Chicken Tales Part 3: Land of the Freedom Ranger

Raising Freedom Ranger broiler chickens for meat. As always free range and off grid!

When my second Spring as a homesteader rolled around, I was chomping at the bit to try raising broiler chickens for meat. I was feeling good about my flock of laying hens and was ready to level up food production here at Big Mountain Homestead! The obvious main concern was around slaughter and butchering, but I chose this lifestyle knowing that would be part of it and mentally prepared myself and focused first on raising them.

The next step was deciding on a breed. The most popular broiler chicken is called the Cornish Cross. These birds grow to full size in about two months, are easy to pluck, and have the body type I'm used to from historically buying chicken at a grocery store (think lots of breast meat). But the more I researched them I realized I didn’t want to participate in this system. Frankly, I think they shouldn't exist. For one thing, their extreme growth will cause their legs to snap from the weight of their bodies if slaughter is delayed. Yuck. They are also too mean to coexist with a flock of laying hens and too stupid to forage. So, I kept looking and found Freedom Rangers. These broiler birds are still much bigger and faster to develop than a typical chicken, but not to the extremes of the Cornish. Although they won’t be quite as fat and breast heavy, they don’t get dangerously top heavy. That’s worth it to me. They are good foragers and can integrate into a flock of other breeds. Well, all things considered that fit right in with my philosophy, so I ordered up 30 "free run" birds (a mix of roosters and hens) and unfortunately prepared another brooder box to go on my table. With that the adventure began!

Even though I researched to find a breed I aligned with, I didn't expect to like them as much as I did. These birds were great! First of all, because they grow so fast even with many more of them the experience of raising up the chicks inside the trailer was tolerable (barely). Seeing their size and feathers develop so quickly was heartening, and it was only a few weeks until they were able to be fenced in outside to get acquainted with the existing flock. They got along great with the other birds and were soon let out to forage and enjoy their lives.

The story of the Freedom Rangers is the story of birds who have an intense passion for food and eating. Almost to what seems like an unnatural degree. But it led to them being by far more interested in humans than my other hens are. The Rangers knew I would throw out kitchen scraps, grains, and seeds for them every day so they would come up as a big herd and follow me around whenever I was outside. They would even follow my family down to the creek! The laying hens want nothing to do with being that far away from their coop and the main living area. So, it was the broiler chickens who I enjoyed watching meander through the long grass scratching for insects while we rested under a tree on hot summer days. And they could not have been more kid friendly. I'll never forget watching my 18-month-old son toddling around the property barefoot with a fat chicken under his arm. He's actually quite a good chicken catcher and can catch any chicken from time to time, but the Freedom Rangers actually seemed to enjoy it. They would just settle in under his armpit as if there was literally no place they would rather be.

Unfortunately, at times, their preoccupation with food was ill-advised. As chicks in the brooder box they would swarm the feeder with such intensity that one chick was trampled and broke its neck on the rim of the feeder dish. Gnarly stuff. As they aged, I noticed that there seemed to be an awful lot of limping Freedom Rangers. Then I began to notice that they would rather risk death and maiming than give the cows any space during grain feeding. They would swarm under the feeders with reckless abandon. More than once I observed one of my cows standing on the feet of a Freedom Ranger with absolutely no intention of moving. The chicken would be seemingly resigned to its fate. When I pushed the cow off the chicken would get up and immediately continue eating the spilled grain right under the cow! It was baffling. Similarly, for a while there was one Ranger hen who would stand with me in the milking stall and actually eat the flies off of my cow, Charlotte’s, belly. This went on for a week or two and then one day I found her unable to walk and too injured to carry on. I'm sure she was stepped on by a cow.

Summer turned to Fall, and the Freedom Rangers were a lovely part of homestead life. I let them grow up slowly, having them forage and hunt for most of their food. They did a great job eating grasshoppers that otherwise would have terrorized my garden, and they drove me crazy swarming the dog and cat food at feeding time. Eventually they grew large, and the roosters began to fight one another. I knew it was time for the first broiler chicken season to come to a close. There's a lot to say about my first experiences butchering my own meat. As an animal lover who grew up in the city, I never pictured myself being able to kill anything. Suffice to say I made it through the bloody endeavor and ensured a humane and reverent end of life for all my chickens. I will write all the details of that in another article.

Due to their hard to pluck flight feathers, and being slow and inexperienced at the whole process, my husband and I decided to skin them. This unfortunately meant no roast chicken with the skin on, but it made the process much faster. Plus, the majority of our meat needed to be canned anyway (there isn't much freezer space here) and that is typically done without the skin. So, by the beginning of Winter, I had canned chicken meat stashed in every available corner of the trailer and had solidified the value of raising my own chicken.

I only have approximations of cost but here's a rough idea:

[(30 birds x $3/bird) + (6 bags of feed x $20 per bag)] / 29 birds surviving to adulthood

= $7.24 per bird/ ~3.5 pounds per bird

=$2.07/pound which is pretty much the same price as my town's butcher shop.

I'll be scaling up production this year, with the goal of working up to a full year of chicken meat preserved before the first hard freeze. And hopefully I'll keep exact track of the costs. Stay Tuned!