Those are Buff Brahmas above,  a chicken we would like to raise one day.  They are a rare breed,  they lay brown eggs and make a good show bird.

We were raising  anywhere from 50 to 100 Kosher King birds for several years, but this year we decided to try Cornish Crosses. We decided that we prefer these birds because they are less aggressive and when the plucker misses a pin feather it doesn't show as much!  But most important of all, they ate about a third as much food and grew to a nice weight.

The chickens are put in a moveable coop at about three weeks, which is set out on the pasture (thus the term pastured poultry).  This is advantageous in many ways.   The birds are moved to a new spot each day therefore giving them clean conditions daily.  They also have the opportunity to eat the grass (30% of their diet) and get some exercise.  This makes for a low fat, cleaner bird.  And because our feed contains no antibiotics,  the meat is not only very low in fat,  but it is drug free and a lot tastier!  Our slaughtering method also prevents the pooled blood that you see in store bought chickens, but I won't go into those details here! ( please feel free to write and ask for more info).  The chicks take 8 weeks to reach broiler weight.  When the chickens are finally in our freezer,  we are left with some very lush,  green pasture because chicken waste has a very high nitrogen content.

Photos of our Home Made Processing Equipment (click thumbnail to enlarge)