Chicken Butchering.....

Last Thursday marked the beginning of the chicken butchering season. We spent two days butchering, the first day skinning 50 birds. It was a bright, sunny day and as a result of working in direct sunlight, the workers got extremely sunburnt. Arms and faces glowed bright red for several days. The second day started much later, and we only managed to butcher 30 birds. Plucking by hand slowed things up a bit, so it was decided to ask Scott to bring over the plucker to speed things up. On Thursday of this week we got back to work and got 120 birds done in about 5 1/2 hours.

Noah had the dirtiest job of us all, cutting the heads off.

Esther is the most vital person in our operation. We always knew she could gut birds fast, but actually timed her this time and found she could gut a bird in 48 seconds. Pretty good, huh?

Scott's Terrific Plucker at Work!!!

Tabitha does a fantastic job wrapping the birds up for us.
We are grateful that she is so good at it because none of the rest of us can do it well!

Clean-up.....

It's a wonderful feeling to go from here........

......to here!!!!

There is only one pen of birds left. Because we lost an entire pen (120 birds) to a wild animal over night our butchering has been cut in half. The remaining 75 birds need about 7-10 days more and then we'll be done butchering this Spring!!