Growing meat while living in 200 sq ft! - Chicken Harvest Day.

Today is one of those days on the homestead that nobody looks forward to, but a necessary day if we're going to eat meat. Today is processing day. Chicken processing day. Yeah, so we've been raising, this is our second batch of meat birds. We have 16 hens and a rooster that is leaving our flock. Causing a problem. So these are different from our egg laying hens. Those are the ones at free range all over the property. These are specifically bought to keep contained and feed and grow quickly and then to harvest. So we've had them for two and a half months and the day has finally come. It's time to do the job. This is actually the first time that we've done this here on our property. The last time we took our birds to a friend's and did the processing there and that was kind of chaotic. So yes, we decided we want to keep them here and keep them as calm as possible. And so let's walk through our setup. So our first station here is where we do the killing. So we have two kill combs and buckets full of water. When you slice the neck, all the blood drains into the buckets and you kind of want water in there so it doesn't become a pasty mess. So after that, we have our scalding station. This isn't ours. We really need to invest in a setup like this, but these pots are expensive. So we're borrowing this pot. We're going to scald them in here and then they go to the plucker. This is kind of key for doing birds quickly. I've done the whole pull the feathers out by hand and that's awful. So this really does the job fast. Water sprays into it. It spins, gets all the feathers off and the feathers come out into a bucket. Then we go to our last station and this is the evisceration station. So we will be gutting the birds here. I do need another bucket for the guts. I forgot about that. After that, they will go over here. We have our ice bath set up. We will have all 17 birds in here for at least 24 hours. I want to do it 48. Last time we only did it about 12 hours and I just didn't feel like that was long enough. So we're going to try a little different each time and see which one we like. While we will not be your source for how to process birds, there's plenty of other YouTubers out there like Justin Rhodes or Jason from Sew the Land where you can watch their videos and learn how to do it yourself. Yeah, we're not going to show all the gross stuff here on this channel. We will show the end result. Yeah. Cool. Meat that we raised, that we know what ate, what it ate, and we know it had the best life possible. Yes. Moved every day on our homestead. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Okay. Now we have to do this. It's been a full 24 hours since we processed the chickens yesterday and plans are changing. Imagine that. So I originally planned to keep the birds in the ice bath for 48 hours, but we have plans tomorrow. So I can only do 24 hours. So today we're going to try something new. Last time when we harvested birds, we had 16 whole birds in our freezer and it took up so much room. So this time I'm going to try piecing them out. I've never done it before, but I did watch a video from Lorraine at Sew the Land and it seems pretty simple. So we're going to try that and separate them. Hopefully we have smaller bags. It takes up a little less room in our freezer. I've practiced on two birds, so I felt confident showing you how we're going to piece these apart. Now, a lot of people ask like, how do you know all this? I don't. I watch YouTube and the people that I learned from the most about homesteading is Jason and Lorraine from Sew the Land. So I watched a video of how Lorraine pieces out her chicken and it's actually really simple. So I'm going to show you how it's done, but also just watch her video because she explains it a lot better than I will. First thing is, I'm sorry it's loud because we're smoking pork over here, but we are going to cut the wings off first. And like Lorraine said, gravity is going to help me do this. So my birds are a little frozen because they've been in ice water for 24 hours. So they don't move as much as hers did. Anyway, we're just going to start with cutting this wing off. So you cut the skin around and it's very stiff. It's very cold for it. And then she said he does jumping jacks and the joint pops right out and there's a tendon that you can cut through. That's it. I am cutting the tips of the wings off for my bone broth. I'm not even sure. We don't really eat wings, so it may just go in bone broth too, but I am going to separate them in case we want to try eating wings. There. So you can kind of see there's the bone and that's the tendon we're going to cut through. Just make sure you don't cut through bone. You don't want dull knives when you're doing this. Next is the legs. And these are actually the easiest ones, I think. Easiest part to cut off. I'll hold it up and cut the skin and you'll see it start to fall. At this point, I'm just being really careful not to cut through the chicken breast, which is here. That's going to pop the leg. There's the joint. You're going to cut the tendon around it. Tendon. Sounds like you're saying tendon. Tendon. Tendon. Okay. It's a weird word. Okay. Next up is getting the skin off the breast. This actually goes really smooth if you have a really sharp knife. These birds have a lot of fat. So I'm going to try my best to not... I've already cut it, but I'm going to try my best not to cut the breast meat. We're just going to cut like where there's like a membrane between the breast meat and the skin. That's what I'm trying to cut. Now even if you don't live on a homestead and don't raise your own birds, this is still a really useful skill to have because most of the time at the grocery you can get a whole bird cheaper than pieces. And if you know how to piece it out, you're going to save some money. But if you can raise birds in your backyard, even better. All right. Get all that skin off. And another useful tip from Lorraine. I'm telling you, you need to watch Lorraine and Jason because they know