That is one clean chicken!

We finally found our chicken processing pictures!  It was one of the things we were the least enthused about doing with our pastured poultry operation.  We did not know what to expect and we used this past Fall to perform our test run before we built our area to process.  Both of us work off of the farm so we know we will never be processing thousands of birds like Polyface or Nature's Harmony Farm, but we still want to process birds in a humane way and be as efficient as possible.  Experience is the best teacher so here we went!

The birds were taken off feed 12 hours before we began processing to allow the digestive tracts to clear and make evisceration easier.  The birds are placed head first in cones where the head extends below the bottom of the cone.  A sharp knife is used to cut the jugular vein without cutting the esophagus or the windpipe.   This allows the bird to bleed out.  If done properly the bird does not thrash about and seems to just go to sleep.

We had cutting boards, folding tables and had a large pot of water over a burner to scald the birds.  Sounds like a pretty fancy operation doesn't it!  The water has to be around 140 degrees to get a good scald.  This allows the plucker to remove all of the feathers, including the small pin feathers.

The birds were then placed in the scald pot for 30-40 seconds and placed into the plucker.  We built a Whizbang poultry plucker from plans that were purchased off the internet.  We searched for used equipment, but were unable to find something in our price range so we decided to build our own.  A featherplate in the bottom of the plucker spins the birds and rubber "fingers" remove the feathers from the birds.  It looks WILD, but it really works well.  If anyone is interested we have rented the plucker to folks that are close.  Just e-mail us for more information.

Here I am taking one of the birds out of the plucker and taking it to the evisceration table.  We will save you all from pictures of the evisceration process!!!  I will share one bloody, gory picture with you...

OUCH!  Processing chickens is full of perils!  The knife slipped and sliced my finger so I spent the rest of the time processing with a rubber glove on.

David killed the birds, scalded and plucked them and I did the evisceration.  After the birds are eviscerated they were placed in a cooler full of ice water to allow the remainder of the blood to evacuate the carcass.

It was a slow and tedious process, but as we did more birds we both got more adept at it.  Outdoor processing has some difficulties and helped us to make a lot of decisions on how to improve the process.
The end result were beautiful, pasture raised broilers for our family and CSA members.  After we finished, the birds were placed in doubled ziploc bags and placed in one of our upright freezers.

We learned a LOT during this afternoon.  The need for more killing cones and a larger scalding pot is going to be a necessity.  Also, we decided that working on concrete would be a lot easier since the area where we processed got pretty muddy by the time we were finished.  We have visited several other farms who processed on open ground at first and they all had improved their facilities to include a concrete pad.  It didn't take us long to see why they did!  We also learned that we REALLY need more freezer space and a better way to package birds!  We found a company that sells poultry bags that shrink around the carcass in quantities for small producers.  We plan on using these in the future.  They are from Cornerstone Farm Ventures and they stated that birds are kept in the freezer for a year and a half with little to no freezer burn.  This adds cost, but considering how much much work and money is involved in producing them it only seems right to protect them as well as we can.  We think our customers will appreciate it.

So, we did our "test run" to see what we needed to do to make a system that worked well for us.  We really felt that spending the money on a processing facility needed to be done after we learned for ourselves what we needed for our farm.  Our plan is to break ground on our open air processing barn this Spring.  We are really excited about this step and look forward to keeping everyone updated with our progress!