Our First Butcher Day

Although I would love for this post to be full of lots of information and details it will mainly be "a day in pictures" of Our First Butcher Day.

BUT please feel free to ask questions about our process and I will be sure to get back to you with answers.

It was a full day for our families.  It was a learning day for our families.  It was a day we plan to relive again soon. 

We all thoroughly enjoyed it (for the most part).  This is of course coming from one who did not have to do the killing.  The brothers did the killing.  And both having a love for all of God's creatures said killing was the ugly part. But a task they knew had to be done.

We started roughly at 7:30 am and were done processing 47 birds by 11:45.  This included killing, scalding, putting in the homemade chicken plucker(video below), processing, final cleaning and in chill tanks (ice chests). 

The first batch took about two hours since this was all new to us.  Everyone was all eyes watching each step and trying to gain a little insight as to how each step was done.  Our second batch went much faster as we developed more of an assembly line. 

After lunch we finished up by bagging the chickens.  And the clean up ended our day. 

So here is our 1st Butcher Day in pictures.

A quick note: There are lots of pictures.  If any are showing up with green lines across them try refreshing your screen.  We have found this to help.  Seems to be a "Blogger" issue I find with many blogs through Blogger.  Sorry for the inconvenience.


The morning before the kill-

Catching the chickens-

Killing-Brant said, "Killing was the most distasteful part of the whole day, but it had to be done".

Scalding-we learned later on this is a "one man" job.  AND a pretty crucial part for the chicken plucker.  If the water is too hot the chicken plucker will tear the skin as you will see in a picture below.  The temperature is really important.

Chicken Plucker-this was by far the most fascinating part of the day.  Even after forty-seven birds I still can not get over how this took all the feathers off the chickens.

Processing the chickens-

Chilling the chickens-

Saving the organs-

Fruits of our labor-

As Brant stated in our first post here on the blog,
"We do not contend to be experts on any subject. The main objective of this journal is to record only one aspect of our journey to disengage from the industrial food system: the raising of pastured poultry for meat for our families’ consumption in an ethical, honorable and humane way.

We are two brothers and their families, who by the grace of God have been given the skills, abilities and desire to provide for ourselves some of the food we eat, and in doing so, to be less reliant upon the factory providers of the Frankenstein food products that have inundated our grocery store shelves."

Our first butcher day was certainly a learning experience.  There are things we will do differently next time and things we will still learn when we do our second batch.  It truly is trial and error, but one we intend to do again. 

We are thankful to our Heavenly Father for the blessings of these chickens.  And pray we will have the same results next time around.

For now we will likely take a break and do another batch at the end of summer. Thanks for following along and keep watch for our next journey in raising pastured poultry.