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npub170f…2d65

2023-06-05 15:30:46

It was a bit of a long weekend, but we got our 25 meat birds in the fridge. Wednesday our new freezer comes, would have been sooner if not for some customs issues.

While I am happy with the efficiency gains from this years setup, I still have a long way to go.

It took about 10 hours from setup to tear down for me and my wife. I did most of the work, and my wife helped where she could. She just couldn't do the evisceration, even though she tried. She also couldn't do the kill either.

I think we got the flow down fairly well, the biggest issue is we now need to figure out a few things in the actual doing.

Here are areas for us to work on:

1. Cutting off the head. I don't know why we had so much trouble this year when in years past this just wasn't an issue.
2. More efficient rinsing of the bird after evisceration. We were using a hose, but we really need a sink right there by the table.
3. The actual killing of the chicken wasn't bad, but the death throws are tough since they are violent at times the chicken wants to flop out. So we have to sit there and hold the chickens until they are done. This is a huge time waste. I need to work on this more.
4. Evisceration could go smoother/faster, but I am not sure how. For the first 10 I was trying to re-remember everything. I then got smoother/quicker. That said with how fast joel salatin can do it, I have lots of room for improvement.
5. Scald and pluck 2 at a time instead of 1 at a time. The new scalder is awesome and our first time using it, but if we can do 2 at a time we should save quite a bit of time.
6. Organization of equipment. Currently I just don't have a lot of room so this needs to get better. We did just get a 40' container so that is going to help a lot.

As you can see there are a lot of areas for improvement, but considering where we started to begin with. I would say we have made great headway.

Also we put 150lbs of chicken in freezer. We averaged 6lb chickens this year, woohoo. I'll talk more later on how we got that, and why, for us, it was a surprise.

#homestead #oklahoma #grownostr #diy #chickens #selfreliance

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2023-06-05 15:30:46

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