My Thoughts on Raising Meat Birds

I would definitely recommend raising your own roosters for butchering (as opposed to ordering mass quantities from a hatchery). We ordered 100 Buff Orpington cockerels from the hatchery, and it was a mess from start to finish. Checking 100 chicks for pasty butt every day is a long, tedious chore. Coccidiosis is a nightmare (it claimed about half the flock), and when you are away from home 12+ hours a day, it's super hard to find time to process the birds once they reach full size. Then, if they reach sexual maturity before you get time to harvest them, you have a fighting mob on your hands. If we'd processed them last September as planned, we'd have had a freezer FULL of nice, plump chickens. We didn't make that deadline, and ended up overwintering them, which was hard on us all. We lost another half of the flock over the course of the winter, mostly from their vicious fighting. They refused to even leave the roost on the coldest days of winter, so they lost weight. With spring they started ranging out much better, but they were fighting one another a lot, and constantly running/chasing. There is just no way we could get them back up to the size they were in the fall, before this much testosterone had kicked in.

I do not use the "hybrid crosses" because I feel that the creation of such birds is inhumane. Their bodies grow so much faster than their internal organs can support. Their bones grow too quickly and are susceptible to breakage, and can you just imagine the growing pains they experience?! All this rapid growth is bound to produce birds with inferior health. Their little livers cannot keep up with the purification needs of a full sized bird, to give one example. For all these reasons, we stick with heritage breeds of chickens. Last year I bought Buff Orpingtons and Black Australorps. This year I am doing my best to get Welsummer pullets. I will probably get some sort of bantam hen(s) to be setters for me, and we will butcher the cockerels that are born, but we won't buy cockerels for meat making purposes again. (I know, never say never...)

Chicken Killin'

On Saturday we began the process of butchering the 20-something roosters that inhabit our yard. Of course, true to form, we realized on Saturday morning that we had nothing to put them in! I had a grand total of THREE one gallon Ziploc bags, and I didn't know if the birds would even fit in them whole, which is how I planned to store them. This necessitated a trip into town for a solution to this problem.

I've been considering the purchase of a vacuum food storage system since early last summer. It isn't exactly a NEED, but I feel it's a very good investment in the stability of our food supply. (No more freezer burnt food!) My darling husband has known about this, but I don't think he realized how seriously I wanted it. Since we were about to butcher a year's worth (if not more than that) of chicken, I didn't want all that effort to go to waste. I suggested that the moment may have come to make this purchase, and why. He said, "Get it!" And so I did.

I am not one for having a lot of appliances. In fact, I try to have as few as I possibly can. However, I think this one will be worth the cabinet space.

Before we actually got to the butchering, we had to build our killing cone. I purchased $13 worth of flashing and had enough material to make three cones. (We decided to only make one, and save the rest in case we find other needs for it later.) Here is the killing cone, work table with knives, and coolers filled with ice water ready to accept that wonderful, wholesome, free range meat:

We followed kosher butchering practices to the best of our knowledge, which made the process much less stressful than it could have been, for both the birds and us. One thing we did that was unorthodox to everyone we know is that we skinned the birds instead of plucking them. We didn't have access to an automatic plucker, and dipping the birds in boiling water and then taking all that time to pluck feathers in a wet, stinking mess did not even remotely appeal to us, so we opted to skin them. This turned out even better than I had hoped. It was a little tricky in a few areas, but overall, I think it was a good decision. Here is what our birds look like all done:

When Wayne saw me taking pictures, he had to show off his injury sustained during a skinning accident:

The Bachelor Pad

Necessity is the mother of invention, right? One of my favorite things on our property is this outhouse. I think it's the coolest thing ever! It's the nicest outhouse I've ever seen. The base of the seat is formed concrete, there is a coat hook and a dowel to hang the toilet paper roll on! There is a vent pipe as well as vents on the east and west sides of the outhouse that have latches so you can open them in warm weather and close them during the cold times. I was remiss to deface this wonderful, but almost useless, structure. However, need won over sentiment. This spring we purchased Buff Orpington cockerels from a local hatchery. We raised these chickens for meat. They needed a place to live! We didn't want to invest in building a chicken house large enough to host so many chickens because we don't intend to deal with mass quantities of chickens again. The logical conclusion was to (temporarily) renovate the outhouse into a chicken house. It's only a roost and shelter, but it meets the need. The boys are thrilled with it, as you can see: