Finishing Up the Butchering - 2024

As the final bird in the chicken tractor is processed, there is still work to be done.  All the birds are chilling in tubs of water in the shade.  Meanwhile, we gather around the eviscerating table.  We dump out the bowl of livers on the table and spray them down.  They are mostly clean, but we make sure that they are clean and then pack them in quart bags for freezing.  We like to pan fry them in butter.  We also like to wrap them in bacon and broil them in the oven.  We did that today, in fact.  Liver isn't for everyone, but we enjoy it.  

Next, we pour all the hearts on the table, cut them in half and wash the coagulated blood out of them and bag them up to freeze.  It's just a muscle, so it's good eating.  I didn't get a photo of the hearts, though.  Livers and hearts are pretty easy to clean and freeze.  

The gizzards require a bit more time.  The gizzards are surrounded by fat.  We take our time and pull it all off of each gizzard.  We are kind of particular about getting them super clean.

Then we cut them in half and remove the yellow, plastic-like liner from the inside of the gizzard.  It is always interesting to see what's in the gizzard.  Chickens eat rocks and oyster shells to aid in the break down and digestion of their food.  You can see that these chickens weren't only eating feed and bugs.  They were eating their share of grass and clover.  Healthy birds.

All the gizzards are bagged and frozen.  But don't forget, we have tubs full of feathers, guts, blood, feet, heads, etc.  We've always put that right back in the garden.  I dig trenches in the garden, pour it all in, cover it back up, and it will rot and add good stuff to the soil.  There are sweet potatoes growing in abundance all around the 'gut pit'.  Healthy soil is the key to a good garden.

We go inside and take a break, while we are waiting for the next event of the day, I take the opportunity to sharpen the knives.  They've all been used all morning and have dulled.  I drip some oil on a whetstone and sharpen them and then use the steel to further fine tune.  In the end, the work results in a razor sharp knife, and we'll need that in just a little bit.

A final thing I want to discuss is the Buck knife at the bottom of the photo.  That knife was my Uncle Don's hunting knife.  It was given to me when he passed away, and we used it to butcher chickens today.  Don was a good man and while using his knife today, we talked about him and many fond memories of spending time with him.  I think he would have enjoyed all the flying feathers today.  We certainly miss him.

We brought the tubs holding 32 freshly butchered birds in the house along with the tables.  It was getting hot outside and the flies were bad.  We felt confident that we would be able to clean up any mess that we made on the tile floors.  The birds were on ice and went through the rigor mortis process during the afternoon.

In the late afternoon, we began the final task - cutting up the birds.  We do an 8 piece cut-up: 2 breasts, 2 wings, 2 thighs, 2 drumsticks.  It's actually a 9 piece cut up, because we keep the neck/backbone section for making broth.  I wish I would have taken some photos of that process, but my hands get so messy cutting up the birds that I didn't want to get all that on my phone.  We freeze them in gallon freezer bags.  We froze a couple birds whole (not cut up).  The rest we cut up and bagged either 1 chicken or a half chicken to the bag.

We weighed the final product and kept good records.  Perhaps tomorrow or the day after, we'll show you the results: total weight, average weight per bird, feed consumption, cost per bird, etc.

Blood, Guts, and Feathers - Chicken Butchering - 2024

Eight weeks from cradle to grave.  That's it.  That's how long it takes to raise a Cornish Cross Meat Bird for slaughter.  Saturday was butchering day.  Our sons came in to help with the annual process.  We were trying to figure out how many years we've done this and can't put our finger on it.  Our best guess is 15 years.  Each year we purchase day old chicks and raise them for slaughter and eat on these birds all year long.  In the past we've raised as many as 100 at a time.  This year, it's only Tricia and me at home so we raised 32.

