Egads, no wonder they don’t taste good! Six to eight pounds certainly sounds huge to me, the fryers we used to kill on the farm probably weighed between two and three pounds but they could fly! Sometimes we raised game chickens and when I was twelve or thirteen my mother would send me out to shoot a couple of game fryers, no one could catch them. I would shoot them in the head with a .22 rifle. The game chickens tasted more like quail than like supermarket chicken.
What is a “tractor” for growing fryers?
The ‘tractor’ is a PVC formed portable quansit type construction that is covered with plastic on the top and sides, then has a hole cut in the side with a chicken-wire fence. You put the chicks in, and they are on the ground - you set in a water feeder and a feeder. The chickens peck the ground, eat the grass and make a mess.
Then every couple of days you take a rope and drag the PVC constuction 10-20 feet to fresh grass. The chickens pile up at the back and if they don’t run to the front of the ‘tractor’ they are drug that distance.
If some chickens roll out from under the ‘tractor’; they will walk 5-10 feet; but then have to sit down and rest. Tehy are so breast heavy that they simply cannot run at all.
When we slaughtered 20 of them, we had less than 2 gallons of feathers. These birds were practically bald. They have been bred to grow very quickly, and produce little waste (feathers). That’s why the chicken you buy today has very little taste - when compared to the chickens we grew up with.
Now, some ‘ Gentlemen Farmers’ raise the old Banty Hens, and these birds grow huge and slow. They are primarily your egg laying hens (which surprisingly have zero commercial value - they are killed and buried). These chickens actually have flavor to the meat.