One thing Dad and Julie have been doing this past year is raising meat chickens. The way this works is that you order little baby chicks and they arrive, in the mail, when they are one or two days old:
10 weeks later they are full grown and ready for "processing":
I have been present for the arrival of the last three batches of chicks, but I have yet to partake in the chicken processing part so when Dad invited me up last week I couldn't resist. You start by putting the chickens into killing cones (you can see these behind me in the first picture), this calms them down (allegedly) and leaves their head sticking out so you have easy access to their necks. Now the reason I wanted to do this is because I feel like I don't deserve to eat the chickens unless I could kill one. (Chuck pointed out that I was either going to come back from this trip with a new appreciation for chickens, or as a vegetarian) The next step was the hardest - the goal is to make a quick cut that severs the chicken's neck artery and they will hopefully bleed out before they really know anything is wrong:
I could only bring myself to do this for about four birds and then I had to trade out with Rob (Dad's friend). Next the (now deceased) chickens go into a pot of REALLY hot water, which loosens their feathers. After the hot water they get put into a plucker for about 30 seconds. The plucker basically looks like a dryer but it has all of these little rubber "fingers" sticking out of its walls that help to knock the feathers off. Here is a picture of the chickens coming out of the plucker featherless (you can see the bucket of feathers on the right).
Now that the feathers are off they get cleaned, this involved taking off their heads and feet and then cleaning out their body cavity. Last but not least we put them in plastic bags and weighed them so that they could be marked with the date processed and weight, the final step is dunking the bags in hot water which makes the plastic shrink down around the birds so that they look like what you see at the grocery store!
It was an interesting experience, not my favorite but also not bad enough to make me a vegetarian :)
10 weeks later they are full grown and ready for "processing":
I have been present for the arrival of the last three batches of chicks, but I have yet to partake in the chicken processing part so when Dad invited me up last week I couldn't resist. You start by putting the chickens into killing cones (you can see these behind me in the first picture), this calms them down (allegedly) and leaves their head sticking out so you have easy access to their necks. Now the reason I wanted to do this is because I feel like I don't deserve to eat the chickens unless I could kill one. (Chuck pointed out that I was either going to come back from this trip with a new appreciation for chickens, or as a vegetarian) The next step was the hardest - the goal is to make a quick cut that severs the chicken's neck artery and they will hopefully bleed out before they really know anything is wrong:
I could only bring myself to do this for about four birds and then I had to trade out with Rob (Dad's friend). Next the (now deceased) chickens go into a pot of REALLY hot water, which loosens their feathers. After the hot water they get put into a plucker for about 30 seconds. The plucker basically looks like a dryer but it has all of these little rubber "fingers" sticking out of its walls that help to knock the feathers off. Here is a picture of the chickens coming out of the plucker featherless (you can see the bucket of feathers on the right).
Now that the feathers are off they get cleaned, this involved taking off their heads and feet and then cleaning out their body cavity. Last but not least we put them in plastic bags and weighed them so that they could be marked with the date processed and weight, the final step is dunking the bags in hot water which makes the plastic shrink down around the birds so that they look like what you see at the grocery store! It was an interesting experience, not my favorite but also not bad enough to make me a vegetarian :)
