Chicken becomes Poultry

We spent the last two days butchering our meat birds, of which there were 35. We had originally started out with 40, but a few died along the way. A friend who sells organic vegetables at a local farmer's market came over yesterday morning to walk us through the process. She raises meat birds for herself and her family but does not sell them. She killed and butchered a bird, then walked Orrin through it while he did it a couple of times, and then she left it in our hands and went on her way. Zane and Alice came to help, as well as our friend Kim, who also wanted to learn the process so that he would be able to kill his own meat birds when the time comes.

Here's the process that we went through:

1. Get a chicken out of the coop, hold him or her calmly for a minute and then place them upside-down in the “killing cone”. For us, the killing cone was a large traffic cone hung upside-down so that the small hole was on the bottom. The bird's body was inside the cone and the head hung below the hole.
2. Cut the main artery in the neck and let the bird bleed out. The bird flaps around briefly, but is contained in the cone. The first time I saw it happen was probably the hardest, and I almost burst into tears. Supposedly they are dead very quickly, but it's still hard to watch.
3. Put a short length of twine around one of the chicken's legs, then after the bird is dead and the blood has stopped draining, pull it out of the cone and into a large pot of water that is 150 to 155F. Hold the legs and dunk the bird in and out of the water for about 1 minute, pulling it out completely every time you come up. This scalds the skin enough to loosen the feathers.
4. Hang the bird by the length of twine at a height where the bird is right in front of you, and then pull the feathers off. This is truly one of the worst parts – Orrin claims it is THE worst part, but I think the butchering is just as bad – because the feather's stink and you have to get ALL the feathers, including the ones on their belly that have poop on them. Those were the hardest for me to pull off emotionally. Physically, the hardest to pull off were the wing feathers and the pin feathers. Yesterday I found myself grimacing every time I plucked. I had to consciously relax my face every time I realized what I was doing, because I was pretty grossed out by it. Today was a little easier.
5. After plucking, take the chicken to the table and butcher it, which involves cutting off the head, feet, neck, and oil glands, and removing all the organs very carefully so as not to burst anything. The last thing you want to do is get digestive juices or poop all over the food you plan to eat. The trickiest part was pulling out the crop, which is the first stage of digestion after the chicken has eaten. It's recommended that you not feed a chicken for 24 hours prior to butchering, because then the crop will be empty and less difficult to remove. We followed that plan the first night, but since we weren't able to get all of the birds butchered yesterday we fed them last night. We didn't start again until noon today, to try to let the crop's empty as much as possible, but still the crop's were very full of the grain that they had eaten, and they had all been empty in the birds yesterday.
6. After butchering, rinse the bird off inside and out to get as much of the gunk and blood off as possible, and then put it in a tub or cooler of cold water.
7. Weigh it, take it into the house and do a second, finer plucking job. For this part, tweezers were helpful for getting any stubborn pin feathers out that couldn't be removed with fingers alone.
8. Rinse it one more time to get any last little bits of tissue, organs and feathers off, and let it drain for a few minutes on a drying rack. We used a cooling rack for this part, which normally gets used to cool bread or cookies.
9. While one bird is draining, go outside to get another one, weigh it and bring it in to the house.
10. Pat the first bird dry and put it into a large plastic bag. Use a vacuum cleaner with hose attachment to suck the air out of the bag, then tie it with a twist-tie.
11. Write the weight on it and put it in the freezer.
12. Repeat this process 34 more times.

This was really hard for me yesterday, emotionally. I had a tension headache most of the day, and felt really overwhelmed by what we were doing. Orrin said he felt nauseous most of the day from the smell. We started at 9am yesterday and finished bagging the last bird at about 6:30pm, and had completed 18 of them. We were totally exhausted and were not really looking forward to having 17 more birds to butcher. Towards the end of the day yesterday I asked Orrin, how on earth will we butcher a pig if we are having a hard time with chickens? He said that a pig will be easier – one kill, one butchering. The butchering will take longer, but you only have to do it once. That sounded a lot more reasonable than having to do it 35 times.

Today was much better than yesterday, so I'm really glad that we didn't get them all done yesterday. If it had only been yesterday that we butchered, I might not be so keen to do this again. Fortunately, both Orrin and I felt a little more comfortable with the process today and neither one of us felt sick. Today it was Orrin, Zane and I, and we started at noon and finished bagging the last bird at 5:45, which was 17 birds. With one day of butchering under our belts, we were able to accomplish the same amount of work in almost 4 hours less time.

Over the course of the two days, I did some plucking, some scalding, and a little bit of the butchering, but mostly my job was weighing them and taking them in the house to do the final processing and bagging. I did not end up actually killing any birds myself. At first I wanted to do it, so that I could say I had, and so I could know what it was like to feel the life drain out of an animal that I had killed. And also because this is a big part of why we are here in this beautiful place, on this land. We want to know our food personally. But I think Orrin realized how hard it was for me to go through all this for the first time (he and Zane had butchered chickens growing up, so he had a little sense of what it would be like), and told me it wasn't necessary. I know it's not necessary, but I think I will want to do it at some point. And there will be chances in the future, probably in the not-too-distant future, too, since our heritage chicks will soon be big enough for us to kill the roosters.

We learned a whole heck of a lot raising meat birds and killing them. One thing we learned is that meat birds are pretty disgusting. They are bred to be meat, and are really only meant to live about 8 weeks. We let ours go to 10 weeks so that they would be bigger, but we lost a few to heart attacks, which can happen with this type of bird, because they are growing so fast. Plus, they are really dopey compared to the heritage birds that we are raising to be laying hens. They don't move much, and just seemed really zoned out. Orrin pulled their pen over fresh grass twice a day, but we don't think they actually ate that much of it. Mostly they gorged themselves on the organic feed that we gave them, going through a 50 lb bag every 2 ½ days.

We also learned that it will be crucial to make a mechanical plucker, especially if we want to butcher large amounts of birds again. That would make the whole process quicker (plucking took the longest time of anything), plus we wouldn't have to get so up-close-and-personal with the poopy, stinky feathers.

Now I'm going to get all geeky and get in touch with what's left of my old engineering self. Yesterday we butchered mostly roosters, and a few hens. Today was mostly hens and just a couple of roosters. At the end of yesterday, we had butchered 18 birds, totaling 144 lbs of meat. The largest weighed 9.9 lbs (this is the dressed weight, ie. no head, feet, feathers or organs), and the smallest weighed 6.5 lbs, with an average weight of 8 lbs. We thought today would be more like 70% of that average because we knew there were mostly hens left, which would have been around 5.6 lbs/bird. Amazingly, the hens were not appreciably smaller than the roosters, and the average weight today was 7.0 lbs. The largest bird today was 8.0 lbs and the smallest was 5.9 lbs. So we ended up with a total of about 262 lbs of chicken, averaging 7.5 lbs/bird. These are big birds!

That's all the energy I've got for tonight. It's late and I need to get to bed. I'll post a few pictures tomorrow.