Celebrating Memorial Day on a Farm

This past Memorial Day weekend, our celebration was a little .... unorthodox.  

Now, mind you, I am formerly a suburbanite.  I was raised in the 'burbs of a big city and went on to live in various cities and suburbs in my young adult life.  Now that we have settled down and decided to start this farm, I am surprising myself (and anyone who knows me) by doing things that I never thought I could do..... like butcher a chicken.  

Growing up, I knew where our meat came from (and no, I didn't think it was the local grocery store).  I knew it was raised on a farm somewhere, then it was killed and cut up and packaged into the nice little packages that we bought at the store.  I was fine with not knowing the gruesome details.  Until I married a hunter.....

WARNING:  This post is NOT for the faint of heart, PROCEED WITH CAUTION.  (And please protect the eyes of any little ones looking at the computer screen.)

I'll start with some pictures of the prep area...

My son - the record-keeper

We wanted this to also be a learning experience but didn't want to traumatize our children.  So we put Hunter in charge of writing down the weights of each chicken as we finished butchering it.

The slaughter site

Albeit a little awkward, but we had planned to "take care" of the chickens without really planning.  So we had to improvise and came up with this.  Honestly, I think we did pretty well.  The cones worked better than we thought they would -- we wanted to get some that were made of stainless steel but couldn't find any locally and didn't want to pay the hefty shipping cost to order them online.  For those of you who don't understand what happens at this stage, this is where you (gulp) slit the chickens' throat to let it bleed out. like this: 

The kill

Contrary to popular belief, you shouldn't just cut a chicken's head off - it can and will run around without it until they fall over dead.  Not only is that messy, but it tightens up their muscles and locks their feathers in, making it difficult to pluck and butcher.

The scalding pot

Pretty self-explanatory but for those who don't know..... The water is heated to 143-149 degrees and the dead chicken is swished and dunked in the water for about 30 seconds to loosen the feathers from the skin.  This, as we quickly became aware, is the source of why we will not be eating chicken for a while.  Since it's best to use propane (safety and logistical reasons), and we couldn't really waste the propane to heat up the water between each of the 28 chickens, we only changed out the water 4 times.  It smelled SO BAD!!!  I cannot explain to you how awful it stunk!  Just the thought of it now is making me gag.  It's not because of the lifeless bird with it's neck cut open, it's because this breed of chicken was created to produce a lot of meat.  They have short legs and a lot of weight to carry around - so much so that near the end, their bellies are dragging on the ground.  They literally had dirt and (uh-um) poo clumps stuck to their bellies.  Multiply that by 7 chickens = YUCK!!

The plucker

We found this on Craigslist - actually it was just the parts to build it but the person we bought it from didn't have time to put it together.  It was cheaper than buying all the parts ourselves....  After dunking the chicken in the hot water for 30 seconds, you start this baby up and gently toss the chicken in.  And it looks like this:

The rubber "fingers" grab the feathers and pull them out.  The occasional squeaking is the sound of the chicken's skin rubbing against the rubber.  About 2 minutes later, the chicken is plucked and looks like this:

A nicely plucked chicken..

Of course, if you didn't want to save the skin, you could just skip the scalding pot and the plucker and remove the skin and feathers in one step.  But I wanted whole chickens (mostly because it takes so much time to cut up and separate a chicken, let alone 28).

Sometimes, the neck is cut too much and by the time the chicken hits the plucker, this shoots out:

oops!

I didn't get any pictures of the actual butchering stages, but basically, you cut off the feet and head, scoop out the guts (carefully), then put the chicken on ice.  You want chill it down to 40 degrees as quickly as possible before it goes in the freezer.  Technically, it should be kept refrigerated overnight before going in the freezer, but we don't have the refrigerator space for this many chickens.  We followed Joel Salatin's video, found here, for the evisceration (aka butchering).  He is so quick about it that we also had to figure a lot out as we went along.  By the end of 28 chickens.... we had it down - even me!

All in all, we ended up putting 112.5 pounds of chicken into the freezer.  The chicks cost us $53.41 from the local farm store (we bought 33 but lost a few), 2 bags of chick starter (feed) was about $36.69 and lasted the first 2 weeks, and the final 6 weeks they ate 2 bags of gamebird feed each week totaling $213.77.  (It was like a take-home layaway plan for our food -- we paid into it weekly.)  Grand total = $303.87, including tax.  So our farm-fresh, pastured chickens cost us $2.70 a pound.  And I can get at least 2 meals (if not 3) out of one chicken.  Around here, this type of chicken typically sells for $4 per pound whole, more if cut up.  Not only did we save money, but we know how our chickens were raised.