We get a lot of questions about butchering chickens over here on the podcast, and those questions range from “I have a backyard flock and I would like to be able to cull a few hens and some roosters every year,” all the way up to, “We are planning to raise enough meat birds for ourselves and our neighbors and we need to know what tools we need to get started on that.” In this episode, I am going to do my best to get you comfortable with the idea of butchering a few hens on your kitchen counter, and reassure you that you have every tool you need, and it really is a simple and straightforward process - but there is a learning curve, and it is worth learning.
This is an ancestral skill that used to be fairly familiar to many people; if you have read many older books you know they are always butchering this, that, or the other chicken and it doesn’t even barely make a comment in the book because it is such a simple and familiar process to people in the days of old. We will cover the tools you need for both a simple few birds a year, all the way up to the larger batches that involve more equipment; we will talk about involving your kids in the process, and we will talk about the clean-up and packaging process at the end as well.
I hope you find this episode to be very useful and interesting, and please be aware that we are going to talk about all the blood and guts in this episode and it is appropriate for all ages, but please be aware before you jump in.
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Resources:
Meredith Leigh, Episode 77
Modern Homesteading Conference
The Small-Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery
Some helpful YouTube videos (go down the rabbit hole!). Use each of these videos as a jumping-off point and take advantage of YouTube's algorithms to watch video after video of the processes! You may find one particular creator speaks to the way you learn best, and dive deep on their videos:
Justin Rhodes butchering with minimal equipment
Justin Rhodes butchering 100 chickens
Brandon shows how to scald and pluck a chicken using a drum plucker (could do it by hand, too)
Brandon demonstrating how to take the guts out of a chicken
Joel Salatin demos broiler processing and as always, he touches on the sacredness of taking a life to begin his process. This is an excellent demo as Joel has butchered hundreds of thousands of birds and he casually drops lots of little useful details.
Note that if you attend a homesteading conference there will almost always be a broiler processing demo on the schedule, and those are well worth attending! Even after butchering many birds we still like to watch these and learn new things or just be encouraged. However, those demos don't typically teach finer points like how to get the crop out; you will more get the broad scope of processing birds.
Mini Urban Farm processes chickens
Stoney Ridge Farmer butchers chickens
You can also see Joel Salatin's early cameo butchering chickens in the documentary, Food Inc! This was the first time I saw cones in use back in 2009.
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