We are getting ready to process our second batch of Freedom Rangers. We've been trying to figure out how we can improve our process from last time to make things go faster and smoother. Seemed like we never got into a good rhythm last time and it took us all day to do 26 chickens. While I didn't think that was horrible for our first time, we have fifty to do this time and would love to see it go faster.
Our crew consists of myself, husband, 15 yo son, 12yo son, and 11yo daughter. We have a Featherman plucker. Last time, I did all the killing, 12yo and 11yo did scalding and plucking with some oversight from me as needed, dh did main evisceration with older ds separating and cleaning organs after removal. I finished things up with a final quality control check and putting the chickens in chill tank.
What we found was that evisceration took longest and we would get a backlog of chickens sitting too long and/or I would have to stop my other jobs and help at the evisceration station. So we're wondering if things might go smoother if we just planned on having a temporary chill tank between the plucking and evisceration station to hold birds while they await evisceration. Perhaps this would help free me to kill more birds at once and then spend more dedicated time at the evisceration station as well. Is there any problem/drawback to temporarily chilling the birds with the guts still in?
Any other insight or ideas would be appreciated.
Our crew consists of myself, husband, 15 yo son, 12yo son, and 11yo daughter. We have a Featherman plucker. Last time, I did all the killing, 12yo and 11yo did scalding and plucking with some oversight from me as needed, dh did main evisceration with older ds separating and cleaning organs after removal. I finished things up with a final quality control check and putting the chickens in chill tank.
What we found was that evisceration took longest and we would get a backlog of chickens sitting too long and/or I would have to stop my other jobs and help at the evisceration station. So we're wondering if things might go smoother if we just planned on having a temporary chill tank between the plucking and evisceration station to hold birds while they await evisceration. Perhaps this would help free me to kill more birds at once and then spend more dedicated time at the evisceration station as well. Is there any problem/drawback to temporarily chilling the birds with the guts still in?
Any other insight or ideas would be appreciated.