Friday, July 14, 2006

Processing Poultry

Last weekend I processed the first batch of broiler chickens we have raised this year.

The good news is that all the paying customers got the chickens they wanted and seemed very happy about it. The bad news is that there was none left for me.

We need more chickens and soon to fix that.

I made a little video of the process, it runs a little over 12 minutes. If you have any sort of broadband connection and don’t mind the realities of converting live birds into food then you may want to have a look. It is in windows media format.


Chicken Processing video clip

7 comments:

Marci said...

What an excellent movie. Very nicely done and very nice facility to do it in. I am sure there are going to be lots of people viewing this. It would have been nice to see something like this before our first birds were butchered!!!

Emily said...

Thank you so much for posting this, Jim. We are first-timers raising our little flock from which we hope to eventually get some meat birds for ourselves and some future customers.

Hexdek16 said...

Having just 'processed' our first chicken this week, I appreciated seeing your operation "in works". We look forward to a larger processing operation when more land becomes available to us - and we can employ Herrick's WBCP to speed things along. I used the standard pull & pluck method of operation - just to get the feel of things the first go round. Nice video demonstration you have there! Regards.

Anonymous said...

Great Job!
Looking forward to raising chickens next year and this was the first time I had ever seen the processing done -
Thanks for taking the time to make the video and put it out for anyone to see!

Madcap said...

I'm another one very thankful for you taking the time to post this. My husband and I are looking for land, and my drive is to have enough chickens to supply our table and a few to sell, too, but I really didn't know much about processing. The cones look like a great idea, all the ladies from the previous generation still shudder at the headless chickens flinging themselves around the farmyard.

Urban Agrarian said...

Thanks for posting this. It's a great video. Last Monday we did some chickens and turkeys and I came back to watch your video again to see what temp. you scald at. The funny thing is, I thought I would end up with 25 chickens for myself. People kept wanting to buy them and I ended up with only one, but I guess that's one more than you got. Luckily there are more to do next week.

Trish P. (aka The Happy Hedgehog) said...

I'm guessing that you posted this movie a couple of years back, but I just wanted to say 'thank you' for making it. I'm a city slicker with a mind full of questions - particularily when it comes to what we eat and where it comes from. I want to be a consumer with a conscience, to understand and respect where our meat comes from and not a mindless drone that just purchases those nicely packaged cuts of meat, not even thinking for a moment that it was once a living creature.

Ok, I'll get off the soap box now. :) Bottom line, thank you for informing me and hopefully others too!