Or at least that’s the plan. We went out at about 10am this morning and rounded up 15 roosters (turned out to be 14 and one hen, but sometimes it is hard to tell). We spent all day processing them. Grampa Tom killed and plucked while I cut and gutted.
Between Grampa and I, it takes us a total of about 20-30 minutes to process a chicken. Not exactly cheap meat, but I’d much rather eat chickens I’ve butchered myself than those processed in a FDA approved packing plant. My kitchen has to be 1000 times cleaner and I’m not known for my housekeeping !
I’ve seen programs about how those places work. In my kitchen, if I accidentally nick the intestines, all the fecal matter is immediately cleaned up, the chicken is doused with bleach and then rinsed with copious amounts of clean water. In one of those big packing plants, all chickens regardless of weather they’ve been contaminated or not are placed in large vats of chlorine and fecal matter laced water to soak up whatever. Yuck! I’m also constantly bleaching and rinsing my sinks and all the equipment throughout the process.
Not to mention the incredible taste difference between slow growing pasture raised chickens and those mutant things that the factory farms grow!
I’ll miss the roosters. Well maybe not at 2 am, but I really enjoy incubating my baby chickens and they are so beautiful! It’s just that with this large of a flock, we can’t afford to feed enough roosters to keep the flock fertile through the winter. We thought about penning up a few roosters and bringing hens to them come spring, but the logistics of it were more than we could handle right now. We can’t even keep the hens where we want them now, much less trying to keep a separate flock! They are always in the garden and all over the place. Maybe next year I can find someone who has fertilized eggs I can incubate.
One thing that amazes me every time I butcher is the difference in lung size between one chicken and another. Here’s a picture of lungs from 4 different chickens.
The other organs of all these chickens were of similar size, yet some of the lungs are huge and I have a hard time finding others! Makes me wonder how some of them breathe! They all appear healthy so why the difference? Maybe one of the youngsters reading this will take up the challenge and find out for me. The smallest lungs on the upper left hand are actually from a bigger chicken than the last ones on the lower left. Interesting.
God Bless You All! ~Grama Sue
God Bless You All! ~Grama Sue
5 comments:
That is very fascinating. I wonder why the lungs are different sizes? I would assume, smaller lungs, smaller chicken. Sure you got the right organ? LOL
Well if they aren't lungs, I sure don't know what they are! Nothing else I dig out of them looks remotely like a lung. My thinking is the same as yours on the smaller chicken, smaller lungs thing.
What kind of chickens do you have? Just curious. We just moved to the country and have 5 layers and a rooster. In the spring I would like to get some chickens to eat, but I don't know that any of us could actually butcher them. I am a city girl! I buy frozen chicken breasts so I don't have to cut apart a chicken! :-)
We have a wide variety of chickens so that we get lots of different colored eggs. Check out my chicken page if you'd like to see pictures. I was a city girl too. I've always resisted farming saying, "I get allergic smelling hay!" But in the last year I've found myself telling people I'm a farmer. It's only taken 29 years. One thing I've refused to do so far though is kill an animal. I'm built to give life, not take it.
The chickens have been smoking.
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