With a little help from our friends

This weekend was filled with friends helping us out.  It all started on Saturday when Mike and Steve packed up and headed home after working at the Howe Meadow Farmer's Market in Peninsula.  They were only a few miles down the road when Mike and Steve noticed the trailer they were pulling was vibrating.  Turns out one of the tires on the trailer had blown out.  Knowing that Dan Greenfield of Greenfield Berry Farms was right down the road that is where they headed.  Dan is one of the other vendors at the Howe Meadow market.  I met Dan when I went to the market with Mike a few weeks back.  Mike always introduces him to me as "this is the guy that makes maple syrup from hickory trees".  Well he does make a type of syrup from hickory trees, but obviously it's not maple syrup.  I need to try some sometime because I just find that totally fascinating.  Mike has tried it and said it is very good.

Back to the tire story.  Since Dan lives local and Mike and Steve were 70 miles from home, Dan brought out a local phone book and they found a tire store that was open and had a new tire the correct size.  So they took the tire off the trailer, loaded the blown out tire and rim into Dan's car and the three of them headed off to the tire store.  Then Mike, Steve and Dan ate lunch at a little mom & pop diner while the new tire was mounted on the rim.  About an hour later the new tire was ready to be picked up and they headed back to Dan's house to put the tire on the trailer and finally headed home.  So a BIG thank you to Dan for helping out.  What a truly nice guy.

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Sunday morning on the farm was our second of two butchering "parties" that we host each summer.  It's not really a celebration type party, but more like a gathering of friends to do a job that is made so much easier with many hands involved.  I wrote about our last butchering day back in July.  This one was pretty much the same except the weather was a lot cooler and it did not rain.  That made the entire morning much more enjoyable.  The first chicken was killed at 8:10am and everything was scrubbed clean and put away or at least spread out to dry at 11:06am.  We butchered 48 chickens this time around.  I'm going to put up some pictures to show the process, but be warned that some of these are very graphic.  If you don't eat meat or even if you do eat meat and you want to be blissfully unaware of how meat gets from the pasture to the table, then don't look at the pictures.  But before I get to the pictures, a quick story.  One of the young ladies that helped at the last butchering day could not be here on Sunday, but she wanted to buy two of our chickens.  Her friend told me that she will not eat chicken that comes from the large factory farms.  But when she came to our farm the last time and saw how humanely our chickens were treated, she had no problem taking a few of them home for her freezer.  That made me feel good because the whole reason I raise chickens to eat is so that I know exactly how they are treated their entire lives and also how they are butchered and handled all the way to the dinner plate.

So I'll start off with the first group of chickens after beheading.  We hang them to bleed out.  Seems like most people who do a lot of this used killing cones and slit throats.  We did that one year and it was a lot cleaner process, but the guys that do this job decided that liked the quick work of the ax better.

Next the chickens are taken to the scalding area.  We use two turkey fryers to heat water to 140 degrees F.  The chickens are dunked in the hot water for about 30 seconds to loosen the feathers.

Then they immediately go into the chicken plucker where they tumble round and round.  Inside there are rubber plucker "fingers" that pull off the feathers.  The hose is sprayed on the tumbling chickens to help wash the feathers out the bottom of the plucker and onto the ground.

 And in about 30 seconds, two chickens are plucked nearly clean except for a few tail feathers.

Then it is off to the evisceration table where several of us finish removing any feathers that didn't come out in the plucker.  Then we remove the feet and all the internal organs.

From there, the cleaned chickens are put into a large container of ice water to start chilling the birds.  After they chill for a bit, two of my friends that do the kitchen work are up next.  They take the cleaned and chilled chickens into the kitchen where they remove the necks, check for any left behind feathers and rinse the body cavity.  Then they bag them and put them in the refrigerator.

 When they are all done, the chickens look just like one you buy at the store, but without all the unknowns on how they were raised and killed.

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Today I spent a couple hours in the afternoon cutting up chickens for the freezer.  But I think I have blogged enough for today so I will leave that for the next blog.