Chapter 1867 You can eat your own chicken
Gilead Abi’s face appeared from the door, interrupting the three people who were about to dig deeper, and finally saved Zhou Zhi: “I called for dinner several times. "Why are you still chatting here?"
When he came to the dining table, Zhou Zhi realized why Gilliam was in such a hurry to invite everyone to eat today. It turned out that today's dish was very meaningful - —Rock eagle chickens raised by the chicken farm itself.
Now Zhou Zhi already knows that the origin of the Meiguyan Eagle chicken breed can be traced back to the Qin and Han Dynasties.
The Yi people have a long-standing custom of raising chickens. Out of the need to worship the gods, they often select excellent breeds and graze them in forests, grasslands and other places with good original ecological conditions. Guo Moruo also specifically mentioned in the book "Research on Ancient Chinese Society": "The word 'Yi', in ancient bronze inscriptions and inscriptions, is used as a second-hand offering of chickens. Chickens should be the first among the six animals to be domesticated by humans. Therefore, the common name for sacrificial vessels is Yi, which is reserved for chickens. ”
I don’t know if it’s because the Rock Eagle chicken is too fierce, but the Yi people have the habit of caponing chickens.
The Rock Eagle Chicken is actually a free-range species. Therefore, during the long-term evolution process, it still retains its thick legs and claws, powerful wings, and is sharper and more curved than ordinary domestic chickens. beak.
The key is that roosters still love to fight and are very capable. One rooster has to manage about twenty or thirty hens. If there are twenty hens and three roosters, the over-energetic roosters will definitely fight.
Other chickens are fine, but when chickens like Rock Eagle chickens, which carry their own weapons, get into fights, they often cause great losses to farmers.
So it is best to keep roosters in proportion to the number of hens in the flock, and castrate the remaining roosters directly.
After a castrated rooster loses his fighting spirit, his food intake will not decrease and he will grow bigger and fatter.
Cocks of this breed can generally grow to about five pounds, and capons can even grow to six or seven pounds.
However, that kind of raising method is a bit of a waste of food. Except for those that participate in the county's "Chicken King" competition, it is not worthwhile to raise the rest like this.
When an average chicken reaches four months of age, it will hardly continue to gain weight.
However, the taste of the chicken starts to change from this time on, and it will become more and more fragrant.
Therefore, chicken becomes "edible" at about four months, and reaches a suitable aroma and texture between June and August.
As you go on, the aroma of the chicken will continue to increase, but the meat will start to become dull again. The chicken at the end is only suitable for stewing soup, or to satisfy special eaters who like chewy texture.
There is another very important issue, that is, after four months, chickens will not be able to eat for long, and the price will not rise accordingly. All the feed consumed becomes the cost of breeding. After eight months or more, Basically don’t even think about making money.
Therefore, New Year chickens are basically old hens that are kept by the family for making soup, while roosters are sold for takeout from the age of four months, and they are basically all out before they are eight months old, otherwise the chickens will not be raised. What profit will there be?
Otherwise, the more chickens you raise, the more you will lose.
Once sales are blocked due to force majeure, the losses will be extraordinary. Most farmers would rather kill all the chickens than continue to raise them. This is the reason why. Capons can be raised a little longer than ordinary chickens, six to ten months is fine, because capons weigh one to two percent more than ordinary chickens and can be sold at a higher price.
The chicken farm has been around for almost five or six months now, and the roosters in the first batch of hatched chicks have also reached the time to be killed and sold. Today, Gillette Abi I made a braised chicken in the thick cast iron pot that the Yi people use on the fire pit. The side dishes were potatoes, dried beans, dried mushrooms, dried bamboo shoots, and konjac, and they were fried in a circle on the edge. Corn cake, the fragrance is very attractive.
“Auntie, this chicken tastes so good!” Li Lu couldn’t wait to grab a piece first 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, when Azi was studying, I relied on me to raise and sell chickens and eggs. , it stopped after her father came back, and it’s fine now. The chickens in the big chicken farm are much better than before!”
"If you ask me, the babies are still the best. They also know how to cut the beaks and shells of chickens." Lao Chiri said with a smile: "We Yi people have not been able to do this for many years."
"The main reason is that you used to do it. Chickens are raised in spacious grounds, which is different from the current management method of large-scale centralized breeding. "Liang Guangping said: "Although our Academy of Agricultural Sciences base is for breeding. Mainly saplings, but poultry and fruit intercropping is an important method of ecological disease and pest resistance, which is not new to the poultry breeding industry. "
In fact, chickens are not just big chickens who kill some of their brothers and sisters. Afterwards, the pressure to survive within a certain range will be much smaller, so basically from the moment they hatch, the chicks will have this instinct.
Switching to the previous free-range breeding method, or switching to other chicken breeds, these problems are not particularly serious. However, when trying to incubate and raise rock eagle chickens in a centralized manner, this is what Gillette Abbey encountered. The first problem she encountered made her extremely worried.
This chicken farm is actually quite thoughtful, so Zhou Zhi went to ask agricultural experts for advice. Liang Guangping didn’t know how to raise chickens himself, but he could find classmates who knew how to raise chickens. The solution was simple, give the chickens Cut off part of the tip of the mouth and collect the weapons, so that even if they stare at each other, the damage caused will not be great.
Of course there is not just one similar problem, but agricultural experts have ways to solve it for Gilead Abi. Today, Lao Chiri took Zhou Zhi and the others to see the "Dashi Bao". They will definitely come back for dinner, so they will wait until everyone is together. After going out, Gilliam Abi became busy.
“There will be Xuewang pickled cabbage soup later,” Gilliam Abi warmly invited everyone to eat quickly: “First try the new chicken from our chicken farm.”
“This chicken is really good. Not bad." When everyone started eating, Liu Hongtao commented: "The six-month-old chicken tastes like eight-month-old chicken, and the meat tastes like four-month-old chicken. ”
“The meat of capons is much tenderer than that of roosters. With scientific breeding methods, mixed feed is added to daily feeding. These chickens are not raised on pure grains, but The taste is still very fragrant. This is due to the variety." Liang Guangping couldn't help but nodded.
"So what about this?" Li Lu also thought the chicken tasted very good, but she didn't understand why it was a bonus from the variety.
Zhou Zhi helped explain: "This chicken is quite good. Although it is not as good as the five-black silky chicken raised in my hometown using pure grains, the five-black silky chicken cannot achieve such a taste at six months. , you have to be eight months old or older to surpass it.”
“If you use feed, it may be more difficult to achieve such quality six months ago.”
“Rock Eagle Chicken is also known as 'Gao'. 'Foot chicken', 'big bone chicken', I guess it could be the bones of this kind of chicken If it is tall, the bone cavity will be larger than that of ordinary chickens. After four months, the bone marrow in the big bones will gradually transform from red bone marrow to yellow bone marrow, which is mainly fat, and the chicken will start to become fragrant at this time. "
“So the chicken with a larger bone cavity will become more fragrant as it grows. Therefore, the fragrance of Rock Eagle chicken will be stronger than that of ordinary chickens of the same age. What Brother Ping wants to say is Isn’t that true? ”