Chicken Processing Day

Here are step by step photos of our chicken processing on 5/8/10.  It was our first attempt and took us 2 hours to process 10 chickens.  Not lightning fast, but not too bad for our first time.

Here we have a pic of the Whizbang chicken plucker that Dan built.  This will keep us from hand plucking feathers right after it comes out of scalding hot water...

Here  is our setup...
Step 1 - chickens go into cones to slit throats and bleed out
Step 2 - into stainless pot with 150 degree water to loosen feathers
Step 3 - into Whizbang to remove feathers
Step 4 - onto table for butchering

Time to catch some chickens... in this case all of the Barred Rock cockerels that we don't want to keep.  After catching, they're held upside down which calms them down as blood rushes to their heads...

Into the cones they go.  After their throats are slit they instantly die, yet their hearts keep beating so they bleed out better than other butchering methods.  They need to hang here a few minutes...

After they've bled out, into the hot water for about 1 minute...

Now into the Whizbang.  You turn the drum on while spraying a little water and 30 seconds later, you have naked birds...

Now we start butchering...

The butchering is all done.  Just need to rinse the bird out and place in some cold water while we do the rest...