Packaging Chicken - September 4, 2019 @goldenoakfarm

This is what the cold room looked like when we were done on Sunday. Coolers full of carcasses and buckets of feet for stock making, heads to feed eagles, some organs for a raw fed cat, and waste.

My intern weighing and packaging chicken for freezing

I got an early start on Wednesday and got the butcher shop cleaned for processing carcasses. We had 66 to do. We started about 7:30.

I had worked up, from an inventory, what we’d need for a year. That was 39 birds. We would have 27 birds left over.

After talking it over, we decided to not sell the extra carcasses. The foremost reason was that they are heritage birds that have spent most of their life running around. This makes them a bit tough. We don’t mind it, but it would be perceived as an inferior product. Ours could not begin to compete with Cornish Cross at 48 days old and never moving or Freedom Rangers, etc at 11 weeks old and usually raised in a tractor. Ours are 18 weeks old and ran all day, no comparison.

So we decided to keep them for 2021 and double vacuum seal them. That meant I had to make around 100 vacuum bags of different sizes for the various cuts. My intern was here and she was a big help with packaging and writing on bags. With my hand problems, my writing is often barely legible.

We finished packaging around 3PM and I spent the next hour cleaning the butchershop.

We were not done completely, just with cuts. My husband will spend all day on Thursday stripping carcasses and wings for ground chicken. We will grind and package that on Friday.

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