Reducing Numbers on the Farm

Haven't posted much recently due to all the work around the farm. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving we reduced our poultry numbers significantly. First we took forty nine broilers and six of our Royal Palm turkeys in for processing on Monday November 12th. We recently purchased a second freezer in which to store said birds. The fifteen Narragansett turkeys we were selling were scheduled to go in Thursday night November 15th.

When I got home from work on Thursday and saw my daughter in the house she informed me that the turkeys were up by the barn. Since I knew Danielle had planned on having them loaded up into the dog kennels which we use to transport them I thought everything was set. After asking Julia if they were all loaded up she said "not exactly". It turns out that Danielle and the kids had been chasing our free range turkeys around our and our neighbors pastures for much of the day. She had only managed to catch two or three, but had localized a bunch with poultry netting up by the barn. Five had jumped the fences onto neighbors properties and were so skiddish from being chased all day that we were unable to get them back where they belonged. That night we were able to coax the rest of them into two of the stalls in our barn. Hopping to still get all of the turkeys to the processor for our 5:30 AM appointment Danielle and I woke up at 4AM on Friday to try to catch the wayward birds and get them loaded onto the pickup truck. We had no luck that morning with the five that had flown the coop so we decided to just take up the nine Narragansett and two Royal Palms we had been able to capture.

Over the weekend we were able to get all the birds back on our property, and confined in the barn stalls. Friends of ours who had arrived Friday night, got to see what a working farm is like, as Danielle and I plucked and processed four turkeys on Saturday. I remember their older son (~6 years old) asking me "is it dead" as I carried a recently deceased bird in from the barn to be plucked and eviscerated. Finally Tuesday night, two days before Thanksgiving I got around to butchering the last two turkeys, one of which was a rather large tom which would be our Thanksgiving bird.

All in all everything worked out fine. We were able to fill all our orders, have a couple birds in the freezer available for sale for Christmas, as well as a few smaller 8-10 pound birds for us to eat throughout the winter. The fabulous Thanksgiving dinner, along with the rave reviews of those that purchased the birds makes it all worthwhile.

Early Father's Day Gift

Danielle is horrible about keeping secrets, and thus when my Father's day present arrived last week she showed it to me right away. She bought me the grill for Father's day 4 or 5 years ago, so it only seemed fitting to get the matching rotisserie. You can't see it in this picture but there is a small electric motor that mounts on the right side of the spit and an adjustable counterbalance that goes on the left side. We defrosted a free range chicken and I have to say the it came out even better than my beer can chicken. Since it is always rotating the bird essentially self bastes. We had a salad with greens out of our garden as well as some homemade bread to accompany the chicken. We are already looking forward to doing one of our heritage turkeys and maybe even a suckling pig on the spit.

Moving Animals onto Pasture

We are busy moving all the livestock away from the barn and out onto pasture. The idea is to let the animals feed on the grass, fertilize the fields and allow the barn yard to rest. The mobile chicken coop was a large part of this but we also moved Mia, our tamworth gilt and our water fowl out this weekend.

I made Mia a simple A-frame structure on skids, siding it with some vinyl siding that was up in our hay loft when we bought the place. We hoped to use just a couple strands of electric tape, but Mia is too much of a "people pig" and would charge through to get back to her people. For now we added a second perimeter of electric netting to keep her in. Hopefully, once she gets used to her new setup, and she gets some company, we have two male weanlings coming in the next week, we will be able to go back to the tape. We have her setup in a small area in hopes that she will root up all the grass. Then we will move her to a new area and repeat.

The ducks and geese are sharing a run. I made them a "tractor" from an old moving crate, chicken wire and an old tarp. Unfortunately they had no desire to go into it at night. They just grouped up and went to sleep out in the grass. I checked on them this morning before going to work and they were happily eating and going about their business. We will use the tractor for the broilers and pullets once they are ready to be put out on pasture, hopefully sometime this week. We also took the cap off my truck and put it out as a run in shelter so the birds can get out of the sun when needed.

So now all we need to do is get the goats, turkey poults, broilers and pullets out on pasture and I will be able to reseed the barn yard.

