Butchering multiple birds without help - need some suggestions.

[aart]

I have butchered 2 birds so far, 1 at a time, and am pretty comfortable with my equipment and the process.
This year I need to butcher about 15-20 birds, old hens and extra cockerels, and am unsure about how to do say 4-5 birds at a time single handedly.

I don't have anyone to help, like maybe one person doing the killing and gutting and the other scalding and plucking......
....or even better would be 4 people, each working one station, but that ain't possible. I'm thinking the stations are kill, scald, pluck and gut then into the chiller. Final rinse and storage could be done by one person inside later.

I'm thinking it's best to just cage the chosen birds the night before and take each bird all the way thru all the stations one at a time then start at the beginning with another?

If anyone who does their butchering alone could share their experience/technique, I would be grateful.

TIA

 

[Hummingbird Hollow]

When I'm working alone that's pretty much what I do too. With all the work it takes to set up the stations, and all the work it takes to clean up afterwards, I try to get 3 or 4 done at one session. However, there is always that possibility that something comes up in the middle of the planned period that slows you down or even makes you quit what you are doing and you don't want to have multiple birds in various stages of butchering on your hands. Once the three or four are in the cooler I clean up and sit down for a cup of coffee and a rest. Later I'll drain the chickens on the dish rack in the sink while I wash out the cooler. Once drained, the chickens are individually wrapped in plastic grocery bags and put in the refridgerator to age for 3 days before they are all prepared for the freezer. Good luck.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Yes same here. I’m by myself. I take one bird all the way through the process at one time. One thing I suggest is do all the preparation you can the day before, set-up, making extra ice, sharpening knives, even digging the hole you will bury the slaughter byproducts in if you bury them. It’s going to be a long day anyway.

I don’t scald and pluck, I skin. My wife wants them skinless anyway. For younger birds hat is pretty easy but older birds and even cockerels at five months have membrane that attaches to the skin so you may need to cut that membrane. Skinning a mature rooster is a challenge. I don’t leave the carcasses whole either but cut them into serving pieces as I butcher. That slows me down some but suits the way I use them. It depends on age and sex but I normally do about 5 to 6 birds in a day.

Butchering is only half of it. I double wrap the parts we will eat in freezer paper. I find that bones will sometimes poke a hole through single wrapped, zip-loc bags, or shrink-wrapped bags, not so much when I’m wrapping them as later when I’m sorting through the freezer looking for things. The parts I use for broth go into a zip-loc freezer bag and yes, occasionally a hole gets poked in it but I live with that.

Clean-up takes a while too. Before I clean up and go inside to wrap the chicken, I bury what I’m burying, wash the things I used (buckets, stand, hatchet, whatever) with dish soap and follow with a bleach and rinse, put the hose away, and store things away or to dry. After I finish wrapping the chicken I of course do dishes and sanitize kitchen counters and take the ice chest outside to wash it and sanitize it with bleach. It all makes for a long day.

When I butcher I keep two buckets handy. One gets the stuff I’m going to bury. The other gets the body parts I feed back to the remainder of the flock. Free proteins and nutrients. It’s also a good time to split open some intestines to see if they have any worms inside.

When you butcher hens you will sometimes find an egg not yet laid. I eat these fairly quickly because the hen has not put any bloom on it. I don’t store those for long.

When I bury the stuff, I put wire held down with pavers over it to keep animals from digging it back up. I had that happen once. The body parts were pretty much eaten so it was not as bad as you might think but feathers were flying all over the place.

Maybe you can pick something out of this ramble that can help.

 

[aart]

I recently started raising and processing my own Cornish cross birds, yesterday I processed 5 all alone and I basically did the whole process the way you described. I had my boys separate the condemned to a smaller pen so I wouldn't have to chase them around and so that they would be mostly empty of food in their craws, then I would go grab the lucky rooster and hang him upside down on my line I made, cut him and wait a few minutes for him to bleed out then take him off the line scald him, put him back on the line and pluck him, rinse and gut and rinse again. I would take each bird into the house and chill it for a bit in cold water then refrigerate for a few hours before freezing them. I started about 730a and between breaks and chasing my ducklings, I finally stopped about noon to clean up and bury the remains of the birds. It worked out fairly well for me. I still have 4 more roosters to process and will probably do those this wknd. Good luck

Great!
One thing you should do a bit differently is let the carcasses set in the fridge for at least 48-72 hours before freezing.
This allows rigor mortis to pass and the meat will be more tender.

Oh, and another thing I found, is that if you feed them a bit of scratch grains an hour before butchering the full crop is much easier to detach from the surrounding tissue. I did an experiment, 3 cockerels...1 got nothing, 1 got crumble, 1 got grain.....the grain one was much easier.

 

[aart]

Fantastic Feedback!! Thank you both so much!!

Lots of affirmation and some new good tips too.

This was exactly my concern " ......you don't want to have multiple birds in various stages of butchering...... "

Now that part is settled, I can move my thinking onto getting the gear all gathered and plan the set up.

I like the skin, but may try skinning too as it would save alot of time and effort.
Too bad the younger ones are easier to skin, especially when they are young enough to still put on the grill......
......cause not many things more delicious than crispy grilled chicken skin right off the grill, it even reheats pretty well with a fresh home grown bird.

 

[CrazyTalk]

Honestly - I only think skinning is quicker if you're doing 1 bird. If I'm doing 2 or 3, plucking is easier. Skinning is only quicker because you don't have to heat up a pot of water - the actual skinning is a pain (IMO). If birds are scalded correctly, the actual plucking is really quick and easy.

 

[OnlyOrps]

This is a very helpful thread. Thanks for all the info guys!

 

[enola]

Nobody plucks their birds dry? I don't scald. By plucking the tail and wing feathers immediately, then plucking the body, all the feathers come out.

 

[LBKS]

Nobody plucks their birds dry? I don't scald. By plucking the tail and wing feathers immediately, then plucking the body, all the feathers come out.

I tried dry plucking a sudden cull rooster once, figured I'd get an idea how much time scalding would save on a one off. I don't seem to have how to pluck the wing feathers fast enough down though. The first wing goes off well enough, the second is harder, and I ended up just cutting off the tail rather than plucking it all the way.

There seems to be a certain way to hold the base of the feathers to pop them out easy enough on body feathers, the best I had on the wing feathers was to push down the skin around the shafts and then pull. Any dry pluck tips? (I'm assuming it'd be easier with younger birds, but wanted to see how difficult it would be on an adult since I had one to work with and didn't want to mess with the scalding pot.)

 

[aart]

Scald and pluck is pretty slick...literally...and I would think it's easier to handle the feathers when they're wet than have them flying all over the place.
PLUS that scald water is great for (again, slickly) skinning the feet for stock.