Today we butchered chickens for the first time. We’ve been talking about butchering a few of our older Rhode Island Reds for a little while now and finally had a weekend we could do it. The fact that we had two roosters hovering over 16 hens kinda sped up the decision. It’d gotten to the point that the older girls would just stay in the coop rather than enjoy the sunshine and have to deal with the males’ advances so it needed to be done.
Lando spent last night at a friend’s. At 11:30pm I got a text from his friend asking if he could come over and help weigh calves and butcher chickens! Not many kids would be excited about the extra work but apparently these two were!
I’m lucky enough to have parents who’ve done a lot of this kind of stuff before. They’ll do it a time or two and then come up with an easier (sometimes) way to do it or build a contraption to help. They moved to a new house in December and it just made sense to bring their chicken plucker to our house for storage at the time (hehe). Let me tell ya- that thing made the whole process soooo easy! I’ve never manually plucked a chicken before but I have done a duck. Horrible idea to do it by hand. Horrible. A couple minutes spinning in this thing (a topless 50 gallon plastic barrel with rubber nipples inside attached to some random electric utility motor) with the water hose going and VOILA- feathers gone. We only butchered two hens and a rooster but it was enough to get our feet wet and give the boys something enjoyable to do. (I’ll spare you most of the photos I took of them through the morning.)
Next up- meat chickens!! haha-And sometimes people wonder why my husband rolls his eyes at me…
scalding pot 
“the plucker” 
feathers everywhere! 
plucked chicken
Since it was one of those rare Saturdays where my husband and I were both off work, we wanted to make the most of it. We borrowed the portable scales from our local feed store to confirm how bad we are at guessing cattle weights. Yeah, it’s a good thing we don’t sell our beef based on what we think it weighs cuz we’d go broke, LOL. The boys have been through the process before so they didn’t mind hanging out in the barn for awhile and then walking through the alleyway to the scale and freedom. The girls- well, not so cooperative. They’ve only been in the chute once before and it was to get vaccinations. We don’t have a great setup with a squeeze chute and I’m not the best at giving large animal injections so a coworker came over to help out with giving the girls their booster shots. He’s got cattle of his own so it made me feel a whole lot better having someone else look over our little herd and telling us they were looking good. WHEW!!
“Salt” 
newest bucket calves