Processing Day Has Arrived

 

The killing cones are hooked to a plywood saddle that I built to hang over a folding saw horse. When it was all over, the entrails and such are taken into the swampy part of the woods for the turtles to munch on.

  

Work table. I burned the remainder of a gift card at Bass Pro for this baby, and it is sweet. It is sturdy and the height is perfect and you can hook a garden hose to the faucet. I ended up using a thick HDPE cutting board to protect the table and hung the paper towels in-between the table legs with a wooden dowel. Shortly after starting, I got rid of the waste bucket and hooked up an old pool drain hose to the drain for the sink.

An old turkey fryer used as a scalder and kept at a steady 145-150 degrees. You to be careful not to let the wind blow out the flame. Getting the water back up to temperature while birds wait in the cones is not ideal.

 Automatic plucker

 Our plucker at work:

we used a 1/2 HP motor and found that with a steel feather plate, it lacked to power to really spin the bigger birds. For the next run, I am going to install a 1-1/2HP motor. There will be no lack of power after that!

 

Transport of the Cornish Cross "candidates". I was processing four at a time; cone, scald, plucker, table and finally to the cooler.

The abattoir in progress. Processing in the sunshine, the UV sunlight and fresh water keeping everything clean.

And into the fridge prior to final weighing, labeling, freezing. The end-of-the-day tally:

The 12 birds =

• 50.56 lbs of processed whole birds*
• 1.78 lbs of livers and hearts
• 1.75 lbs of necks

 *The individual birds weights were as follows (in lbs) :  4.9, 5.06, 4.7, 4.4 , 3.8, 5.1, 3.8, 4.3, 3.5, 3.1, 3.9 ,4.0