Crafty Girl

Last year Bill built a chicken plucker to ease the processing of chickens. The first year we had meat chickens, we plucked them by hand. Um. Not fun. The next three or four years we took the birds to someone else to process them. This usually cost about $2/per bird. It was also a big hassle.

Commercial chicken pluckers cost upwards of a $1000. After some research, Bill found this book…Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker and managed to build one for around $300. Not too shabby!

This year we are raising 200 chickens! Yikes. Well we already raised and processed the first 100 and we’re almost about to process the second 100.

Nothing beats free range/pastured chickens. They are so much more tasty than anything I’ve ever bought in a grocery store. If you can, I highly recommend raising your own chickens. It’s pretty easy. If you can’t raise your own, try to find a farmer to get some from. You will be amazed!

Here’s some pictures of the Chicken Plucker that Bill built.

Ignore those beer bottles in the lower left hand corner. Chicken processing is thirsty work! It’s also really hard work. It takes Bill and his friend Jim & Jim’s daughter about 6 hours to do around 90 birds and they are tired when they’re done.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Farm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.