In May shortly after our flock was decimated by stray dogs three broody hens hatched out their clutch of eggs. A few days later I bought some chickens & the guy threw in 7 or 8 chicks that he had recently hatched. Then I bought some straight run chicks from a local breeder. Within a matter of days I went from 6 hens to more chicks than I knew what to do with. (If you’ve ever heard of chicken math you’ll understand).
About a dozen of those chicks wound up being cockerels, and given my flock size I only need 3 roos. Friday morning my 12 yo son, my friend, my friend’s 8 year old son, & I set about the task of processing 9 extra roos, 3 old hens & my friends disabled roo. It took us about 2 hours to get the birds cleaned & on ice & get our area cleaned up. (Vultures were literally circling over our heads as we wrapped up.)
The picture above is of our setup Friday am.
Affixed to the tree are killing cones my dad made me a few years ago. The birds are put into the cone head first.
We borrowed a big turkey fryer from a friend to scald the birds. With a good scald (between 140-150 degrees for 30-60 seconds) the feathers come out quickly. The downside to using a turkey fryer for a scalder is the temperature is hard to regulate. The water got too hot, so some of the middle birds we processed got too hot & didn’t fare well in the plucker.
Speaking of plucker. Although it’s not pictured above, we did use our chicken plucker we built a decade ago using Herrick Kimball’s Planet Whizbang plucker plans. It saved us a ton of time. Sometimes the plucker leaves a few tail feathers or some pin feathers under the wing, but it definitely gets the bulk of them. (Now I see that Mr. Kimball has plans for a home built scalder. If we decide to raise more meat birds, purchasing those plans will be on my wishlist.)
I took a few snapshots of our processing day. I had planned on taking more for the blog, but with only 2 adults & 2 boys processing 14 chickens I was too busy scalding, plucking & cutting up chickens to do so. Maybe next time!
