Game Over
November 14th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in farming
The last of the 2015 Freedom Ranger broilers have been slaughtered and bagged and we are celebrating. My wife especially is toasting an occasion she has been looking forward to most of the season as she is no fan of the twice-daily drudgery involved in feeding, watering and moving the chicken “tractors” around the pastures.
I will also be glad not to suffer a sore back all winter the way I did last year, having insisted on help moving the aforementioned tractors, or large cages. It’s so much easier with wheels on each end, rather than one person trying to drag them hither and yon with a single dolly.
In all, we received 324 chicks in the mail. Most of them made it into the field. Some met with tragic accidents during the growing period. We sold all but 54 of the grown birds, leaving plenty for us to eat. One of our chest freezers is packed with frozen broilers.
I haven’t compiled all the data yet, but the average size of the Rangers we raised was about 4.5 pounds at slaughter. We grew half the birds to 10 weeks, the other half to 11 weeks, except when it started to get cold (we’ve had a pretty warm fall so far) and we extended that by a week as the chicens start burning more calories to stay warm. With my wife and I doing all the slaughtering, plucking and eviscerating, it’s easier to split a harvest of 50 birds over two weeks. Plus some of our clientele prefers smaller birds, others larger.
This year we shortened our growing season by a couple of weeks so we weren’t trying to move chickens through the snow. We also added one batch of Rangers to the mix, which meant the harvests and chicken sales repeated on a monthly basis. June was slow: People said they still had chickens in their freezers from the prior season. Sales were really brisk in August and September, then tapered off again in October and November.
I’m not sure how to account for these sales patterns. Perhaps most people are more interested in fresh broilers during summer barbecue season. I expected the final fall harvest to be a big draw, but it turns out not as many people have chest freezers to over-winter their chickens as we thought. Over the season, it was the smaller birds that lagged. The bigger Rangers–the ones that got 11 weeks to fill out and grow to six pounds or more–all sold.
We ended on a bit of a sour note when one of our clients, who’d purchased eight birds to store for the winter, rushed to cook one of the them for dinner too soon after it was slaughtered. She sent a bewildered e-mail complaining how tough it was and we agonized all evening over what might be the cause. Illumination didn’t come until the following morning: rigor mortis. Freshly killed foul should get at least six hours and preferably 24 or more to rest before being cooked so the muscles have a chance to relax.
It’s the first negative feedback we’ve encountered since starting our Freedom Ranger operation. Another lesson learned.Otherwise, our chickens are now known far and wide as the tastiest east of the Pecos.
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