Mobile Chicken Coop

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was converting an old trailer into a mobile chicken coop. We got the trailer from my neighbor and after stripping off some things we didn't need it formed a strong platform to build the coop. I did a simple lean to design with a large nesting box on one end and roosts in the middle. The bottom is diamond metal mesh so hopefully most of the chicken droppings will fall through. The bottom is secured with hardware cloth to keep out any predators and to allow a lot of ventilation. I used metal roofing and a single plastic panel to afford the chickens some natural light. There are large doors at both ends and a small chicken door which is left open during the day.

I set the mobile coop in the barn yard Saturday afternoon and locked all the chickens out of their old coop. Danielle and I came back out Saturday night and transfered all the chickens into their new home.

Sunday morning we moved the coop out onto our pasture and setup a perimeter of electric netting. The chickens happily came out to explore their new digs and seemed pleased to have some fresh grass to feast on. I am happy to say that when we went out Sunday evening to close them up all but one of the chickens had found their way into the coop. They also had no problem finding the nesting box and provided us with 19 fresh eggs.

An Accidental Dinner

Our chickens like to go into the goat stall during the day to root around through the straw for food as well as to just hunker down out of the weather. Some had gotten in the habit of jumping up on-top of the corner hay feeder. This was not a problem when it was full of hay other than the fact that they tended to spill some of it, but one day the feeder was empty and one of our Delaware's managed to fall down into the feeder and get herself stuck. Not sure how long she was like this but upon removing her it was clear she could not walk. Danielle hoped that she was just in shock so she isolated her and gave her some food and a electrolyte solution.

After a couple of days it was clear that she was not going to recover so I culled her. Not really wanting to take the time to pluck all her feathers I instead just skinned her. It was apparent when butchering her that she had broken her one leg and had a significant amount of internal injuries. It ended up that I was only able to salvage the two hind quarters and one breast. After letting the meat age for a few days in the refrigerator I made what turned out to be a delightful dinner -- if I do say so myself. I first browned the chicken on the stove top with some butter and onions. Then added some chicken stock to deglaze the pan and baked it with some fresh rosemary from the garden. Served over some farmstyle home fries made with our own red potatoes it was quite a treat.

We have since removed the corner feeders from all of our stalls, but this definitely seems like an example of making lemonade from lemons.

Culling, Processing, or as I like to call it a good old Chicken Slaughter

The chickens had finally fattened up so we decided to take advantage of the long Labor day weekend to slaughter, pick and pack our surplus cockerels. We are keeping one Welsummer and one Dorking rooster, but this left us with nineteen cockerels for meat. Trying to learn something from our earlier test run, we separated the cockerels from the rest of the flock Saturday, putting them in the extra stall in the barn. This allowed us to evaluate all of the cockerels and decide which two birds were the closest to their respective breed standards and thus would be kept on as our roosters.

It also made it much easier for me to grab the birds on the day of the slaughter since they were in a confined space. We normally use the extra stall to store hay for the goats, as well as to store other odds and ends. We covered up the hay with a tarp to keep the cockerels from getting into it, the whole point of separating them out is to clear their crop and stomach of food so that the eviscerating is less messy. This was not completely successful as they managed to still get into the hay and thus in the future we will want to put them in an empty stall.

We did not get started as early as I would have liked on Sunday, mostly due to the fact that I had to run out and pick up a knife to do the killing with. We do not have a boning knife and my pocket knife which I used on the test bird was not the best tool for the job. So after Sam and I ran out to the store and we all had breakfast I pulled killed and started processing the first three birds at around 10am.

Things were going along slow and steady, so slow in fact that my wife took sympathy on me and decided to help out with the picking. We worked out a system where I would kill three chickens at a time then bring them up to the patio where we would scald and pick them. The picked birds would go into the garage fridge to cool, and the process would continue. We did this until we had 9 or 10 birds cooling then we switched to eviscerating and packing. Again Danielle helped out -- I am only pointing this out since it was made clear to me early on that she did not want any part in the processing of the birds. I eviscerated and washed the chickens in the kitchen sink and Danielle did a final picking and cleaning of the birds then packed them into bags. We recently purchased a vacuum sealer (thanks to the kind support of our personal CSA) and she put the birds in these bags but did not seal them so that they could drain for a few days in the fridge before being sealed and transferred to the freezer.

