Chicken Butchering Day - 2018

Warning: If you don't like seeing blood or guts, today's post is not a good one for you.

Our Cornish Cross Meat Birds averaged 6 pounds at the time of the last weigh-in, so it was time to process them this weekend.  Process is a fancy way of saying, "It was time to butcher them."  Our chicken tractor makes it so easy to just roll them right up to where we have our outdoor butcher shop set up.  No more carrying them in wagons across the pasture.  No more ducking into the old chicken tractor that was 3 feet tall.  This tractor has a door and is 6 feet tall, so you can walk right in and grab the birds as their turn came.  The night before we work hard to sharpen all the knives with sharpening stones and a steel.  We use Chicago Cutlery knives as we've had good success with them.  We had butchered almost all the chickens when I took this picture, but I wanted to show you the ease of transportation with the tractor.  It's all about logistics.

Death Row

The first station in our butcher shop is the killing cones.  The killing cones are traffic cones hung upside down.  The chickens are placed in the cone head-first and the rubberized cone holds them tightly.  Russ gathers the chickens and brings them to Benjamin as he and Benjamin do the killing.  He administers a knife cut with precision, slicing the jugular and causing the blood to drain out of the bird.  We can kill 4 at a time and when the heart has beat all the blood out, the chicken dies.  All the blood is captured in buckets beneath each bird and will be composted into the garden.

Even the cat can't watch

Station 2 is the scalding station.  Russ and I handle this.  We get the crawfish pot heated up to a scalding 145 degree temperature and keep it at that temperature by monitoring a thermometer.  We add dish washing liquid to the water.  Once the chickens are dead, we dunk the birds again and again (about 25 dunks) or until you can easily pull out a wing feather.  That's when you know it is ready for the next station.

The dunking machin

The next station is our chicken plucker.  We built this bad boy and it is a time saver.  You turn it on, drop two birds in and watch the birds spin while the rubber fingers remove every single feather.  We let it spin until it looks like no feathers remain.  You don't want to leave it spinning too long as it will break bones and/or bruise the meat.

The Spin Cycle

Here you can see what a clean job the plucker does.  It pulls off almost every feather.  In quality control, we may pull of one or two, but the plucker really speeds things up.

The Emperor has no clothes

I line them up beside the evisceration station and pull the heads off with my hand.  You don't want to cut them as it will create sharp edges that cut the ziploc bag.  Then I cut the feet off.  Finally, I cut a slit in the neck and loosen the crop and windpipe and then cut a slit right above the vent to expose the entrails.

Chicken carcasses

Tricia does the eviscerating.  She reaches in the cavity pulling heart, crop, liver, gizzard and intestines out.  Then she cuts a 'u-shape' under and around the vent to completely remove all the guts.  There's really not much poop or stink as we stop feeding them the previous day with the noon feeding being the last.  That gives a chance for them to empty their bowels, producing a cleaner slaughter.  The gizzards are put on ice in one pot, the hearts in another, and the liver in another.

Gutting the bird

Once the bird is gutted, the lungs are removed, the bird is washed out and then is thrown into a cooling tank.  They are kept under water to keep from flies.  As the water absorbs their body heat, we dump it out and replace with cool water as the bodies cool.

Chilling out

The feet and heads go into one pot.  Some will be eaten and the rest will be composted.

Chicken feet

The guts will be composted into the garden soil, using the trench composting method.

Gut bucket

We clean up all of the tables, plucker, cones, etc. and then add ice to the buckets of chicken, giving the birds a chance to go through rigor mortis.  Later in the evening we'll cut all the birds up and freeze them individually in gallon sized ziploc bags.

Tomorrow we'll talk a little more about it.  It is good to be all finished up and it is nice to know that we have 50 chickens in the freezer from which we will feast on for the next year until it is time to butcher again.  We'll also post the statistics, showing comparisons from last year and the prior year, so we can judge our success.