Each day we made sure that they had access to feed and fresh water.  We also gave them an all you can eat grass and bug buffet by pushing the chicken tractor to fresh grass two times a day.  The night before the butchering, I pushed the tractor near the butchering stations I set up.  I stopped feeding them at noon the day before butchering so that their digestive system would be emptied.  This makes gutting them a cleaner process.  I got the whetstone out and steel and sharpened all the knives.  A sharp knife certainly makes the butchering process easier.

The Final Countdown

The first station is the "killing cones."  We use traffic cones that were abandoned on the side of the road and then screwed to two 2 x 4's.  The live birds are turned upside down in the cones with the head poking out.  The rubber cones hold them tight.  Buckets are placed beneath each cone to collect the blood.

Killing Cones

Benjamin runs the Killing Cone station.  After he's positioned the birds in place, he uses a sharp knife to slice the bird's artery on the side of its head.

One slice

The bird's heart will pump all the blood out of the bird and it will die.  We aim for the least stressful death possible.  This only takes a couple of minutes and the bird is pronounced dead.

A bloody job

Russ runs the scalding station.  We use our crawfish boiling pot that's been filled with water.  A propane burner heats the water.  A thermometer in the pot is monitored so that it stays between 145 and 150 Fahrenheit.  The temperature has to be just right.  If it is too cool, the feathers won't come off.  If it is too hot, it will cook the bird.  We add some dishwashing liquid to the water.  It is a surfactant and enables the feathers to come off a little easier.  We usually dunk the bird in and out of the water for about two minutes.  We make sure we dunk all the way down so that you get the joint of the let wet.  The test for making sure the bird is ready for plucking is to try to pull a tail feather out and try to pull a big wing feather out.  When each pulls off easily, you're ready for plucking.

Russ' Plucking Station

Teamwork makes the dream work.  Sometimes, when Benjamin is waiting for his four birds to die, he assists Russ in scalding.

Next up is the plucking.  Years ago we built this plucker.  It has rubber fingers mounted on the sides and on a disk on the bottom.  A washing machine motor powers this contraption.  You turn it on and the bottom spins.  Toss the bird in and spray it with water and while it spins, the rubber fingers take all the feathers off.  It's quite a time saver.

The plucker

The de-feathered bird is given to me.  I pull the head of the chicken off and cut the feet off.  Then I remove the gland on the top of the bird's tail, cut the neck and pull the crop and the windpipe out and make a cut across the bird's belly near the vent.

No head, no feet

Tricia runs the evisceration station.  She's quite the surgeon.  She reaches in the bird's cavity and pulls out the intestines, liver, gizzard, heart, crop and windpipe.  It all pulls out connected.  She cuts a U-shaped cut around the vent and the bird is gutted.  The liver, gizzard and heart are cut out and placed in iced containers for further processing later.  The gall bladder is carefully cut off the liver, being careful not to cut into the organ.  All the guts are put in a bucket.  She reaches in the bird and removes the lungs from along the back bone and, if a male, removes the testicles.  The gutted carcass is washed out good with a hose.

The surgeon in her OR

The birds then are cooled down.  They are thrown in tubs of cool water.  Keeping them submerged protects them from flies.  It also brings their body temperature down.  Toward the end of the process, we dump out the water and refill with cool, fresh water.

The chilling station

This whole process goes faster than you think.  We always say we're going to time it and always forget.  Finally, we look in the tractor and there's just one left.  The last of the Mohicans.  

Tomorrow, I'll show you Part II of this process.  It is a smooth operation that we've tried to perfect each year.  There's something to be said about processing your own birds in the backyard.  It's good to know what you are eating and what went into your birds.  No medications.  No hormones.  No antibiotics.  Join us tomorrow as we continue...

2024 Meat Birds - 7 Weeks Old

This week was an eventful week for the Cornish Cross birds.  A bad storm was coming through, promising hail and high winds.  After the weather scare when the birds were very young when we tried to hold the chicken tractor down in 80 mph winds, we had different plans this time.  We were getting weather reports of 75 mph winds an hour away from us.  I staked down the chicken tractor, but then had an epiphany.

