Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1867: Can I Eat My Own Chicken?
Gillette Abi's face appeared from the doorway, interrupting the three people who were about to continue digging deeper, and saved Zhou Zhi: "I've called you for dinner several times, why are you still chatting here? Let's go and eat!"

When he arrived at the dining table, Zhou Zhi realized why Gillette Abi was so anxious to call everyone to eat today. It turned out that today's dish was very meaningful - the rock eagle chicken raised by the chicken farm itself.

Now Zhouzhi has known that the origin of the Meigu Yanying chicken breed can be traced back to the Qin and Han dynasties.

The Yi people have a long-standing custom of raising chickens. They often select excellent breeds and graze them in forests, grasslands and other places with good original ecological conditions in order to worship the gods. Guo Moruo also mentioned in his book "Studies on Ancient Chinese Society": "The word 'Yi', in ancient bronze inscriptions and oracle inscriptions, is in the form of two hands offering a chicken. Chickens should be the first of the six domestic animals to be raised by humans, so the word Yi is commonly used in sacrificial vessels, which are dedicated to chickens."

I don’t know if it’s because the rock eagle chicken is too fierce, but the Yi people have the habit of castrating chickens.

The Rock Hawk Chicken is actually a free-range species, so during the long process of evolution, it still retains its sturdy legs and claws, powerful wings, and a beak that is sharper and more curved than that of ordinary domestic chickens.

The key is that roosters love to fight and are very capable. One rooster has to manage about twenty to thirty hens. If twenty hens are paired with three roosters, the roosters with excess energy will definitely fight.

It's okay for other chickens, but when chickens like rock eagle chickens, which are equipped with weapons, fight, they often cause great losses to the farmers.

Therefore, it is best to keep the roosters for breeding according to the proportion of the number of hens in the group, and castrate the remaining roosters directly.

A castrated rooster will lose its fighting spirit but its appetite will not decrease, and it will grow big and fat.

Roosters of this breed can generally grow to about five kilograms, and castrated chickens can even grow to six or seven kilograms.

However, that method of raising chickens is a bit of a waste of food. Except for those that participate in the county's "Chicken King" competition, it is not worth raising them that way.

Generally, when a chicken reaches four months old, its weight hardly continues to increase.

However, the taste of the chicken begins to change from this time on, becoming more and more fragrant.

Therefore, chicken starts to be edible at around four months old, and reaches the right aroma and taste between June and August.

As time goes by, the aroma of the chicken will continue to increase, but the meat will start to become tougher. The chicken from now on is only suitable for stewing soup or to satisfy special diners who like chewy texture.

There is another very important issue, that is, chickens will not grow long after four months, so the price will not go up. All the consumed feed becomes the breeding cost. When they are over eight months old, you can basically forget about making money.

Therefore, the chickens for the new year are basically old hens kept at home for making soup, while roosters are sold out from the age of four months old. Basically, all of them must be sold out before they are eight months old, otherwise there will be no profit in raising chickens.

Otherwise, the more chickens you raise, the greater the loss.

Once force majeure blocks sales, the loss is huge. Most farmers would rather kill all the chickens than continue raising them. This is the reason. The time for castrating chickens can be longer than that for ordinary chickens, six to ten months is fine, because castrated chickens weigh 10% to 20% more than ordinary chickens and can be sold at a higher price.

The chicken farm has been around for about five or six months now, and it's time to kill and sell the roosters from the first batch of hatched chicks. Today, Gillette Abi made an iron pot chicken. He used the thick cast iron pot that the Yi people use over the fire pit to make a braised chicken. The side dishes were potatoes, dried beans, dried mushrooms, dried bamboo shoots, and konjac. There was a circle of corn cakes baked on the edge, and the aroma was very tempting.

"Auntie, this chicken smells so good!" Li Lu couldn't wait to grab a piece to satisfy her craving.

"Come, sit down and eat!" Gillette Abi handed out chopsticks to everyone, with a happy smile on his face: "In the past, Ah Zi relied on me to raise chickens and sell eggs to support her studies. I stopped after her father came back. Now it's good. The chickens in the big chicken farm are much better than before!"

"If you ask me, the kids are really good. They even know how to cut the beaks of chicks." Old Chiri laughed and said, "We Yi people haven't learned this trick for many years."

"The main reason is that you used to raise chickens in spacious areas, which is different from the current large-scale centralized breeding management method." Liang Guangping said: "Although our base of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences mainly grows seedlings, raising poultry and fruits together is an important method of ecological disease and pest resistance, and it is not unfamiliar to the poultry breeding industry."

In fact, it is not only the adult chickens that fight. After killing some of their brothers and sisters, the survival pressure within a certain range will be much smaller. So basically from the moment they hatch, chicks have this instinct.

If they switched to the previous free-range method or changed to other chicken breeds, these problems would not be particularly serious. However, when trying to centrally hatch and raise Rock Eagle chickens, this was the first difficulty Gillette Abi encountered, and it made her very worried.

This chicken farm actually belonged to Zhou Zhi, so Zhou Zhi went to ask agricultural experts for advice. Liang Guangping himself did not know how to raise chickens, but he could find classmates who knew how to raise chickens. The solution was very simple: cut off a part of the tip of the chickens' beaks and confiscate their weapons. This way, even if they pecked at each other, the damage caused would not be great.

Of course, there is more than one similar problem, but agricultural experts have ways to solve it for Gillie Abi. Today, Lao Chiri took Zhou Zhi and others to see the "Dashibao" and they will definitely come back for dinner. Therefore, as soon as everyone went out, Gillie Abi became busy.

"There will be blood and pickled cabbage soup later," Gillette Abi cordially invited everyone to eat quickly, "First try the new chickens from our chicken farm."

"This chicken is really good." When everyone started eating, Liu Hongtao commented: "A six-month-old chicken tastes like an eight-month-old chicken, and the texture is like a four-month-old chicken."

"The meat of castrated chickens is much more tender than that of roosters. With scientific breeding methods and the addition of mixed feed in daily feeding, these chickens are not raised on pure grains, but the taste is still very fragrant. This is the bonus from the breed." Liang Guangping kept nodding his head with his mouth full of oil.

“What do you mean by that?” Li Lu also thought that the chicken tasted good, but she didn’t understand why the taste was due to the variety of the chicken.

Zhou Zhi helped explain, "This chicken is quite good. Although it is not as good as the five-black boned chicken raised with pure grains in my hometown, the five-black boned chicken cannot reach this taste at six months old. It has to be over eight months old to surpass it."

“If we were using feed, it would have been more difficult to achieve this quality six months ago.”

"The Rock Eagle Chicken is also known as 'Tall-legged Chicken' or 'Big-bone Chicken'. I guess it's because the bones of this type of chicken are tall, so the bone cavity is larger than that of ordinary chickens. After four months, the bone marrow in the big bones will gradually change from red bone marrow to yellow bone marrow mainly composed of fat, and the chicken will start to become fragrant at this time."

"So the bigger the bone cavity of a chicken, the more obvious its fragrance will become as it grows. Therefore, the fragrance of a Rock Eagle Chicken will be stronger than that of other chickens of the same age. Is this what Brother Ping is trying to say?"