2020 Meat Birds - By the Numbers

I promised to finish up on our segment of butchering our meat birds by giving a little recap of our costs and other figures we always track every year.

Ordered      50
Received    50
Mortality     3  (6% mortality rate)
Butchered  47

Date Mailed                3/23/2020
Date of Slaughter       5/16/2020
Days old @ slaughter             56
Weeks old @ slaughter            8

For comparative purposes, our Total Costs last year on 47 birds were $443.24, yielding a cost per bird of $9.43.  Much better this year!  Last year we fed 16 bags of feed.  This year we fed only 14.5.  Much better conversion of feed to meat as last year each bird consumed 17 pounds of feed and this year each bird consumed only 15.4 pounds of feed.

2020
Total pounds Cornish Cross Carcass whole            230.40 lbs.
Average pounds per bird                                              4.9  lbs.
Cost per pound                                                           $1.60

For comparative purposes, here are the numbers from 2019:
Total pounds Cornish Cross Carcass whole            193.10 lbs.
Average pounds per bird                                              4.11  lbs.
Cost per pound                                                           $2.30

On the same # of birds (47), we produced 37.3 pounds more of meat in 2020 over 2019.  Our cost per pound was $0.70 per pound cheaper in 2020 over 2019.

Overall one of our best years and I attribute it to two things:
#1   Purchasing the birds later in the year.  (2019 we got them on 2/28.  2020 on 3/23)  Getting them later meant that the birds were warmer.  Their calories were not expended keeping warm, but in growing.
#2   We put them on grass from day 1.  They were able to scratch and do "chicken things" like eat grass, bugs, and worms to supplement the feed we kept in front of them.

Cutting up the Meat Birds

We left off on Tuesday after the chicken butchering was done.  Well, it's not exactly done.  We still need to cut them up and put them in the freezer.  While the freshly butchered birds go through rigor mortis, chilling in cool water, we take a break for a few hours.  I use that opportunity to re-sharpen the knives.  My Chicago Cutlery knives do a great job, but they must be razor sharp to keep taking the abuse they take.  When we cut up the chickens, we'll be cutting through bone - on 47 birds!

Here is our first bird.  We weigh each bird (more on that later) and label a gallon-sized freezer bag with the weight and the date.  We are now ready to cut.  We use a variation of the typical 8-piece cut up that yields two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and two breasts.  Except we add the neck and backbone and then cut the breast in half.

I was going to do step-by-step, but my hands get too messy (and we have a lot of birds to cut up).  the first thing I do is slit the skin between the thigh and the carcass.

After cutting the drums, thighs, wings, neck and backbone off, we're left with the breast.  I heart chicken!

Here is a photo of the 8 piece cut up ready to go in the bag but before I cut the breasts in half.

After all are cut up and bagged, we put them on ice in two ice chests.  We've learned not to overwhelm our deep freezers.  While leaving the rest on ice, we put a few in the freezer and allow them to freeze.  Then we add a few more.  And so on and so forth until they are all in the freezer.

Here they are.  47 birds in the deep freeze.

We've also learned to put t-shirts between each bag so that we can pull out individual bags of chicken.  If you don't do this, you have to get a crow bar and a hammer to get a bag of chicken out for supper!

In our next post, we'll look at the numbers.  How did we compare in total pounds harvested over last year?  What about cost per bird?  Fatality rate?  Feed cost per bird?  Well, we'll find out the answer to those questions and others as we look at the numbers.  Bon Jour!

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.

Saving Sugar Snap Pea Seeds for Next Year

Life has a way of getting in the way, busyness and spontaneous happenings are constantly setting your priorities.  Lots of times planning goes out the window and instead of proactive planning, you find yourself reacting to the daily rigors that rise to the top of the to do list.  It is kind of like a real-life "Whack-A-Mole" game where you hit down things that pop up.

Planning ahead is important - especially in gardening.  The photo below looks like an unkempt, unsightly mess.  And it is.  But it is much more than that.  It is next year's Sugar Snap Pea Crop.  How can that be?  Let's look closer.

Over the winter months, we've harvested the peas many, many times and have eaten a bunch of them and also blanched and frozen a bunch for eating later.  As the weather warms, sugar snap peas wilt and the vines on the trellis quickly turn brown and die.  Once the pea pods get large and tough, we stop harvesting them and let the biggest ones mature on the vine.  You can see a few below:

The trellis for peas must be torn down and moved to make room for spring and summer crops.  First, we'll pull the dried pea pods off the vine.

The peas inside are plump and large.  They are perfect seeds for next year.  Since these are not hybrid, and they are open-pollinated, these perfect peas will make up the seeds I plant later this fall.

I'm looking forward about five or six months ahead when it is time to plant more peas.  But first, I need to make sure these peas are dried fully.

I will keep them on the window sill out of the humidity and allow them to dry. 

Once the peas are dried and stable, I'll pack them into old vitamin and supplement containers and store them away in the dark.  They'll sit there until the fall - then we'll plant more.  And the cycle continues.  The best part about it is that the seeds are free!  And I've saved enough of them that I could skip saving seeds next year and have plenty for planting from the next year's crop.  It's great when a plan works out.

A Hopeful Beginning - A Tragic End

On April 22nd we discovered a nest in our blueberry bush.  Almost every year we find a song bird's nest in a bush right around the house and we follow it from the time the eggs are laid until the babies leave the nest.