The birds are older now and not as susceptible toy hypothermia.  I decided to remove the tarp from the top of the tractor.  This takes the wind resistance away and allows the wind (and rain) to blow right through.  Yes, the birds would get wet, but we could get the tarp back on as soon as the weather settled down, turn on the heat lamps, and all would be good.  Good, that is, unless we got hail that could kill the birds.  I made up my mind that we would butcher any birds that got killed by the weather.

Well, no hail killed any birds.  The strong winds blew and we got almost 2 inches of rain, but the birds made it.  All of them.  We turned the heat lamps on and the shaking birds quickly recovered.  What a blessing!  Well, today is weigh day.  I grabbed an average rooster and marched him in to the kitchen scale I have set up on a table in the garage.

He's a nice looking bird, I think.  He feels solid as I held him.  Let's see what the scale says.

At week 7 we are at 6 pounds and 2 ounces.  Remember a 6 pound bird yields a 4 pound carcass and that is what we are shooting for.  We've hit that for the average bird and still have a few days to go (and grow)!

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces
• Week 4, they weighed 44 ounces
• Week 5, they weighed 64 ounces
• Week 6, they weighed 84 ounces
• Week 7, they weighed 98 ounces

That's a weight gain of 14 ounces or just shy of a pound over the last week.  As discussed above, we've hit our goal.  I've compared to prior years and this one is right in line with where he needs to be.  Weather permitting, we've tentatively scheduled the butcher date to be this Saturday morning.  So far, we haven't lost a single bird.  Let's see if we can get all 32 birds to cross the finish line on Saturday.  Stay posted.  We'll keep you abreast (pardon the pun) of the poultry butchering extravaganza.

2024 Meat Birds - 6 Weeks Old

This morning my wife and I were reading in the book of Job.  You know the story well.  Job had many calamities befall him.  All on one day.  When he thought it couldn't get any worse after loosing his oxen and donkeys and sheep and servants, another servant came running up and told him that his sons and daughters were having a feast and the eldest son's home.  All of a sudden strong winds came forth and blew the house down on top of them, killing all of Job's children.

What did Job do?  He mourned.  Like anyone would do.  Then he said, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, Blessed be the Name of the Lord."  In all this Job didn't sin.  In fact, his wife told him, "Are you going to retain your dignity?  Curse God and die."  Job told her, "You talk as a foolish woman.  Are you going to receive good from the Lord and not receive the bad?"

First, I began to think of what a righteous man Job was.  I also began to remember when our meat birds were very young and the 80 mph winds blew, knocking over our pecan tree and causing destruction all around.  Tricia and I were in the chicken tractor, trying to hold it down and save our birds from calamity.  Little did we know that we could have been like Job's kids!  Not only that, lightning was flashing all around, crashing like nobody's business.

After the storm passed and I was cleaning up limbs, I picked up this branch that wasn't 150 feet from where we were in the chicken tractor:

Yep, lightning!  It popped a water oak tree in the front yard, burning the branch with considerable voltage and splintering the wood, sending it falling in the yard.  You can see way up in the tree in the photo below where, about 3/4 of the way up, another burned, broken off piece of the limb remains.  That was a close call!

Well, tonight is 'weigh day.'  It's the time I go out and pick out an average bird from the chicken tractor, march it into the garage where I have the scale set up, and weigh the bird.  We purchased straight runs, meaning they could be hens or roosters.  Roosters grow faster and bigger.  This one below is a rooster.

He felt heavy and hot.  I sat him up on the scale to see where he was.

Whoa!  He tipped the scale at 5 pounds, four ounces.

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces
• Week 4, they weighed 44 ounces
• Week 5, they weighed 64 ounces
• Week 6, they weighed 84 ounces

That's a weight gain of 20 ounces or 1 pound 4 ounces over the last week.  At five pounds and four ounces, that is precisely where we want to be at this point.  I've compared to prior years and this one is right in line with where he needs to be.  At this rate, we are on course for butchering at the 8 week point.  We'll check back in next Wednesday.

