13 Chickens Butchered and in the Freezer

Thursday November 15, 2021 Guerneville CA.

Butcher day

Once I got it going today I went out and fed the chickens and then put the 13 chickens I selected last night in the dark into a small transport cage.  I  used the wheelbarrow to to transport them to the backyard where I have my butchering stuff set up.

Warming up

I wasn’t ready to start the process yet so I did some chair hopping and decided to start this job by one. I was also waiting for the sun to shine in my work area as a big redwood tree was blocking it.

Getting started

I did a little better than that and got started around 12:30 and processed the first 7 chickens which took me around 2 hours. It mostly took that long as I’m having a hard time getting the presoak that loosens the feathers, just right, so the feather taking off machine didn’t do a good job so I had a lot of little feathers to pull out of most of the birds which really slowed me down.

Once those birds were in the freezer I went out and got the other  6 birds and processed them trying some different times on the feather loosening soak, but that didn’t improve much. I think the water temp is too high from inaccurate thermometers as each one I have reads a different temp and the one I was using read about 145 compared to another one that read 160, so I think I’ll use the lower reading one next time to see if that helps or not.

Second batch

The second batch did get done a bit faster mostly because one gets better the more one does.

Anyway the second patch got done in about an hour and a half and all the birds were in the freezer.

Fertilizer

I cleaned everything up and buried all the remains of the process in a hole under a peach tree.

Evening

I only had a little bit of time before dark so I chair hopped around the yard a bit then it got dark.

This is not one of my favorite things to do but it’s good to get this much of it done. I still  have to do this a couple more times before I’m done with all the birds.

Nice day.