Sam and I spent last Saturday processing our chickens we were raising for meat.
And when we say processing, we mean slaughtering, plucking, eviscerating, and cleaning the chickens. So we can eat them.
This was our first time raising chickens for meat. We have had our egg-layers for over a year now (and LOVE them!!!), but since we moved to a larger property we thought it would be the perfect time to try raising chickens for meat.
The standard meat chicken is called Cornish Cross - this is what you buy at the store. They are a hybrid chicken (not an actual breed) and have been selectively bred over time to get big, FAST. As chicks, they are cute, fluffy, yellow things...
By 4 weeks they look like this...
And at 8 weeks you have a 5-6 pound chicken that is full grown and ready to eat... crazy!!
Since these chickens have been bred to get big so fast, they often have leg problems or will die of heart failure if you let them live too long past the time you would slaughter them. They are very lazy birds and do not like to move very much.
Sam and I decided to start with 10 Cornish Cross chickens since this was our first time raising chickens for meat. We made -- and by "we" I really mean Sam -- them a pen (to protect them from predators) and raised them on pasture for the last 3-4 weeks of their life, once they were big enough to be outside and could keep themselves warm at night. We chose to put them in a pen outside instead of letting them stay in the barn with the other chickens because they would have stayed in the barn all day and would have only eaten chicken feed (because they are too lazy to move very far). By raising them on pasture, they were able to have access to bugs, grass, weeds, etc. that they would not have gotten otherwise. Grass-fed meat has been shown to have less saturated fat and more omega-3 fats than purely grain-fed meat. (Hey, I'm an almost Registered Dietitian, I have to throw nutritional information in there every now and then...)
Unfortunately, 2 of our chickens died prior to processing day, so we only processed 8 birds. And boy, what a long day of processing it was! In all honesty, it was a rough but good experience. It is never fun to have to kill something, especially something you have taken care of for a good chunk of time, but we thought it was important for us to be able to raise our own meat and to be able to know where our meat came from. Truth be told, Sam had to be the one to actually kill the chickens because if it were up to me, they would still be outside right now. Together we plucked the chickens and I did most of the evisceration (removing all the internal organs)... which was actually kinda cool. We watched quite a few YouTube videos on how to do all this and then just went at it! And I think we did a pretty dang good job if I do say so myself!
This was our final product... minus one chicken (not sure where it went, in the fridge maybe?). Once all of the chickens were done, we put them in these nifty shrinkable bags! For the bags, you put a chicken in a bag, zip-tie it shut, cut a small (like 1/2 inch or so) slit in the bag, submerge most of the bag (at least up to the hole) in ~180-degree water, and the bag just shrinks! Then you put a label over the slit and voila - you have a chicken ready for the freezer. We ordered the bags (they come with the zip ties and labels) from Herrick Kimball.
Sam holding the finished product!
My I-can't-believe-I-just-did-all-that face.
After all was said and done, we were exhausted. We were originally going to do another batch of chickens and sell some to those who were interested, but after all the work we did (and because it is not terribly fun to kill chickens) we decided to keep the chickens and hold off on raising more for meat until next season. So, if you are interested in farm fresh meat, we will be raising more next year and may ask that you come help with the processing... to make it go quicker and also to help it be more cost-effective to you! And let me tell ya... speaking from experience, the chicken is MIGHTY tasty :)
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