First Time Processing

This past weekend was the first time we processed our own chickens. It took us 4 hours on Saturday and a couple hours on Sunday to get them all done.

Saturday was the processing day and Sunday was packaging day. We killed, scalded, plucked, and cleaned on Saturday. This is a picture of the cones we used. There are two on each side. We have 8 cones total but only used 4 this time, since we were only processing 26 birds.

Doing the dirty deed.

Scalding

Our plucker doing it's job

We purchased a used Featherman Pro Plucker, and it does a wonderful job. They birds came out with only a few feathers still attached but I think that was because we either didn't scald them long enough or we didn't run the plucker long enough. But I remember plucking chickens by hand when I was a kid and trust me, this is the way to go!

We cut 10 chickens into parts including boneless skinless breast. 2 chickens were in the scalder just a little too long so they went straight into the crockpots and now we have 3 bags of shredded chicken in the freezer and had a chicken casserole last night. All the others were left whole. We have a few of them sold. We marked 10 of them for sale but I hope all 10 don't sell. I would like to keep enough to get us through until Spring when we raise some more.

It was a lot of work, but well worth it. We have chickens in our freezer that we know where they came from, how they were treated, and what they were fed. We also know that they were processed cleanly.

Have a great day!

Mae

Growing the Farm

This summer has been quite different from the past summers on the farm. We produced only 1 tomato in the garden and so far that has been the extent of our garden this year. The spring and early summer were just too wet for our garden. Then when it did finally dry up the weeds had taken over.  But other things have happened that have been really good.

We have raised our second flock of 50 meat chickens and sold all of them. We are working on the third flock. This flock was supposed to be for our personal use so we only ordered 25. We received 28 but lost one of them. And some of them are already sold.

We had a Farmer's Feast here in the county and provided 25 chickens for it. It was a really nice dinner on one of the other farms in the county. People from all over the county were invited and several from outside the county. I hope this will help in advertising and bring in a few more clients. Our eggs are available for purchase at one of the local hardware stores and we have raised the price on them to $3.00 a dozen. So we have increased sales and price, making us a little more money.

We are in the process of purchasing our own chicken processing equipment which will save us a $4.00 processing fee. It was $3.00 last time we had them processed but the processor told us they were going up. It will also give us more control of the environment that they are processed in.

Next year we are going to try our hand at raising turkeys and possibly rabbits for meat purposes. We already have clients interested in both. There are also plans to put in a large strawberry patch where our garden was this year and move the garden to a different area.

Even though we didn't really produce any vegetables on the farm this year the chicken industry is growing for us.

It seems that there is just so much going on with the farm all of a sudden. God's timing is always perfect and his blessing should always be treasured.

Have a great day!
Mae