off, the rods hit the tin and make a terrible noise

Done this one.

Plus the other of walking around in there - can't go wrong on that one.

If you have a tired toy train, run that bad boy on a christmas light timer. Perfect chance to get some redneck engineering creativity!

I also used a remote control car so I could drive it around in there while sipping my coffee/hot cocoa when I had them.

[yanta61]

So anyone do anything special when it gets close to show time. I'm about 2 weeks out.

[Buzzbow]

This is great stuff. Keep it coming. My baby girls gets chicks on March 2nd. She can use all the help she can get. THANK YOU!!!!

[clay4626]

So anyone do anything special when it gets close to show time. I'm about 2 weeks out.

About time to find the best of the bunch and separate them from the rest.
weigh some of them and see where you are at. Give the best ones more room
and they will do better. really be carefully with them and don't let them flap their wings very much. When you pick out your three you want three peas in a pod. Always temping to take the biggest one but you are showing a pen of three that needs to match. Most of the time had to leave the biggest one at home due to not having two others that match. put your hand on their breast
with the tip of your index finder on the tip of their breast bone and you can feel
how thick the breast meet is at that point and kind of measure how long the breast is. There should be a valley in between both sides of the breast bone.
If the breast bone is higher than the meat then those should be culled out

[yanta61]

About time to find the best of the bunch and separate them from the rest.
weigh some of them and see where you are at. Give the best ones more room
and they will do better. really be carefully with them and don't let them flap their wings very much. When you pick out your three you want three peas in a pod. Always temping to take the biggest one but you are showing a pen of three that needs to match. Most of the time had to leave the biggest one at home due to not having two others that match. put your hand on their breast
with the tip of your index finder on the tip of their breast bone and you can feel
how thick the breast meet is at that point and kind of measure how long the breast is. There should be a valley in between both sides of the breast bone.
If the breast bone is higher than the meat then those should be culled out

Thanks for the info and will try and cull some more today. How many birds should i keep? Also what does everyone use to take the birds to the show?

[Jason Fry]

Good advice based on my experience. Get out there in person as often as possible.

We always fed Acco, then used vegetable oil and feed mix to finish them out the last few weeks.

Cull early, cull often. By 6 weeks, the scrawny ones were all crammed on one side of the building. By the last two weeks, we only had about 10 on the "show" side.

[JerryC]

We used to put a light and radio on a timer at night to get them up and moving every couple of hours. When the light went off they'd lay back down. When the light and radio came on they would get up and start moving around and eating. Set the timer to go on and off every two hours.

[uncle jesse]

I know a dad that puts a cot in the pen and sleeps with them so he can stir them up throughout the night

[kyleseipp]

So anyone do anything special when it gets close to show time. I'm about 2 weeks out.

Wash them. And dry them. Do it a couple of times to get a soft plume.

Otherwise, pick your best set, and good luck.

[clay4626]

So anyone do anything special when it gets close to show time. I'm about 2 weeks out.

About time to find the best of the bunch and separate them from the rest.
weigh some of them and see where you are at. Give the best ones more room
and they will do better. really be carefully with them and don't let them flap their wings very much. When you pick out your three you want three peas in a pod. Always temping to take the biggest one but you are showing a pen of three that needs to match. Most of the time had to leave the biggest one at home due to not having two others that match. put your hand on their breast
with the tip of your index finder on the tip of their breast bone and you can feel
how thick the breast meet is at that point and kind of measure how long the breast is. There should be a valley in between both sides of the breast bone.
If the breast bone is higher than the meat then those should be culled out

[Jrmhunting]

We cull to 10 birds about 2 weeks before show. The day before we cull to 5 birds. As far as making the birds move we are putting an old garage door opener in the coop with a board attached to were the garage door attaches and hanging a blanket down from it. The blanket will be about 10" from the ground so it will go over them and not push them to one end. I found a water sprinkler timer im gonna try to use to program it to come on every 2 hours. We also built an elevated coop this year to get air flow around the birds and also maybe they will stay cleaner.

[Jrmhunting]

After about 4 weeks we mix cornbread mix and leave it in the pen in a ground feeder along with our regular feed. My sons 1st broilers at show time averaged just over 8lbs. Since doing this they average just under 10lbs and they seem to be more uniform. His pen lastyear was a difference of 2 oz from largest to smallest and all had uniform breast.