Independence Homestead

WARNING: If you don’t want to learn about where GOOD food really comes from and wish to remain ignorant to how chickens are harvested on a homestead then do not read any further!

Homestead Meat Chickens

Our new homesteading friends invited us to their homestead this weekend to participate in their chicken harvest.They had a couple other friends over to help with the process, so the six of us worked through the afternoon processing their 15 meat chickens, culminating everything with a wonderful dinner of fried chicken that could not be any more fresh and independent!

You can take a moment to see the chickens just before we harvested them here:

Those of you that know us personally will know that we identify ourselves as vegetarians. So seeing us with chickens and now butchering chickens may come as quite a shock to many of you. I’d like to clarify that while we are mostly vegetarians, the reason we don’t usually eat meat is because we object to putting food in our bodies that has been pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and other nonsense as well as food that comes from animals that have been treated inhumanely and not lived a dignified life. Since getting meat that meets those requirements is next to impossible without raising your own or too expensive to buy unless you know friends with their own meat animals we eat vegetarian. But since we were presented with an opportunity to learn from our fellow homesteaders and partake in their animal meat that has been fed quality food and lived quality, dignified, lives we were honored to be able to participate in the processing and consumption of their meat. I guess there should be a new classification called “independentatarian” for people who want to eat independently and responsibly.

Martha Holding The Next “In Line”

Martha and I have never experienced butchering chickens before so were not sure what to expect when we started the process. But we made sure to get involved with every step of the process so that we maximized our learning experience and are now able to perform all the steps on our own should the need ever arise.

Step 1: Dispatch Station

The first step was to take a chicken from the holding coop (pictured at the top of the post) over to the dispatching station. The dispatching station consisted of cardboard boxes with holes cut out at the bottom mounted to the fence with buckets placed directly underneath. The chickens were held gently and pet to calm them down, then with a quick snap at the base of their head their neck would be broken. They were then placed in the box upside down with their head out of the hole to be cut off and drained. The box helped contain the involuntary postmortem kicking/flapping/movement.

Step 2: Hot Water Bath

The second step after the chickens were fully drained was to dip them in boiling water to loosen their feathers. We dipped the chickens in the water for about 30 seconds which then made it much easier to pluck the feathers out.

Step 3: Feathering

The third step was to feather the chickens. After the hot water bath the feathers could then be pulled out by hand in about 5 minutes of plucking.

Step 4: Gutting

Next we gutted the birds by cutting off the area above the breast around the neck, then cutting through the under side and pulling out all the guts. Once the insides were out we cut the feet off at the joint and rinsed out the carcass and put it in a plastic trash bag in the cooler packed with ice.

That’s pretty much all there was to it! Honestly it was really weird reaching inside the chicken body during the gutting stage the first time and feeling it be still warm, but we quickly got over it after the first chicken completed the process. We had six people helping with the process today and were able to process fifteen chickens in about four hours.

Fresh Chicken in Frier

But that’s not all! The best part is yet to come! Once we finished the processing and cleaned up all the tables and tools we got the frier turned on and cooked two of the chickens we just prepared.

We then all gathered around the table for a dinner to conclude our efforts of the day. The food was delicious, the chicken was super tasty, and it all had the best seasoning of all, it was independence food!

It was an incredible learning experience for Martha and I today, we are so thankful to have met our new friends and fellow homesteaders to participate in the processing of their chickens and receive our friends’ incredible generosity and fellowship.