Disaster in the Hen House

At 6 am the alarm clock goes off and I head out to the barn to do the morning chores.  I feed the goats, the cows, and feed the chickens.  Then I open the henhouse to open the nesting boxes.  After sunrise, the solar-powered door opens and the chickens go out to roam on the pasture.  When I opened the door to the hen house, I was met with a startling sight.  There were feathers everywhere.  There were numerous carcasses of dead hens littering the hen house floor.  Carnage and savagery on display.  It was only a few months ago that we worked very hard to cement the floor of the henhouse where mink can't tunnel under and get to the chickens.  Mink had, you'll recall, killed 39 hens back then.  What in the world happened?  The surviving birds had witnessed a murderous rampage and I wondered if they had PTSD.

When I got back from work, I loaded the deceased into a wagon.  There were FIFTEEN dead hens.  Fifteen of them!  But I have a plan.  Like Wyatt Earp exclaimed in the movie, Tombstone, "You tell 'em I'm comin', and hell's comin' with me!"  Phase one of my plan is to gut all these chickens, so I sadly, but resolutely brought the wagon of death to the back patio.

Once I gutted all fifteen birds, I dug a big burial plot in the back of the garden.  If any good can come of this, it's that we're importing some fertility to the garden.  Tossing the birds in the burial plot, I covered them up.

I collected a nice collection of chicken guts.  I'll show you what I'm planning on doing with this in a future post.

Once that job was out of the way, I went to inspect the henhouse.  How could the mink get into my feathered fortress?  I closely surveyed the entire exterior.  And then... I found it.  There was a very small gap at the bottom of the door casing.  It is only an inch and a half wide by 1 1/2 inch tall.  That's more than enough room for a bloodthirsty mink.  They don't even eat the chicken.  It appears they suck the blood.  To fill this gap, I cut off a piece of 2x4 and nailed up the hole to prevent re-entry.

That night a contingent of hens that previously roosted in the hen house gathered in front of the rabbit hutches to roost where it's safe behind hardware cloth

They were exposed to a lot of violence.  I guess they've seen enough.  For that matter, I have, too.

Filling the Deep Freeze With Meat

In our post ON DECEMBER 20, 2020 we talked about bring our two bulls to be processed at Elliot's Slaughterhouse in Morse, Louisiana.  After being slaughtered the meat is dry-aged and then cut/processed according to the instructions we shared in the post from December.  They package, label, and freeze the meat and then call us to go pick it up.  My wifey made the short drive in the pickup truck and brought it home.

She actually made a couple of trips, first filling the deep freeze at our house and then filling the one at Russ' house.  Here are photos of the meat picked up and brought to our house prior to fitting it into our freezers.  The bags are huge!  It doesn't look like much meat, but it is.  Here is the ground meat, steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.:

Here is a big bag of bones:

Here is a big bag of fat.  (More on this bag tomorrow)

So, it is a shame that we don't have a scale to weigh the animals prior to slaughter.  That would really tell the story.  But what we have is interesting nonetheless.  

Clarabull, we estimate, weighed 725 pounds.  He yielded 284 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging.  Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge for butchering him was $75 and debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Aussie, we estimate, weighed 775 pounds. He yielded 310 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging. Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge from butchering him was $75 and the debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Total cost + tax was $486.35.  Taking the cost of processing divided by pounds of retail cuts of meat gives us an average cost of $1.14 per pound.

For comparative purposes, the cost of butchering back in 2017 was $25 and $0.43 per pound of hanging weight.  The cost of butchering this year (2020) was $75 and $0.49 per pound.

Now that we have almost 600 pounds of beef in the freezer from our bulls and 47 Cornish Cross Meat Birds in the freezer, we are seriously considering investing in a generator.  It would be a tragedy to have a power outage and lose that meat!  We have an addendum to this post tomorrow.  Stay tuned!

Chicken Butchering Day - 2020

In our eleventh year of butchering chickens for our meat for the following year, we've got the process pretty much down.  We do try to improve the process a little each year to make things easier, faster, and better.  It is hard work.  Eleven years ago we were both younger!  I remarked to Tricia, "How much longer do you think we can do this?"  We both laughed.