2024 Meat Birds - 5 Weeks Old

It's already Wednesday weigh-in for the meat birds.  The week has been mostly uneventful for the Cornish Cross birds.  They are steadily growing.  You can't really call them chicks any longer.  We had more than a 2 1/2 inch rain this past week, but it didn't phase them.  As young chicks, when they get wet, you can easily lose the whole flock.  Ask me how I know that little factoid.  They are older now and have feathers and put off a lot of heat.  

Speaking of heat, I still have them under the heat lamps at night.  During the day, I turn them off as it has been warming up into the upper 80's already.  I'm still feeding them bugs at night.  As far as feeding, we're still giving them an 18% protein, non-medicated chick grower.  I feed at breakfast, lunch and supper.  In other words, I keep feed in front of them all day long.  At nightfall,, I pull the feed and give them a 12 hour stretch with no feed.  In the morning, they are hungry.  They practically attack me when I open the door with the bucket of feed.

Let the sleeping chickens lie

I picked up a bird of average stature for the weigh-in.  Remember, there are 7 birds that are a week older.  I'm not weighing any of those guys.  You can see by this one's comb that he is a rooster.

This bird has some big feet!  I noticed them when I set him down on the scale.  Let's see what he weighs...

Exactly 4 pounds.

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces
• Week 4, they weighed 44 ounces
• Week 5, they weighed 64 ounces

That's a weight gain of 20 ounces or 1 pound 4 ounces over the last week.  At exactly four pounds, that is precisely where we want to be at this point.  At this rate, we are on course for butchering at the 8 week point.  We'll check back in next Wednesday.

2024 Meat Birds - 4 Weeks Old

What's changed in the last week since the last weigh in?  Well, for one thing, their feed trough.  I moved out the small feeders because they kept getting their heads stuck in it.  They're growing.  I replaced the little chick feeders with what we always use - a 10 foot PVC gutter.  It works perfectly.  Now all the chicks can gather around and eat to their hearts' content.  

We still have them on 18% (unmedicated) chick grower.  We keep feed in front of them all day long.  At night, I pull the feed away from them.  In the morning, they're presented with breakfast and kept with food in the gutter all day.  I can tell they are growing and still, no deaths.  0% mortality rate.  Let's see if we can keep that up.

I still feed them bugs at night, but we've had a string of cool nights and that's kept the nightly bug population down.  Although tonight, it's warmed up and so far they've eaten 60 fat beetles.  On my last beetle feeding trip to the chicken tractor, I grabbed an average looking bird and brought him back to the scale in the garage.  He plopped right down.

Surprisingly, the bird is calm and only made some slight noise when I picked him up.

I made sure to zero out the scale before we began.  Here's where ol' boy measures up on the scale for the week 4 weigh in.

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces
• Week 4, they weighed 44 ounces

That's a weight gain of 15 ounces over last week.  As I look at prior years' figures, we are still right where we need to be as far as growth is concerned.  We'll check in next week to see how they continue to progress.  Remember, our goal is a 6 pound bird at eight weeks.  We're still within range of hitting that target.

2024 Meat Birds - 3 Weeks Old

Three weeks are in the books for the meat birds.  I'm not a superstitious person, so I'll go ahead and say it:  We haven't lost a single bird.  We started with 32 and 32 are still upright and vertical.  That's good.  Real good.  We've been feeding them an 18% protein Chick Starter with no medication or antibiotics.  We keep the feeders full, but the feeders you see in the photo below will be swapped out with a PVC gutter that we use as a feed trough in order to fix a problem.  I noticed today that the chicks' heads were getting stuck in the feeder.  They're growing.

The other thing that's different is that I replaced the one gallon waterer with our old trusty bell chicken waterer.  

