Broilers on the Downhill
September 19th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in farming
All summer long we’ve been taking care of 150 0r m0re Freedom Ranger meat chickens in various stages of development. That means tending the needs of 50-plus chicks in the basement brooder until they’re big enough to go outside, and dragging another hundred around our pastures in big “tractors” (cages) until they’re ready for slaughter. That all started to change yesterday when we harvested the last of the 50 broilers that arrived at Spy Dog Farm as chicks nearly three months ago.
The last of the chicks arrived from the post office in August and left the brooder this week to start the rest of their lives in the tractors outside. That means we’re down to 100 broilers, with just two more monthly harvests to go before the season is completely done.
It couldn’t happen soon enough for my wife, who gets little pleasure out of feeding the chickens twice daily, changing water twice daily, moving those tractors to fresh grass twice daily. But then, who does?
It could be worse. We figure it takes maybe 45 minutes of our day to complete the broiler chores. But there is plenty of stooping, pulling, lifting, to take a toll on the back. And then each month, over a two week period, we turn those fattened birds into meat we can sell.
We’ve gotten pretty good at the slaughtering. And now that our mechanical chicken plucker is on the fritz, I’ve learned how to pluck by hand fast. I gather the birds two at a time, kill them, scald them and pluck them. I then hand them off to my wife, who does the eviscerating and details the carcasses, meaning cleaning them of any little feather remnants. We’re told we sell the cleanest birds east of the Pecos, and all I can say is it sure helps working with a Virgo.
I take up the tail end of the operation after my wife’s through. That means stuffing the cleaned innards (heart, neck, liver) back into the cavity, weighing the birds and sealing them in plastic bags. I guess I forgot to mention that before we even get started in the morning, my wife counts out the bags and affixes labels she ever-so-neatly writes out herself with permanent marker.
New York State permits us to sell up to 1,000 chickens off the farm without inspection or licensing as long as we maintain sanitary conditions and keep a record of who we sell the chickens to. This year we raised 300 chickens. And you know what, I think we’ve reached our limit.
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