So as not to be too boring you can figure out where it went from here, back out to kill and pluck the rest of the birds and then back inside to eviscerate and pack. When all was said and done including cleaning up the barn, patio and kitchen it was about 8:30 PM. A long day for sure but now we have a freezer full of chickens (well not full since my wife purchased a huge freezer but that is a different story) and we can look forward to pulling them out for dinner throughout the winter.

Warning CARNAGE Below: How we butchered our first Chicken

Since we purchased straight runs of Dorkings (25) and Welsummers (10) this past spring we were always aware that we would have on the order of 18 cockerels to deal with. We plan on keeping one of each species so that we can breed the chickens in the future instead of always ordering new chicks, but this still leaves us with quite a few chickens to dispose of. My wife specifically got multipurpose birds so that we could cull and eat the cockerels.

Well our new chicken coop that seemed huge when I first built it is starting to get crowded with the nearly 60 chickens which currently call it home. This along with the fact that the cockerels are nearly as big as our two and a half year old hens meant that we needed to start thinking about culling some of the cockerels. Since I have never processed a chicken before and I was going to do this by the book (i.e. no one was around to walk me through it) I decided to start small and just process one chicken. I isolated a Dorking cockerel in the morning and set him up with just water. I know you are supposed to do this overnight but I did not plan that far in advance. As it turned out I ended up butchering a different Dorking (one that got out of the chicken pen and into our yard). He was a real pain to catch so it seemed like as good a chicken as any to cull from our flock.

I built a killing cone from an old gallon milk container by cutting open the bottom and opening up the spout enough for the chickens head to poke through. With an old spackle bucket below to catch the blood I cut the chickens jugular and let it bleed out. I also de-brained it, which according to the books is supposed to make the process of plucking the feathers easier. After the chicken was done bleeding I scalded it for 30 seconds in hot water then the kids and I began plucking the bird. All and all I have to say that dealing with the feathers was the most time consuming part of the entire operation. While it was not hard to pull out the feathers, there just always seemed to be more of them.

Once the bird was as free of feathers as it was going to get it was time to eviscerate the chicken. While this sounds daunting in the books, all you really are doing is cutting off the feet and head and removing the guts. Considering I did not really know what I was doing it all went smoothly. I was amazed by the size of the liver, it was by far the largest organ. I removed all the giblets and offal and disposed of them. In the future I will probably at least save the livers to make pate, but for my first run I just wanted to keep it simple. After washing off the bird and putting it in the fridge to cool I cleaned everything up and had a beer.

After relaxing for a while I fired up the grill and put some red potatoes on to roast. We made beer can chicken and grilled up some Gold Nugget tomatoes as well. Everyone except Sam tried some of the chicken.
It had a lot of flavor but was a bit chewy. Not sure if this is the norm for free range birds or just cockerels. The neatest thing about dinner was that everything we ate came from our farm. The chicken, potatoes and tomatoes were all raised or grown on our farm. Even the rosemary and thyme came out of our kitchen garden. Danielle and I have been talking for some time about how great it would be to have an entire home grown meal, and I must say it was quite a treat.


The cockerel was on the small side so the rest of the flock has received a temporary reprieve, but in a couple weeks I will have to start processing the birds on a larger scale.

Pullets Moved!

Finished (well I am sure it will never be truly finished) the new chicken coop yesterday. I put a sheet of plywood over one door and transferred the small sliding door from the barn to the other. The window currently is only covered by chicken wire. So as I stated above it is far from done but it was complete enough so that we could move the pullets into there new space. They had completely outgrown the stall they shared with the turkeys and seemed happy with the move. It was "interesting" moving 48 birds. By the end Danielle and I had devised a somewhat efficient assembly line process. She grabbed 4 - 6 pullets and hung them upside down, carrying them by their feet. She then handed them to me through the window and I put them in the coop. I still need to add a shutter type closure for the window, open up the side of the barn to add a small door ......

As I said it will never be truly finished.