My first trip down this road! It was a fun experience.

[theOEGBman]

Well, to start off Im in college. Im taking a poultry science class this semester and it pretty much talks about commercial egg and meat production. We raised 100 broilers, directly from Foster Farms, and we processed about 85 today! My school has a full-blown processing plant with the shackles, big ol plucker, scalding tank, etc. Its a really awesome set up, even a whole area outside for the actual killing so the dirty work is seperate from the "cleaner" stuff. Anyways, we were all assigned to a station and I got stuck with the plucker. That thing is AMAZING. I'd put 2-3 birds in it after they went through the scalder and man, it was awesome. After that I removed the legs and sent them on to be cleaned internally. I dont know how you guys pluck them by hand, I cant imagine plucking all 85 by hand. We packaged them all up afterwards and I brought one home. It was on the small side, just 3 lbs, but most averaged 4.5 lbs or so. I've got 6 broilers here at home that I'll be taking back there to process when they're ready. I just wanted to tell you all that do this that wow, you guys are brave! Haha, it was really fun but I am sore!

 

[Brunty_Farms]

Commercial processing facilities are a work of art... it's amazing how fast birds are processed. Some plants do 250,000 in one day, which is beyond my imagination.

What a neat class what college?

 

[theOEGBman]

Yeah, it was unreal how fast we got through them. It was cool to be put at one station because we got it done so much quicker. But she still allowed us to walk through the stations at the beginning to see how its all done. She told us a while back she had to process 900, I cant imagine how she managed that one! Yeah, next semester she is doing Avian Practices which will be more about turkey production, squab production, duck & goose, etc. Its Modesto Junior College. They've got a pretty great AG program. They have poultry, swine, cattle, etc, all on campus.