After exactly eight weeks of pushing the Cornish Cross Meat Birds to fresh grass several times a day, feeding them, watering them, and caring for them, we look forward to putting these birds in the freezer.  On Friday afternoon prior to butchering day as the sun sets, I pushed the chicken tractor to their spot by the slaughtering location.  I also set up all the stations.  You can see them in the photo below:
Starting in the middle, you see the chicken tractor full of 47 chickens, to the right, you can see the "killing cones," in the middle below the tractor, you see the scalding station, to the right of that is the whiz bang chicken plucker and finally to the far left, the eviscerating station, and the chilling buckets.

On Friday night, I'll sharpen the knives with a whet stone and a steel.  It is vitally important to have a very sharp knife.  It makes the job much easier.  The next morning around 9AM after chores are done, we have Russ and Benjamin manning the killing cones.  They move the live birds from the chicken tractor and place them head down in the cones.

With a quick slice to the neck, the chicken bleeds out.  The heart will pump out all the blood.  It is important for the bird to completely bleed out.  The chicken then dies.  A lot is often said about chopping the head off with an ax, but we find this to be a better method.  It seems a brutal process, but chickens must die to eat them.  And we are not vegans.  We eat them!  Nothing goes to waste.  The blood goes into the compost pile in the garden.  So do all the feathers.

From that point, we move to the scalding.  The water is heated by our propane burner we normally use to boil crawfish.  A dash of dishwashing liquid is added to the water to aid in the process of ultimate feather removal.  We monitor the temperature of the water to keep it at exactly 145 degrees - any cooler and the feathers won't come off.  Any hotter and you'll cook the bird instead of scald it.

After dunking (except the feet) the bird in the water for about a minute or two, we test to see if the bird is ready for plucking.  This is done by pulling out a wing feather.  If it is pulled out easily, it is ready for plucking.  If not, we continue dunking until the feather comes out with ease.

Then we put it in the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker that me and two friends built fashioned after plans from Herrick Kimball of the Deliberate Agrarian website (now Heavenstretch).  One of those friends that helped build it (AJ), passed away a few years ago from cancer.  Everytime I use this plucker, I think of him.

The plucker is turned on the bird placed in it and water is sprayed on the bird while he spins.  The rubber fingers gently remove most of the feathers.  After spinning for a minute, the bird is ready.  It takes precision.  If you spin him too long, it breaks his legs.  If you don't spin him long enough, you leave feathers on him. 

We turn off the plucker and lift him up.  Most every feather is gone!  We do have to pull a tail feather or three or a wing feather or two, but mostly, he is completely de-feathered!  A wonderful contraption, the Whiz Bang is!

We then move to the eviscerating station where I pull the head off and cut the feet off.  We have a good friend that we give all the feet to so we collect them in a basket beneath the table.  I then slit the neck at the base of the breast and loosen the crop and windpipe.  Then I slice a three inch cut right above the bird's vent.  These are all nice looking, healthy birds.

Tricia is the master surgeon. She reaches in the bird's cavity and grabs the bird's heart and pulls.  The heart, crop, windpipe, gizzard, and liver is pulled out of the bird.  The organs (heard, gizzard and liver) are harvested and separated into different containers for later after the gall bladder is carefully cut off of the liver, being careful not to burst it open.  The vent is cut out and all guts tossed in a bucket for composting.  The oil gland is cut out of the tail, the lungs scraped out of the backbone/ribcage, and then the entire bird is washed real good.

The birds are tossed in a bucket for a cool-down period.  Dunking them under water keeps any flies off of them, too.  The eviscerated birds chill until we are finished butchering.  It took about 2 hours to butcher all 47 birds.  Once done, we dump out the water and replace with fresh cool water.

About halfway through, I took a photo of the waiting birds.  I bought 'straight run' birds because they are a little cheaper.  Straight run means about half are roosters and half are hens.  Roosters cost more because they grow bigger and faster than the hens.

Here is a shot of a bird yet to be eviscerated, with a container containing livers, gizzards, and hearts.

