Differences Between Raising Heritage Chickens and Cornish Cross for Meat (Part 2 – Processing)

I don’t usually spend much time sharing the experience of processing chickens because usually people don’t think they want to hear it. But in the interest of sharing our observations, here goes!  This post will not contain any photos of actual processing.  

Differences between raising heritage chickens and cornish cross for meat (part 1)

Today we harvested our five biggest heritage cockerels and it was an eye-opening experience. We didn’t kill them because of the 4 am crowing, or the fact that one of them bit our daughter, or because we are in dire need of adding more chicken to our freezer.  We did it because this is why they are here, why we are raising them.  We are exploring the sustainability of heritage breeds, as well as taking note of our experience raising different breeds.  They are here to feed us, and we thank them for their role.  We took the opportunity to compare to a batch of cornish cross chickens we also raised for meat, and in this post I’ll go over some of the key differences in the actual raising of the birds.