Some friends of ours owns 40 acres out in Sumas where a group of us constructed a huge chicken run for the purpose of raising some meat birds - locally grown, free range, organic meat birds. Last year was the first meat bird raising and butchering extravaganza, but we were out of town and couldn't participate.
This year was a different story. A whole bunch of use pitched in for about 50 broiler chickens, aka meat chickens - similar to the one above. They mature in about 6-7 weeks, which is a bit freakish. After the whole thing is said and done {inclusive of feed and butchering supplies} each bird costs $10, which is less than you pay in the grocery store for an organic free range chicken.
Everyone met out at Blackberry Acres for the slaughter party. We all pitched in from chicken wrangling, chicken killing, de-feathering {courtesy of the plucking machine - which is genius by the way}, to de-boweling, and packaging. It was quite the adventure and a fantastic lesson is learning where your food really comes from. Admittedly, I didn't actually kill any chickens, but I did de-bowel a couple - which actually wasn't that disgusting. More like biology. Very little blood {they were pretty well drained at that point}.
Ollie slept through most of it, but was interested in checking out the live birds. I didn't let him watch the killing. I didn't want the kid to be traumatized. When the dead, de-defeathered chickens were being de-boweled, Ollie exclaimed, "Poop!" and pointed to the chicken's butt. It was pretty hilarious!
After it was all said in done {it only took a few hours from start to finish}, we ended up with seven chickens in our freezer/fridge. I am going to bake up our first one tomorrow. Mmm good.
4 comments:
As a meat eater I should be able to handle things like this but i can't. It makes me sad. For instance when we go crabbing, I can't break the back of the crab, I can't chop the fishes head off, I can't shoot Bambi and then eat it. But, I LOVE MEAT! So, kudos to the Allen's :)
So cool, I was hoping for some more pics though. Probably best you spared the rest of your readers though.
Good for you! Nothing like knowing where your food comes from.
You are a brave woman. I think it would have made me really squeamish...although you never really know how you'll react until you try it, right?
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