Butchering day.

[freewheat]

Passing the torch of knowledge on to my son. Been butchering chickens the last few mornings. He loves it. I love it. So fun to do stuff together and answer his questions and watch him learn. This was the first year he got right into it, down and dirty, cutting and pulling guts. Getting past the, "you are in the way" phase to the "wow, you are actually VERY helpful" Phase.

Anyone out there in agriville still raise a few birds? We got done 38 out of about 60. Average weight at 12 weeks about 7.5 lbs of the yummiest chicken you can imagine.

Proud of my boy...

[seabass]

Use to do it as a kid with my Baba. 100 or more chickens and 20 or more Turkeys. Sometimes Ducks and Geese. A lot of work but very tastey.

[Tucker]

We raise our own meat chickens here too. Only 25 this year. The boys catch and pluck but will not pull guts.

[nibs1]

We still raise chickens, use to be about 400 when the kids were raising them and selling but we have scaled back to only 150 for our own families use.Once you taste farm raised you never want store bought.

[crusher]

Right on freewheat.

We won't be getting into chickens, I'm conditioned to store bought and wouldn't want to be tempted to build a chicken coop.

[farmaholic]

Nothing tastier than a farm raised chicken, we were buying some from someone who raised them. Soup from whats left is good too. Sure don't like the smell of scalded feathers, singeing and gutting.

Over the years we did alot of beef some pork. My job was beheading the chickens then I disappeared, lol.

[freewheat]

lol. Good responses. I am set up pretty well, I can have about 20 from the point they lose their heads, to done and in a bag in about 2 hours by myself. My wife is like the little red hen. She does not feed them, she does not butcher them, but by gum she sure likes the way they taste!

We used to raise 500 or so for sale, but that was an insane amount of work. We prefer the egg hens now, they are not much work at all, and more economically viable. We don't even feed the layers from April to Early November.

When I was a kid, we did ducks and turkeys and sometimes geese. Oh the ducks and geese were hard to pluck! And a 50 lb Tom is quite the match for a 60 lb boy...

[ado089]

At one point we had a couple hundred now we only raise about 25 chickens and a dozen turkeys. Plenty of wild meat to compliment it.

[perfecho]

Our own beef and chickens...although I take them in to get processed.
Friends from the city are catching on, and although we don't encourage it, they want to buy. Did some chickens at plus 10 lbs and at $4 per lb, they added up, but we could have sold many more.
We are light on our beef at about $4/lb hanging, but these guys helped us through BSE and now its time to return the favor.

[sumdumguy]

We used to have a lot of fun, putting their heads between 2 nails on the chopping block, saying our goodbyes, using an axe, then watching them flail around. How brutal is that! Wouldn't show that to my grandchildren today, probably go to jail, but that's how it was done back 40 years ago. We didn't keep the wings, nor thighs, just the breasts. We once raised a turkey that grew to 36 pounds. Big breasts when they chaised grasshoppers into the wheat fields. The first young rooster cooked in cream with dill was a real delicacy. Lucky kids to have the memories of pulling out the guts and identifying the anatomy, sometimes finding all kinds of junk that the free range chickens ingested. I didn't know people still "butchered." Oh yeh, our first year of farming, we used our only cash to raise 125 chickens and 40 turkeys for income. The goings on!