My first time raising meat birds (broilers) for food

Hey guys, it's Amy. On today's video I'm going to be sharing my experience raising meat birds. Yeah, essentially my goal is to be self-sustainable and I knew that I would never probably become a vegetarian and so I embraced this and I did do a lot of video throughout this process so I'll kind of pop back and forth to that but the journey started when I ordered my baby chickens from Freedom Ranger so let's check that out. Good morning I saw that my chickens have been checked in to my local post office and so I'm getting their brooder ready here in my garage. It's about like six by eight or so and this will last until they are about two weeks old. I'm gonna fix that little hole there. I'm gonna put in some pine shavings and hang their warming light, get their food ready, all the things that you would get ready as you are expecting new little ones. So, yay! I'm so excited. I ended up getting 77 chickens and I chose that number because I thought you know they're gonna be more intentional about packing these little birds if I order kind of a different number and I loved a line numbers so you know call me hopeless mystic I guess or romantic or whatever but you know what I got ready for those cute little chickens and brought them home from the post office which was quite the experience to go through you know and if you think my daughter liked the 11 chickens that we brought home in the spring you can bet she loved the 77 little chickens but this is also part of the reason why she has a hard time eating my chicken I think. After about a week or so this little guy in the middle wasn't doing so hot so I did end up separating him from the other chickens but unfortunately I did lose one. Little League died on July 2nd. The next step was from raising them in my garage in their brooder to transferring them to my Joel Salatin style chicken tractor. Here is the status of my chicken tractor at the end of pretty much first day. We only spent a couple hours on it so it came together pretty fast. I used Joel Salatin's, not his plans per se, but his design and kind of created my own plans and so this is it. It's 10 by 12 and I'm gonna probably wrap it actually I think I'm gonna finish the door this weekend and then wrap it with chicken wire after that so it's about two feet tall or it is two feet tall and there it is. It's been a good little project. This chicken tractor is designed to hold about 75 birds which was perfect. My daughters helped me with this getting them all from my garage up to the chicken tractor and they were doing great for a while. The goal is to keep them up there for about six weeks before you harvest and process them and move the chicken tractor around about every other day so they get fresh forage and then not too long after maybe two three days after I put the chickens up there we had some deaths. I realized that it was raccoons. I trapped them and some people would say that I'm heartless because they did not make it by design but you know what that is part of life. So I ended up overall losing 20 of my chickens in their first two weeks in my chicken tractor. So this was day after day going up finding three or four dead chickens because the raccoons would reach through the chicken wire and just grab and so I ended up putting an electric fence and that worked as well as you know just keeping the traps up there just in case they got through the the electric fence. I processed my first chicken when they were about eight weeks old and I did it without any fancy tools. I didn't even have one of the restraining cones to like hold them while you kill them. So it was a complete learning experience and I really wanted to test and see if I wanted to buy all the extra equipment and the answer was yes I did want to buy extra equipment. So let me show you when I actually had my sister in town she wanted to see the whole process. So I showed them and we processed I think ten chickens at that time. So I processed my 60 chickens that I had left after all the raccoon incidences in three to four separate days. So I did about 20 at a time and I did them largely myself and it was mostly my choice. I did have some friends one day they helped me cut up the birds and and packaged them and that was very helpful. I had a spot in the woods where I had my cones hanging on a tree and you can see it here in this close-up picture and that's where you kill them and I brought them down in a wheelbarrow to my house. You have the water that you drop them in and basically plunge them in for about 30 seconds and that helps to loosen the feathers and I did end up springing for the chicken plucker. It spins and has these little fingers that get all the feathers off which is a great great tool to have in your arsenal. Then after that you have to clean them and then you decide whether you want them to you know be packaged whole or if you're gonna cut them up and I cut about half them up and vacuum seal them and I have about half of them that I left whole. So essentially that was my process and again you know I did the whole processing of them with as much like love and reverence for the chicken as I could because I fully believe that you know that energy that goes into the animal that I'm eating like somehow transfers to my own body and psyche which is why I really you know don't agree with the whole factory farming process and will definitely possibly on an annual basis process chickens for myself and if I decide to sell them in the future you know I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. But I was really happy with the Freedom Ranger color yield. A lot of people get the Cornish Cross for a meat bird but you know it's it's a preference. I might try some of those next time but this for me is a journey and experimentation and I just wanted to share that process with you because it was the it was quite a process but I'm really happy to have experienced it and every time I go to my freezer and pull out some chicken thighs or a you know whole chicken I am absolutely struck with reverence for this whole process and for that chicken that you know I'm about to consume. So that's my story. If you have questions or comments please leave them below. This is part of a series that I'm doing on my self-sufficient life that pretty much documents everything I learned in 2021 and am committed to being self-sustainable by September of 2022. So I gave myself a two-year goal and this was a huge learning process. The first chicken that I killed I did by myself in the woods and it was you know an emotional experience. I'm not completely heartless but you know it's not for everyone but I think as supply chains get more restricted and changes happen in our world we're going to want to have some of these skills. As far as how much it cost me the biggest expenses would probably be the chicken plucker which was about $500 from Yardbird and the feed. Towards the end they were eating like 30 pounds of feed a week a week or a day no not a day that would be insane but they were eating so much towards the end because you know you're raising them from these tiny little chickies to like a finished weight was about six and a half pounds and that was you know without all the guts and feathers and everything. I bought a vacuum sealer I you know I bought a lot of extra supplies too along the way including additional feeders and waterers and you know things that you may not see or that I didn't really talk about but you know in the end it was a choice a personal choice for me to learn how to do this and you know move that much closer to being self-sufficient in the future. So thank you so much for watching I will see you on the next video bye for now.