everything. Just shove the skin back in the carcass because you're just going to make bone broth with it anyway. And that's good for bone broth. So we're going to cut down the breast right in the center. Then on its side, follow this fat line and we're going to let it just fall off. We're just gently cutting, making sure we're going around the ribs. We want a big chunk of the breast meat to fall off. That's it. You have this little... I think this is... I'm... I don't think. I know this is a tender. Like if you get chicken tenders, that's the little piece like under the breast. Anyway, put that with your other chicken breast and do the other side. Okay. The chicken breast, chicken tender. Now I do notice that sometimes I don't get all the meat off. And so I'm just going to go in and get more of that off because I'm not going to waste it. It won't be wasted anyway. It will go in the chicken broth and I'll get it then. But I'm going to cut it up. I might as well cut it up now. Now I am going to just cut the neck off. There's no like easy way to say this. I'm going to chop its neck off and stuff it back into the carcass and save this whole carcass for bone broth. Did I already say that? Probably. Anyway, that's it. That will be much easier to store. We can fit two in a bag easily and it won't take up so much room in the freezer. I don't think. We'll see. Okay. So I'm just going to keep piecing these out. I've got six, seventeen birds to do. Uh, sixteen. I don't know if I'll do the rooster. Anyway, we'll just put this on time-lapse and show you the end result. Okay. The next step is we have already bagged all the meat. We've sectioned it off into like a leg bag and a breast bag and a tender bag and a wing bag. We have lots of bags and the leftover bones. We've put two carcasses in one bag so that we can make bone broth with those. So the next step is we're going to heat this water up to 180 to 195 and dip the bags in there. And they're shrink-wrap bags so they're going to shrink up all around that and then we can freeze them and use them whenever we feel like it. And oh, don't forget. Um, that was to me. I'm not going to forget. Um, I'm going to weigh them at the end too and see how much meat we got from this harvest because I think these birds are a lot bigger than our last harvest. I didn't keep track of how much our last birds weighed so I want to kind of have in mind that 16 birds is going to be about however much meat. So, that's coming up. I really need a bigger pot. This isn't working so great. Ideal situation would be I would put these in the fridge and get them extremely cold before I put them in the freezer but we live in an RV and our fridge is seven cubic feet. So, that's not going to happen. These are still cold from this morning. I mean, we did this really quick so hopefully it doesn't defrost our freezer too much. Meat. What was that? We're on it. Ew, hold on. And just like that, we have over 50 pounds of chicken in our freezer. 50 pounds? Yeah. Dude. That doesn't include the bones. That's just the meat. Nice. Yeah. Good job. Two and a half months. This was definitely a group effort. True. Adelaide really was in charge of moving them each day and making sure they have water and food. Yes. You have to feed them a lot to make them grow that fast. Yeah. Adelaide kind of runs the farm. Let's just be honest here. She runs the farm. Pretty much. Now, Jonathan really wants me to explain a chicken tractor. Yeah. I figure a lot of people may not know the whole purpose of the chicken tractor and how it works. Okay. So with our meat birds, we run them in the yard in a confined space. So we have like a four by six chicken tractor that is entirely too heavy for one person to move on their own. It's not very easily movable. No. So that is going to be a project coming up very soon. We really need to make a better movable chicken tractor that is easy for one person to move. But it keeps them contained, right? And then they eat and then they poop and they scratch and it kind of fertilizes that area. And then you move them to another spot and do the same thing. Another spot and do the same thing. Yep. For two and a half months. So we have a bunch of stuff that's cleared out over near the solar panels. Yeah. So we're going to see over time, our grass hopefully will improve, our soil will build, but this will take years worth of moving chickens. So I think we need to raise more chickens, babe. What if we got 300 chickens? Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Where are we going to put 800 pounds of chicken by the time it's done? So hopefully we'll build that new tractor in the next, I mean, we're supposed to get birds in February. So again, yeah. Oh my gosh. Never ends. It doesn't. Well, we have a break. We get them in the spring and then we get them in the fall and hopefully we have 50 pounds that will last us until the spring. I will say though, harvesting them in the winter, I felt like worked pretty well compared to the summer. We didn't have to buy as much ice. It wasn't stupid hot. Yeah. Also having this whole area over here with the water and the power was really nice. Yeah. Being able to do it on our property was really nice. For sure we'll be doing that again here on the property. There's no point in like taking them somewhere to do that. Because it stresses them out and then stuff happens and the meat's not as good. So yeah, it's good having it here. So guys, that is our meat production for the end of 2022. No more meats? No more meats. Okay. Babe, I was thinking we probably harvested 32 birds this year and two pigs. Yeah. On the farm. I know. I wonder if we should like come up with the number of the total poundage of meat. It was 178 pounds of pig and this time it was 50 pounds of bird. So it was probably 45 last time. That's a lot of meat. Yeah. Not bad. For a very tiny homestead with one deep freeze and a seven cubic foot fridge. Seven what? Our fridge is only seven cubic feet. Oh yeah. Okay. So that's it for this video. Yep. We don't know what we'll be up to next. No. But you'll find out when we do. We'll see you then.