Pastured Poultry Processing Day 1

Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 16 May 2023...

Hey Y'all!

Happy Tuesday from Air2Ground Farms! Wow, what a great day! I'm going to give a quick update and share the pics with you. The animals are great on the farm today. We got everything set up and ready for processing the beef chickens and got right to it. I'll explain the setup using the pics in the collage. The tan tank is a scalder that heats the birds after they bleed out. The metal cones behind the scalder are kill cones that hold the birds in place and calm them. After the scalder, they go to the mechanical plucker. From there, they get a dunk in ice water for a couple of minutes. Then across the stainless steel table to remove heads, feet, and guts. The final stage is a quick quality check and tuck their legs to get ready for the freezer bag. Off the table, they go into another ice water dunk before moving to the freezers we just bought that will hold them at about 34-36 degrees until tomorrow morning when we will put them in shrink bags and move them to the deep freeze. We processed 40 today and will finish up tomorrow. Today it took us about 4 1/2 hours including all of the clean up and getting things ready for tomorrow. I'll go through more details tomorrow about who is doing what job and how we did. Overall, we are very happy with the quality of the birds! The last pic, bottom right, is two new lambs today. The near lamb's mom is just out of the frame.

Local Farm Report for 15 May 2023:

Harvest:

35 Chicken eggs

23 Duck eggs

0 Goose eggs

6 Gallons of milk

Cheers! Psycho & Shelley