It suspends from the roof of the tractor and has a 5 gallon reservoir that I'll show in the next photo.

The reservoir is simply a 5 gallon bucket with a 5/16 hole drilled in it.  A rubber tube connects to a valve on the bell waterer.  The five gallon bucket sits precariously atop another 5 gallon bucket turned upside down that sits on a cow molasses tub turned upside down.  This set up allows gravity to do its thing and provides sufficient head pressure to keep water flowing as the chicks drink it.  We're still adding apple cider vinegar to the water.

So today is weigh day.  I snatched up an average bird.  Not the biggest.  Not the smallest.  I carry him in to the kitchen scale I have set up in the garage.  He's a nice looking bird.  He feels plump.  I'm still feeding them a whole bunch of june bugs every night.  That's free protein you don't have to pay for at the feed store and the chicks love 'em.  I set this week's bird down and he gave me a nice profile pic.

I sat him down on the scale for the Wednesday weekly weigh-in...

This week, Week 3, he weighed 1 lb. 13 oz or 29 ounces

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces

That's a weight gain of 11 ounces over last week.  As I look at prior years' figures, we are still right where we need to be as far as growth is concerned.  We'll check in next week to see how they continue to progress.

2024 Meat Birds - 2 Weeks Old

An eventful week for our feathered friends.  The changes are apparent.  First, they are putting on feathers.  Their heads still have the yellow fuzz that is typical of cute little chicks, but white feathers are starting to come out.  They are noticeably larger, too.  We'll find out how much they've grown in a minute.

The storm that blew through on Wednesday set the birds back.  First, many of them came very close to dying as they got wet and had hypothermia.  Although we saved all of them, for probably 12 hours of the day, they didn't eat and didn't drink.  Once they recovered, they ate, but in a life span of 8 weeks, losing half a day of nutrition is going to set things back a little bit.

The bug population has fallen off.  Where I was feeding them between 95 - 200 beetles each night, tonight only 5 beetles were found.  That falloff in protein will be missed by the birds.  We're expanding the real estate within the chicken tractor that they can roam on, almost daily.  Since they are eating more each day, they are also pooping more.  We move the chicken tractor to fresh grass, so that they aren't standing in their poop.

So tonight is the night I pick out an average looking bird out of the flock of 32 and bring them to the kitchen scale to see where we measure up.  Like a prizefighter standing before the scales, let's look at tonight's heavy-weight competitor:

Notice the big dinosaur-looking feet on that little bird.  That means he's got some growing to do to fit into those "shoes."

Let's zoom in on the weight:

1 pound and two ounces.  In looking at records of past history, 20 ounces at this time hold the record, I think.  This bird isn't materially far behind.

At a day old he weighed 3 ounces.

A week later, he more than doubled his weight to 6.5 ounces

Not to be outdone, a week later, he more than doubled his weight to 18 ounces or 1 pound 2 ounces.

That's pretty good growth there.  We'll see if we can keep them healthy, happy and growing!  Next week we'll see how Week 3 goes.

2024 Meat Birds - 1 Week Old

As we've done in prior years, during our meat bird project we'll have weekly updates where we weigh them and discuss how they are doing.  Tonight is episode one.

As time goes on, you notice trends.  Things happen time after time.  When I was farming, I remember plowing the same field year after year.  The turns you made until you finished plowing were the same turns you made in previous years.  The tractor could almost be on auto pilot.  Other things the Lord put in nature comes at the same time every year.  The live oak leaves fall and are replaced with fresh growth, quickly followed by tassels.  Then the little stinging caterpillars fall from the trees.  Ugh!  Then, the june bugs come.  I call them june bugs, but that's not their name, I'm sure.  It's only April.

Anyhow, like clouds of locusts the june bugs come.  Tonight, I thought of a brilliant idea.  Those don't come often, so I thought I should act on it.  I turned on the flood lights and the light attracted the june bugs.  I picked them up.