The nest -2020

The nest was constructed with care.  It had a strong outer nest made with live oak twigs and an inner lining fashioned with hay and grasses woven to make soft bedding for the baby birds that would be coming.  Three blue eggs that were speckled with brown spots were laid in the nest.  Momma bird flew off to eat and I peeked in.

A few days later, things started to happen.  The first baby chick hatched out of the egg.  So tiny and so newly hatched, the chick was still curved into the shape of the egg.

After a few days, three ugly chicks were out of the egg, clamoring for momma bird to bring some worms or bugs or something to eat!

Every time I checked in on them, they seemed to be all peach fuzz and mouths wide open...

I'm not sure what type of bird this is, but here is a photo of the momma bird sitting on her nest.  She would squawk at me when I got near, so I backed up and zoomed in and got a picture of her.  Know what kind of bird this is?

A few days later, I looked in to find only two birds in the nest.  I don't know what happened to the third baby.  The two remaining looked to be growing.  The peach fuzz was almost gone and you can just see the tiny pin feathers on their small bodies.

Over the course of the next week, we weathered a few rough storms with lots of rain and wind.  From a distance I could see that the momma was sitting on the nest, keeping her two babies warm and dry.

The next time the weather cleared, I checked in on our little bird family.  With dismay, I found the nest was empty, and it was laying on its side.  The parts of the nest that were once so impeccably built and cared for were now askew .  There was no trace of the baby birds.  There was no warning squawk from the momma.  Just silence.

I was sad.  The momma bird had worked so hard, done all the right things, shown care and compassion, nurtured here offspring, and yet...  The promising start was full of hope and potential.  The results were discouraging and tragic.  I still am not sure what happened.  If I was a betting man, I would put my money right here.

Ginger would be the primary suspect.  I can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she did it, so at this point charges will not be brought against her.

I looked it up on the Internet and found that most song birds only nest one time per year, so this just makes it even more tragic for the momma bird.  A whole year lost!  But I bet she'll try again next spring!  Just in a better spot!  There is a parable there, I think, for humans.  Even in the midst of trouble, trial, and tragedy, we should keep going and not give up.  Persevere.  Persist.  Push on!

Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.
Galatians 6:9

A Prickly Supper Situation

I can remember my father-in-law telling me a story about ranching in South Texas.  He told me that there were times in the summer time where it was so hot and so dry that the cattle didn't have much to eat.  So they would take propane torches and burn the cactus.  Once the outer spines were burned off and the tough outer skin heated, it exposed the soft-watery inside of the cactus and the cows ate it up. 

Have you ever eaten cactus?  I hadn't until a year or so ago.  Tricia introduced me to it.  Cooked cactus is called nopalitos.  My wife got the recipe from Pati on PBS, specifically the recipe at this link: Pati's Nopalitos.  You can click on that link, but I'll just show in pictures what we did.  We have a prickly pear cactus growing in a pot by the air conditioning units.  In the past, we've shown you the pears that we get from this thing.

Tricia picked some of the young, tender cactus "paddles" and brought them in and washed them.

Here is a washed cactus on the cutting board.

Russ took a knife and cut the edges off.

Then he scraped the outer part with the knife, making doggone sure there were no cactus spines left!

Then he used a knife to dice up the cactus into cubes.

And here we are.  Diced nopales - ready to cook.

Put oil in the bottom of a pan and add the nopalitos, some salt, and sautee.  The cactus will emit a gelatinous liquid.  If you keep cooking, it will evaporate.

Add chopped onion, garlic, corn and chili peppers and a squeeze of lime juice and continue to cook.  Ready to eat!

Pretty doggone good!  No cactus spines in my tongue.

2020 Meat Birds - Week Seven

Well here we are in the last week of our Annual Meat Bird Project.  From what we saw last week in Week 6 in the weigh-in, the bird we put on the scale was 6 pounds 4 ounces.  This means they are ready.  We always shoot for a 6 pound bird.  That yields a 4 pound carcass.  We know last week we were at our goal.  This last week was just lagniappe.  We wanted them to grow, but not too much.  Maybe it is just our opinion, but a bird in the 4-5 pound carcass range just seems to taste better to us.

This week nothing eventful happened.  We still only lost 3 birds out of the 50 we started out with over the 7 1/2 week project.  We continue to feed 3 times a day and keep clean water in front of them and we push them to fresh grass two or three times daily.  Tomorrow we'll pick up the chicken plucker that a friend was borrowing and then Friday night we'll set up the outdoor slaughterhouse.

It's Wednesday weigh day.  Let's get this show on the road.  Today I decided to weigh a hen and a rooster.  Roosters grow faster and gets bigger, so I wanted to see how both are doing toward our goal.  First, the hen:

I zeroed out the scale with the box and then set her in it.

5 lbs 12 ounces today.  By the time Saturday morning butchering rolls around, she'll be a tad over 6 pounds.

Now for the rooster.  He's a big guy.  His foot was poised to hop out of the box.

He weighed in at 7 pounds 2 ounces.  Wow.  That's the biggest I think we've ever had.

At the end of seven weeks, the hen and the rooster averaged about 6 and 1/2 pounds. 

To look at previous years at this same time:
*Week 7 2019: 5 pounds 9 ounces
*Week 7 2018: 5 pounds 15 ounces
*Week 7 2017:  4 pounds 1 ounce
*Week 7 2016:  5 pounds 14 ounces
*Week 7 2015:  3 pounds 9 ounces

We will butcher on Saturday and will have plenty to post about that.