MapleEngineer

I just posted a few pictures of the chicken disassembly process. In deference to the vegans and those of delicate constitution I followed the community rules (which I wrote) and marked the post NSFW.

If you have NSFW posts blocked you will not see it. If you want to see it, remove your filter temporarily.

We are a small, homestead farm. We aim for zero waste processing and have achieved it with our chicken processing. Here's how we do it.

We started with 42 Cornish x White Rock cockerels. They finished between 3 and 7 pounds (mostly toward the high end.)

Today we processed them down to dressed carcasses (what you would buy as a whole chicken in the grocery store.)

The first thing I do is remove the feet. They go into the feet bag. Some of them will go to Asian customers who want to eat them, some will go to pet owners for pet food.

Next I remove the skin from the top half of the neck then loosen and remove the glands and crop. These go in the gut bucket.

The necks go into the broth bag.

Next I open the cavity, carefully cut around the vent, and remove the organs.

The cavity fat goes in the schmaltz bag to be rendered into schmaltz.

The hearts go to one of our customers who will eat them.

The gizzards go to one of our customers who will eat them.

The livers go to one of our customers who will make pate from them.

The other organs and the contents of the gizzards go in the gut bucket.

That leaves us with clean carcasses.

I have two 5 gallon buckets (the gut bucket and a bucket of blood and heads). The feathers fill the tops of both buckets. These get buried in the muck pile to be composted. Within a few weeks they will be reduced to worm castings.

Tomorrow, I will part most of the chickens. I will make wing parts, boneless skinless breasts, boneless skinless thighs, and legs.

The wing tips, bones, skin and fat, and carcasses go into a roasting pan and my wife roasts them. When they are nice and brown she fills the roasting pans with water, onions, peppercorns, and vegetables and puts them in the oven overnight. In the morning she picks all the meat from the carcasses, This picked meat will become chicken salad, chicken quesadillas, or other dishes that require pulled chicken. Anything we don't use right away gets frozen to be used later.

What little is left of the carcasses goes into the muck piled to be composted.

Nothing goes to waste.

It took us 6 hours to harvest and process 42 chickens. They are in the fridge with bags of ice between them to make sure they cool down. Tomorrow I will part most of them. We are keeping these ones for ourselves for the winter. We would normally sell half of the fall batch but the summer was crazy and our plans changed so we're keeping these ones.

This is one of those things that I never imagined that I would be good at as a kid growing up in the city.

The issue for the christofascists isn't that children are being indoctrinated in school. The issue is the deprogramming of the indoctrination to fear, hate, intolerance, and self-loathing that they get at home from their parents and at church from christofascist leaders.

Schools don't make people more liberal, exposure to reality makes people more liberal.

We are harvesting 44 white rocks today. I mount three cones on my tractor bucket. I have cut them down to widen the mouths. I put the tractor between the chicken house and processing area.

On the left, a homemade scalder. It's an electric water tank cut in half with the thermostat replaced with a commercial thermostat (the temperature can be set higher than a residential one) and a replacement element (110V versus 220V.)

In the center is our homemade plucker. It has a spray bar around the top and a solenoid valve that turns the water on when the plucker is turned on.

We process the birds through to ready for the freezer 9 at a time.

I can post detail pictures of the plucker or a video of anyone is interested.

"We want our pilots to be entirely free from any financial consideration when they take a safety-related decision," WestJet CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech said

Safety related delays and cancelations are not the problem. The airlines not having enough staff to fly the planes is the problem. Poor planning by the airlines is the problem. Lying and calling those YOU problems safety problems IS the ptoblem.

The loophole is allowing airlines to call any delay or cancellation a "safety issue" to deny passengerd compensation.

We pay for a an agreed service at an agreed time. If the airlines don't provide the service as and when described we should be compensated. The government is just closing a loophole that allows the airlines to decide how, when, and even if they are going to provide the service we paid for. 

I can't wait until the big, tough neo-fascists who are perfectly capable of covering their faces when they're screaming threats, insult, and epithets at children and their families and people of colour suddenly become pathetic, delicate weaklings who can't possibly wear a mask for 10 minutes to go into a hospital.

Good.

A few weeks ago we got 40 (45) broilers. They're almost done.

We had to change our delivery date because I was going to be in Atlanta and my wife was going to be in Toronto. We had to switch hatcheries to get an earlier delivery date but the abattoir couldn't accommodate the change so I'm going to end up processing them myself on the homestead. These ones are for our own freezer. We're not allowed to sell them if they aren't processed at the abattoir where they can be government inspected.

I've got a note out to a local woman who wanted to come to learn how to do it herself. My wife's friend's son also wants to come learn.

It's a valuable skill to have if you're going to raise chickens for meat. It's especially important if the poop hits the fan and you can't get them processed at the abattoir because there's a zombie apocalypse or something.

Everyone needs to calm the fuck down. Sure there isn't enough of our tax money left to pay to get our kids to school but Doug Ford had ouch left to build a $400 million parking garage for a private spa being built on private land under a 99 year secret lease. I'm not sure day everyone is at host about. He also managed to give his rich developer friends a $8 billion Dr during a national housing crisis to build million dollar homes far away from city centers where they're desperately needed.