Butchering day.

[freewheat]

Passing the torch of knowledge on to my son. Been butchering chickens the last few mornings. He loves it. I love it. So fun to do stuff together and answer his questions and watch him learn. This was the first year he got right into it, down and dirty, cutting and pulling guts. Getting past the, "you are in the way" phase to the "wow, you are actually VERY helpful" Phase.

Anyone out there in agriville still raise a few birds? We got done 38 out of about 60. Average weight at 12 weeks about 7.5 lbs of the yummiest chicken you can imagine.

Proud of my boy...

[seabass]

Use to do it as a kid with my Baba. 100 or more chickens and 20 or more Turkeys. Sometimes Ducks and Geese. A lot of work but very tastey.

[Tucker]

We raise our own meat chickens here too. Only 25 this year. The boys catch and pluck but will not pull guts.

[nibs1]

We still raise chickens, use to be about 400 when the kids were raising them and selling but we have scaled back to only 150 for our own families use.Once you taste farm raised you never want store bought.

[crusher]

Right on freewheat.

We won't be getting into chickens, I'm conditioned to store bought and wouldn't want to be tempted to build a chicken coop.

[farmaholic]

Nothing tastier than a farm raised chicken, we were buying some from someone who raised them. Soup from whats left is good too. Sure don't like the smell of scalded feathers, singeing and gutting.

Over the years we did alot of beef some pork. My job was beheading the chickens then I disappeared, lol.

[freewheat]

lol. Good responses. I am set up pretty well, I can have about 20 from the point they lose their heads, to done and in a bag in about 2 hours by myself. My wife is like the little red hen. She does not feed them, she does not butcher them, but by gum she sure likes the way they taste!

We used to raise 500 or so for sale, but that was an insane amount of work. We prefer the egg hens now, they are not much work at all, and more economically viable. We don't even feed the layers from April to Early November.

When I was a kid, we did ducks and turkeys and sometimes geese. Oh the ducks and geese were hard to pluck! And a 50 lb Tom is quite the match for a 60 lb boy...

[ado089]

At one point we had a couple hundred now we only raise about 25 chickens and a dozen turkeys. Plenty of wild meat to compliment it.

[perfecho]

Our own beef and chickens...although I take them in to get processed.
Friends from the city are catching on, and although we don't encourage it, they want to buy. Did some chickens at plus 10 lbs and at $4 per lb, they added up, but we could have sold many more.
We are light on our beef at about $4/lb hanging, but these guys helped us through BSE and now its time to return the favor.

[sumdumguy]

We used to have a lot of fun, putting their heads between 2 nails on the chopping block, saying our goodbyes, using an axe, then watching them flail around. How brutal is that! Wouldn't show that to my grandchildren today, probably go to jail, but that's how it was done back 40 years ago. We didn't keep the wings, nor thighs, just the breasts. We once raised a turkey that grew to 36 pounds. Big breasts when they chaised grasshoppers into the wheat fields. The first young rooster cooked in cream with dill was a real delicacy. Lucky kids to have the memories of pulling out the guts and identifying the anatomy, sometimes finding all kinds of junk that the free range chickens ingested. I didn't know people still "butchered." Oh yeh, our first year of farming, we used our only cash to raise 125 chickens and 40 turkeys for income. The goings on!

[JDGreen]

Freewheat. There is zero money in raising a few birds. I get what your trying to teach your boy but be careful it isn't so far left you leave him behind. I admire your spirit often how ever there's a fine line between righting and wronging them. It's 2015 and sometimes you still think it's 1960. However I built my wife the nicest little chicken barn this spring and throughout this year have been maintaining 17 chickens for laying. The lesson hear isn't money as they are peanuts in The broad scale of things. I LOVE THEM...... I have never had so much enjoyment out of anything on my farm as I do these few hens. Just started laying by the way and I am really excited by it all. Have some ultra friendly STAR variety red hens that both annoy me on my deck and still make me laugh daily.. This has been the best thing in a long long time in my backyard and yet I have ZERO interest in eating them. Personally I spend a few bucks with the loval hutts and buy my broilers

[fjlip]

Yup, it's 1960 when I think about what it was like when the parents butchered yearlings/pigs/chickens. I never got comfortable with butchering and so my sons never saw that either, it's lost now. However the wife experienced it all on a mixed farm also, more than I. So we had 20-30 hens for 20 years, just for the eggs cause the bantams were like pets. Some were tame as could be. Very colorful roosters, that's what the sons grew up with. Good for you free, that is a disappearing art on most farms!