Chicken Processing

We spent 2 days this week and 2 days last week processing chickens. We processed about 275 chickens. They were beautiful healthy chickens that looked wonderful dressed. The average chicken weighed about 5 lbs dressed and were as plump and meaty as expected. The processing went very well with help from both my brother and some of the boernsen family members. Our biggest challenge was freezer space to cool the chickens after they were processed. We ended up putting chickens in every freezer space available which became a logistical challenge for Sharon. We'll work on looking for a good used freezer to fill the gap. We've been trying to keep our customers from arriving for pick-up during the processing because we assume that most of our chicken customers would not want to see their chickens go from pasture to package. But had to asked some of our farmer and close friend customers to come by and pick-up during our processing just to make room for all of the birds needing space in the freezers to cool. It's great to have customers that grew up on a farm come by and tell us how they remember when they were young and or growing up on a farm processing chickens. No fancy pluckers or scalders for them! Just good old fashioned hand work and a pot of boiling water. We hope that our chickens live up to the high expectations of people who have experienced eating a fresh chicken raised at home in farmyards of their youth and those customers that have only had store bought chickens as well. We did have a customer call us to say that she had already eaten some of our chicken and she said that she hadn't tasted a chick so good since her days on her farm! Wow! That is awesome! That really means a lot to us and we really appreciated that encouragement. For us at Mulberry Grove Family Farm I think its fresh chicken barbecued on the grill tonight. I can't wait. Now if only the sweet corn and tomatoes were ready we would have a complete summer barbecue...