Processing Station Plans

[ImpulsiveFarmer]

Does anyone have any plans for meat bird processing area. We have someone getting us a stainless steel table, and we are going to be getting a chicken plucker. I just want to set everything up in the most efficient manner. We have processed bird before, but that was only a couple at a time for our own use. We want to start processing larger amounts of birds to sell, so we need a better setup than what we have been using.

 

[PotterWatch]

We prefer to have our killing area separate from the eviscerating area. Mostly because I don't care for the smell of wet chicken feathers so I don't like to be close to the scalder. We have ours set up so that we have a row of six kill cones mounted at the edge of a concrete pad. The dunking can (just a trash can filled with water to dunk the birds in before they go in the scalder to get off the worst of the poop and dirt so our scalder water stays cleaner), scalder, and plucker are all on the concrete pad. That makes for a nicer area for my husband to work in. It doesn't get muddy with all the water running through the plucker and the water that drips from the birds as they go from scalder to plucker. The plucker is situated so that the chute where the feathers come out dumps them into a catch tray we made with wood and hardware cloth. It catches the feathers and the water runs through into a hole we dug. Again, it helps keep the area from becoming muddy. When they come out of the plucker, he brings them to our eviscerating area (only about 20ft away). We have a stainless steel sink table with double sinks. He puts the plucked chickens in one side of the sink and we use the other side for rinsing finished birds. We have a home depot bucket at the sink to put the guts in and coolers with ice to put the birds when we are done. That's pretty much our setup. We do anywhere from 20-100 birds in a day and haven't found that we need anything else.

 

[wyoDreamer]

PotterWatch - very nice sounding set-up! I will have to file that away for when we do our butchering.

 

[ImpulsiveFarmer]

potterwatch Thank you! - you wouldn't happen to have any pictures?

 

[syount]

Our setup is almost identical to PotterWatch. I agree that it's important to separate the plucking area from the eviscerating area. The one slight change we have is that when the chickens come out of the plucker, we throw them in a feed trough full of ice water. This helps cool the bird down before we clean them. Once they are clean, we throw them back in another cooler full of ice water. I'm not sure how much it really matters, but it makes me feel good from a food safety perspective. As a final step, we give them a last once over, pat them dry bag and then dunk the birds in hot water to heat shrink the bags.

 

[PotterWatch]

I'll get some pictures when everything is set up to do birds on Friday.