I learned that I could fit 21 of them in the palm of my hand.  The crawling sensation gave me the frissons.  I threw them down in the brooder and found that the old saying "quicker than a chicken on a june bug" is true!  Those dudes and dudettes went absolutely crazy chasing down the bugs and devouring them.  These are straight run chicks, so I won't know how many are male versus female until a little later.  You want males because they grow bigger and faster.

This is Friday night entertainment on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  I watched the chicks scurry around, grabbing a june bug in their beak.  Then other chicks would try to steal it.  What fun!

I kept walking back to the light and collecting more bugs that were attracted to it...  Like moths to a flame, they sealed their doom.  As of this writing, I've fed 97 bugs to the chicks.  I think they are still hungry believe it or not, so I'll go back out and collect some more high protein june bugs.

So on Wednesday, the majority of the birds (less the 7 we got a few days earlier) turned a week old.  Time to put one on the scale.  This is Tricia's kitchen scale, so I put a piece of paper on it to keep it somewhat clean should the bird decide to have his daily constitutional.

As you can see, at one week old this one weighs 6 1/2 ounces.  Last week it weighed 3 ounces.  It's doubled in size, adding 3 1/2 ounces of body weight in one week.  In looking at prior years' weights, they have been between 6 and 8 ounces at one week, so we're right in the ballpark.

I'll wager that if I feed them 100 june bugs a night, they might weigh as much as me by next week!

The 2024 Cornish Cross Project

For those who follow, each year we purchase and raise day old chicks of the Cornish Cross variety.  Generally, in eight short (or long, depending on how you look at it) weeks, the birds will weigh six pounds and yield a four pound carcass.  We butcher them and have chickens to eat for most of the year until its time to do it again.  On March 23rd we purchased all the birds that our local Tractor Supply Company had.  That totaled 7 birds.  Purchasing this way rather than by mail saved shipping costs.  The birds were $2.99 a piece.  Big problem, however.  Seven birds in the freezer are not going to make many gumbos, fricassees, or chicken and dumpling meals. 

Chickens already under the heat lamp

The kind lady informed us that they had more coming in on Wednesday, March 27th.  On my way through town at noon, I passed by and snatched up all the Cornish Cross meat birds that they had delivered.  That totaled 25 birds.  So if we can keep them all alive, we'll have 32 in the freezer.  That sounds better.  I picked up two boxes of birds - 12 in one and 13 in the other.

Two boxes of chicks

I have a great old college buddy who is from Michigan.  I envied him for the snow that he always saw growing up in the north.  He always told me snow was great for about the first week - pretty, white, and picturesque.  And then, it turns ugly and dirty.

That's a good description of day old chicks as you see in the unboxing photo below.  The chicks are yellow and cute.  They are at their zenith.  Enjoy the photogenic moment while you can, because they change.  Quickly.  They get big and dirty and gross, to be honest.

Day old chicks

We put the day old chicks under the heat lamp and the seven (one is hiding) chicks we got initially moved out of the garage and onto green grass on a beautiful day.  We like to get them outside as quickly as possible.  They start eating grass and bugs almost immediately.

Pastured Poultry from week 1

So each year, on a weekly basis, we put the chicks on a scale to chart their growth.  I put some old rags on top of the kitchen scale to protect its cleanliness, zero out the scale and put one of the chicks on top.

Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!

And here's the verdict on day one of having the 25 birds home.  The average bird weighs 3.5 ounces.

So a quarter of a pound, basically, at day one.  In addition to grass, we feed them an 18% protein chick starter.  Oh, something else, too.  Right now, in our area, we have an influx of big beetles.  I call them June bugs, but it's not June and I don't think that's their proper name.  At night, they are attracted to the outside lights.  I catch handfuls of them and toss them to the chicks.  They instinctually know they are food and they run around, snatching them up in their little beaks and then run away so the others don't steal their meal.

Next week we'll see how much they've grown.