Whew!
(no antibiotics, and no ‘fecal soup’*see note below)
healthy chicken! Affectionately known as “pastured poultry”.
The biggest was 6.1 (the 8 wk old rooster) and the smallest was 4.0 # (due to the skin getting pulled off from over-scalding 
).
Very grateful!
Inside Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profits this interesting little insight into the processing of the meat itself:
“Mechanical evisceration breaks open intestines and pours fecal material over the carcass, inside the body cavity, and contaminnates the birds. Large chill tanks often have several inches of fecal sludge in the bottom. In fact, about 9 percent of the weight on department-store chicken is fecal soup.
The soft muscle tissue is more conducive to insoaking, and the carcass sponges up the fecal-contaminated chill water.
Of course, this adds to the carcass weight, but certainly does not contribute any to the health of consumers.This filth is why birds receive as many as 40 chlorine baths – how much of that permeates the meat? And now the Food and Drug Administration has approved irradiation of chicken to control Salmonella and other bacteria that are a direct result of high-speed automated processing. Irradiation reduces vitamin C levels and reduces the nutrients in the meat.
Processing is an inherently filthy thing. And the larger, the faster, the more automated the system, the more filthy it is.”– excerpt from Pastured Poultry Profits, p. 10, by Joel Salatin