Now there are none

We finished off the last four the turkeys today. Along with the turkeys, we culled our older hens and slaughtered this years roosters.

We've been plucking the turkeys by hand all fall, but for this slaughter we rented a plucker. We wanted to try one out and see what they were like. See which styles work well. I have seen tiny ones to attach to a drill advertised, rotating drums and tub varieties like we rented. We rented a tub style one. I do think the tub style should work well for turkeys, but the one we rented didn't work out well for us. It worked OK for the chickens, but not for the turkeys. The turkeys would get stuck, a foot or head or whatever getting caught between the spinning plate and the tub wall. The turkeys just didn't tumble effectively, so they didn't get plucked. The guy we rented it from said it would handle upto 35 pound birds, and ours were only about 25 lbs live weight.

In all fairness, I think our scalding wasn't optimal either, but this plucker just banged the birds up too much. Even the chickens got beat up.

I am glad the birds we did today we not for customers, they wouldn't have been saleable.

I still think that a tub style plucker will work. I have heard very good things about the featherpro machines. We'll be looking to try one of those next year. I am glad there won't be another opportunity till then. I am done with processing turkeys for a while.

And then there were four

We're down to four turkeys still kicking. There are still four not kicking in the market fridge pending pickup.

We did twenty five turkeys this spring. We lost five chicks in the first week, no losses beyond that. We have been doing a slaughter day each week for about a month. Hand plucking makes for long slaughter days. But having an extended window for slaughter has meant we met the window for each customer's desired weight. We had requests for < 12 to 22 pounds dressed weight. Our smallest bird was a little over twelve, the largest has been 23.5 lbs dressed.

I talked to a nearby farmer and he talked about having commercial white toms coming in at 39lbs live weight, which I would guess would be close to 30 lbs dressed. I am assuming the major difference from his max weight to ours is more grain. Interestingly, it sounds like his hens weighed in at about the same as ours. Whatever led to his big toms did not translate to bigger hens.

We have sold 12 birds this year. Our goal had been 10, but it seemed like a good idea to satisfy our available market. That's without any advertising outside word of mouth. My wife does all the selling, connections she makes at the farmer's markets and the community. After giving two to family, two for the harvest party, one for our thanksgiving and another one at Christmas, there are two for our freezer to enjoy later. I like eating roast turkey, its a big meal that carries us for days after that isn't hard to do. And during the winter, it is hard to beat the way it satisfies hunger.

We are thinking about renting a plucker for the final slaughter day. We want to try one out as we think a plucker is in our future. I'd like to get an idea for how the different styles compare. We have some roosters that will help make it worthwhile. I think about making one of those Wizbang pluckers, but I haven't gotten up the motivation.

We are one buckling and three roosters lighter

Today was a slaughter day. Time to prepare the various unproductive males for their "next stage"...

Slaughtering is never pleasant, but a necessary evil if we are going to breed animals. The facts come down to we cannot support an ever growing population, maybe humans should take note.

I had been planning to keep the buckling, Alarm, through breeding season to breed to our one unrelated doe, Heddar. Alarm comes from one of our original does, Sparque, and Heddar comes from the other, Ruffles. But I realized we already have that genetic mix (last years bucklings, same dam and sire bred to this target doe gave us this springs doeling, Able). So there is not a lot of sense breeding Alarm to Heddar. It's further redundant because the other does from this spring all come from that Sparque Sire mix, either first generation or one generation out. Heddar is our only animal not related to Sparque and her suitor from last year. I bred Sparque to same Buck three times waiting for her to give us a doe. In the meantime, I bred one of her bucklings to Heddar and Ruffles last fall. So it's important that we get Heddar bred to a new line in order to get some balance back in our genetic diversity. Breeding Alarm to Heddar does save us $50 in breading fees, but that wasn't enough of a reason.

And now, we don't have to keep the buck separate from the does going into breeding season. That greatly simplifies our paddocks. Pretty soon the kids will be weaned and we won't need any subdivisions. Woo Whoo! Sad for Alarm, good for me.

So, Alarm was just about three months old. He was coming into sexual maturity and he yielded about 30 pounds of meat, bone in. That's pretty interesting because last years bucklings I slaughtered in Late winter and they were also 30 pounds bone in. It was winter, and they were on hay only. This buckling has been nursing and getting Lamb and Kid grain. In addition to the meat, he had significant organ fat and fat under the skin. The boys from last year had very little fat. Again, time of year and ration. But still interesting that going into the fall Alarm had as much meat and more reserve as the boys twice his age and similar genetics (they were all brothers from the same dam and sire). And the boys from last year looked good and performed well (the breeder buckling sired three does by Heddar and Ruffles).

I didn't face any quandaries about the Roosters. We had a clutch hatch earlier this summer and they are well along. The Roosters' days have been numbered since. It was just waiting for an ambitious day. It didn't help that the dominant rooster was attacking the back of my legs on a periodic basis. And they were waking us up at slightest provocation. Killing sucks, but I am not going to miss the roosters.


My PI cleared up by the way, in less than two days without more than a light rash. I am going to claim the prompt washing helped. If anyone cares.

Chicken Killing Day

Lasted weekend was chicken killing day. I read a lot of helpful Fowl killing blogs a day later.

There weren't any chickens harmed in this process, just Guineas. But Guineas are a fair approximation of chickens, in a frantic sort of way. I didn't take any pictures, so the reader is relatively safe.

We use a tried and true process, but that doesn't mean we are good at it. Killing, plucking and processing 9 birds took my wife and I more than two hours. I hate plucking worse than I hate processing, and my wife hates processing. Lucky thing, that. If we were of the same mind it might come to blows before we got done.

The thing that amazed me this year was their crops. In the past, I don't remember remarking on the crops. They must have been there, but they were, well, unremarkable. This year, they had an amazing amount of gravel fulling their crops. My wife points out that we are feed less grain per bird, hence more foraging. More foraging, more gravel, I guess. And the guineas get up late. With our new chickens, if you get up late, you aren't getting any grain. The guineas probably didn't get grain since about July when we let the pullets out to free range.

We don't slaughter for meat, really. We'll eat these birds, for sure. But if it were just for the meat, we wouldn't do it. The meat is at least a little on the tough side and there isn't a whole lot of it. We can probably get an average of one meal from a bird between actual meat and stock and such. Not really worth the effort. But the birds aren't just about meat. Normally we would get eggs and they would be on bug patrol all summer. Part of the reason we are slaughtering is we didn't get eggs. We were only getting eggs from one bird, we think, and she was tricky, changing up her nest sites a lot. So, we weren't willing to carry a large group of males through the winter if there weren't going to be eggs in the bargain. Too much grain for too little benefit. Also, we are tight for coop space. So into the freezer they go.

I'll bet if more people had to slaughter for their own use we'd have a lot more vegetarians. I hate pluckin'.

I'll Spare you the grisly details

We did some chicken butchering recently. Since before thanksgiving, we have been talking about slaughtering a few chickens and guineas. The chickens had gotten to the age where they no longer laid eggs. They were some of our first and favorite birds, but we had new guineas we hatched over the spring and summer and we'll getting new chickens for 2008. We need the eggs. This fall we have resorted to buying eggs, which I really hate. Unfortunately, we need to make room for the new birds and that means we need to slaughter the unproductive birds, however much we liked them.

I had been putting off the deed for over a month. Last week we had a predator kill three birds. This is the first time we have lost birds to a wild predator (we did loose some to a domestic dog in 2006). Since we free range our birds and they sleep in a unlocked coop, I always felt blessed that we had no predator losses. Luckily, we lost three unproductive birds and non of our current layers. But it brought the need to slaughter front and center. As bad as it was to kill a chicken we liked, allowing it to potentially die by predation and missing out on the butchered meat was worse.

Slaughtering chickens is not my idea of fun. There are probably a lot of ways to kill a chicken. I have seen chicken killing devices and read about techniques. Not sure I know any I particularly like. I just try to be quick and as painless as possible. I try to keep the bird calm up to the last instant. A quick neck wringing and then slit the throat. A chicken beats it's wings as the last bit of life leaves the body. I don't allow it to run around. I don't do it in front of other animals. Stress at slaughter is supposed to be bad for meat quality.

If slaughter is bad, butchering is worse. I hate plucking chickens. It's not a pleasant business. I have tried scalding the body, but either I didn't get the water temp right or I am just no good at it. I generally end up tearing the skin at least a little. And getting all the feathers seams impossible. After plucking, I removed the digestive tract and organs. The dog gets some of it. The feathers go every which way.

We ate the birds this afternoon as a holiday meal. I wish I could say that all the work that went into them made them taste sweeter. They actually tasted fine. But they were a little on the tough side. Especially the legs. But even the breast was a little chewy. I think next time we'll stew them instead of roasting them.

Although eating the birds was not a glorious end, the chickens and guineas have been a successful experiment. They do a good job of cutting down on the bugs in the yard, particularly ticks. And the fresh eggs are fabulous. We'll just have to look up some recipes for older birds.