Once all done, we begin cleaning the organs.  First we scrape the fat off of the gizzards and cut them in half.  You can see below, the gizzard is full of grass.  That lets you know these are healthy birds.  Chickens you buy in the store have never had the benefit of living on grass and eating it.  We have our birds on grass from day 1 and we think they are healthier because of it.  No antibiotics.  No medicine.  No vaccines.  We dump the grass in the compost bucket and pull the yellow lining from the gizzard and we are done.

Then we move to cleaning the hearts.  We slice off the aorta, cut the hearts in half and remove the blood clots.  Finally we wash the hearts real good.

They are placed in a bucket and later mixed with the gizzards and frozen into quart bags.  We cook the gizzards and hearts together with rice.

Finally, at last, we clean everything up and put all the guts, feathers, and blood in the garden compost pile where they will decay and grow vegetables for us next year.  Everything gets used in some or fashion except the chickens' clucks!

We allow the birds to chill and go through rigor mortis.  Tomorrow I will show the next step in the process that we do about four or five hours later.  We are always very happy (albeit tired) when this job is complete!  But it is fulfilling to raise your own birds and eat on healthy meat you raised for the next year knowing exactly where your meat came from and what went into them.

Feathers 'A Flyin' (Chicken Butchering Day 2019)

At 8 weeks old the meat birds, on average, had met our target weight for them of 6 pounds.  A 6 pound bird yields a 4 pound carcass.  These birds will grow more than double this weight, but this is the size that we think produces the tenderest, tastiest bird that is sized right for our family.

In this post we'll show you how we process the birds.  "Process the birds" is a nice euphemism for slaughtering them.   This post has blood & guts, so if that makes you queezy, check in with us on another day.  This is reality, though.  This is how meat gets to your table.  Here goes:

Russ took a trip to Talladaga Motor Speedway for the weekend, so it was just Benjamin, Tricia, and I.  We worked hard and got all 47 birds butchered.  Benjamin is always the killer.  He places the birds in upside down traffic cones.  The rubber cones hold the birds tight.  They are positioned over buckets to catch the blood.  This goes into the garden.  No need to buy Blood Meal.  There is quite a dichotomy going on between the sweet smelling Confederate Jasmine blooming in the background and the 'not-so-sweet' task going on in the foreground.

Benjamin has a very sharp knife and he slits their throat.  The chickens' hearts pump out all the blood and they "go to sleep."  All the blood is removed from the carcass in this process.  Not a pretty sight, but it is necessary.  These aren't pets.  They are food.

Once the birds' hearts stop beating and they are pronounced dead, Benjamin lays them on the ground next to the propane Crawfish Boiling pot that we use as a Scalder.  I add some dishwashing liquid to the water to assist in cleaning the birds and allowing the feathers to come off easier in the next step.  I dunk the chickens in the scalding water for about two minutes, up and down, up and down.  When a tail feather or wing feather is able to be pulled out easy, they are ready for plucking.

One more thing.  It is critically important to have a thermometer in your pot.  You want to keep the water at a temperature of 145-148 degrees Fahrenheit.  Any cooler and the birds won't scald and the feathers won't come out during plucking very easy.  Any hotter and you cook the birds.  You don't want to cook them now. 

The next step is plucking.  We made a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker.  It is electrically powered and has a washing machine motor that turns a plate on the bottom that spins the chicken quickly around, hitting rubber fingers that grab feathers during rotation and pull them off without damaging the bird.  I spray the birds with water during plucking.

It doesn't take very long at all - maybe a minute and most all the feathers are removed.  You don't want to spin the birds for much longer than that or you'll risk breaking the legs of the bird.  You want to keep your chicken intact.  Look how nice and clean the birds are when they emerge from the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker!

I then cut off the feet and pull the heads off.  Heads are pulled off versus cut off because cutting causes sharp bones that will cut your zip loc storage bags and increase the potential of freezer burn.

I begin lining the birds up on the table for Tricia.  She is the eviscerator.  That's a fancy way of saying she guts and dresses the chicken.  To further prepare for that, I cut the oil gland off of each bird's tail.  This gland is said to give an "off" flavor to the meat.  Then I cut the bird's neck and loosen the crop and pull the windpipe out.  Then I cut open a slit right above the vent to expose the entrails.

Tricia pulls the entrails out and cuts around the vent to remove.  She cuts the gall bladder off of the liver, and removes the heart and gizzard.  She pulls the lungs out of the backbone and tosses.

The liver, heart and gizzard are all separated out.  They'll be cleaned and cut later and processed and frozen.

One final washing is done to remove any remaining blood and guts.

Once clean, the birds are submerged in a tub of cool water.  This begins a cooling process, bringing the bird's body temperature down.  It also serves a second purpose.  Beneath the water, flies can't land on them.  After a couple of hours, we pour out the water as it will be warm from the birds' body heat.  We quickly replace with fresh cool water and then we add ice and allow the birds to chill for 8 hours.  During this time the birds go through rigor mortis.

While we wait for the next step, we accumulate all the feathers, guts, and blood and bury them in the garden.

Tomorrow, we'll show you the process of cutting up the birds and storage.  We may also go over the numbers to show the details like, total pounds of meat harvested, total expenses, cost per pound, how much feed each bird consumed, etc.  It is always an interesting exercise.  Spoiler Alert: If you think that it is cheaper to produce birds yourself, you would be wrong.  It is much cheaper to buy them at the store.  If you remember studying Economies of Scale in Economics class, Tyson certainly has that advantage in their favor.  However, there are other reasons to do this rather than price.  We may discuss those tomorrow.

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.

Butcher Day - April 22, 2017

At exactly 9 weeks and 3 days old, our crop of Cornish Cross Meat birds were ready for butchering.  On a random sampling at 9 weeks old, their average weight was roughly 6 pounds.  On Friday evening, I lifted the wheels on the chicken tractor and slowly rolled the birds near the butchering site.  It is easy to have them nearby on butcher day so that you don't have to go get birds out in the pasture, and we've found that it is easier to set up all the butchering stations up the night before.

We've done this post in previous years, but perhaps someone new is following that hasn't seen it.  If so, this is for you!  This is the chicken tractor that is serving as the holding area.

Station 1: The Killing Cones

These re-purposed traffic cones serve as the perfect killing cone while the birds bleed out.  The rubber cone holds the birds tight to minimize bruising through any thrashing about.  We position catch basins under each cone to capture blood for the garden.  The chicken is placed, head-first, in the cone and a quick slice to the neck with a sharp knife yields of steady stream of blood and the chicken's heart pumps out all the blood in a couple of minutes.

Station 2: The Scalding Station:

This station is simply a propane powered crawfish boiling pot in which the water is heated to 145 degrees Fahrenheit.  If you note on the pot, there is a thermometer, and we keep close tabs to ensure that the temperature doesn't deviate from 145 F. Any cooler and the feathers won't come off easily.  Any hotter and you risk cooking the bird.  We don't want to cook it - just scald it.

Station 3: Plucking 

With our nifty Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker (credit Herrick Kimball), we drop the scalded bird into the plucker, turn on the switch and spray the bird with water. With a whir and a spin, feathers begin being picked off the bird by rubber fingers. This device is a time saver!

Station 4: Evisceration Station

The bird, minus its feathers, are placed on a table where the head is pulled off and the feet are cut off.  Then the bird is gutted.  What's left is a perfectly beautiful carcass.

We cut all the gizzards in half and wash them up read good for bagging.  Tricia makes a dish called Gizzards and Rice that sounds awful, but tastes great.

Here are the livers of 66 birds, cleaned up, with the gall bladder carefully removed.  We like to cook chicken livers in butter in a case iron skilleet.

Finally, we cut the hearts in half and coax the congealed blood out of the hearts.  The hearts are washed and bagged.

Station 5: The Cooling Station:

Meat birds are hot birds.  They become even hotter after scalding.  It is important to cool them down.  Once the carcass is gutted and rinsed off, the birds go into cooling tanks while they go through rigor mortis.  We keep them covered by water and ensure that the water stays over all the carcasses as we don't want flies on the meat.

We add ice to the buckets and let them age for several hours.

Later in the afternoon, we cut up all the aged birds in an 8 piece cut up, place in a gallon-sized freezer bag and freeze.  We'll eat on these delicious birds all year long. Later this week, we'll do our annual comparison where we assess the average weight of the birds, how much feed they ate, mortality rate and other key metrics in comparison to prior years.