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Raising meat birds

Swampee

Swampee

Dumbass
Joined
Jul 19, 2020
Member Number
2327
Messages
29
Loc
100 miles due east, in the desert
Anyone raise chickens or other medium sized bird for meat? We have chicken and quail. The quail its easy to skin and peel breast off. Chicken sucks to pluck.
So the question is who has built/bought a chicken plucker and how do you like it?

we have mosttly skinned them for ease of the operation, but for baking and rotisserie the skin is a must have.
Picture of my cock from the first try in the air fryer
20201026_203517.jpg
 
Perhaps you may be familiar (or not): We have a large pot (turkey fryer kind) of boiling water nearby to immerse the chicken (usually a rooster) immediately. A quick dip of a few seconds and the feathers are much more easily removed.
 
I'm trying to get away from manual plucking. I've done them that way and its marginally different than dry in my experience. Most feathers don't come out terribly difficult except the wing. It is just very time consuming to do manual plucking.
 
We raise cornish cross for meat. I have a CoopsNMore/Rite Farm scalder and plucker. A friend has a Feathermann setup, and it is much nicer, but much more expensive.

Scalding temp and time is critical. 145-150 deg for the water, and dunk/circulate the bird for ~30 sec or until the flight feathers pluck easy and feet skin peel easily. Put in the plucker for 30 sec-1 min. Waterfowl tends to take much longer in the scaler and plucker.
 
ParadisePWoffrd said:
We raise cornish cross for meat. I have a CoopsNMore/Rite Farm scalder and plucker. A friend has a Feathermann setup, and it is much nicer, but much more expensive.

Scalding temp and time is critical. 145-150 deg for the water, and dunk/circulate the bird for ~30 sec or until the flight feathers pluck easy and feet skin peel easily. Put in the plucker for 30 sec-1 min. Waterfowl tends to take much longer in the scaler and plucker.
Click to expand...

Ducks were a greasy mess to do. I've not done more than say 5 or 6 birds at a time previously but planning to hatch some for meat and to purchase some cornish cross for meat alone. Usually we harvest any roosters from the hatch and any older hens that normally get skinned. Manually plucking ducks was horrible even with the scalding method. Pin feathers just seem to stick to everything.

Made a makeshift plucker and ran it off a drill but I'm thinking its time to upgrade. Thanks.
 
It takes a lot of them to justify the cost to me. The pluckers are great and I keep thinking of building one because you can do small pigs in them too. But I have a place about 30 mins away that I just back the trailer up to with 50-100 birds and 2hrs later I leave and they are whole or quartered on ice for a buck 75 each. Screw with doing it myself.
 
Runningquarters said:
It takes a lot of them to justify the cost to me. The pluckers are great and I keep thinking of building one because you can do small pigs in them too. But I have a place about 30 mins away that I just back the trailer up to with 50-100 birds and 2hrs later I leave and they are whole or quartered on ice for a buck 75 each. Screw with doing it myself.
Click to expand...

After a few setups on other forums I think I may build a barrel type. The drill type worked for us but was a 2 person operation. The thing is I've only been hatching a couple rounds per year so far and would like to get that up higher since I purchased 2 adjacent properties. More room means I can have more birds. Doing a few at a time is an hour of work for the wife andI, ,from catching them to fridge.
I'd like to be able to do 10 or more birds easily by myself. I'm also looking into rabbits as a source of lean protein.

I'm glad to have been in the position that when the quarantining shitshow started to have had plenty of food on hand. People at the stores were getting ridiculous to say the least. I could sustain our family a while easily by expanding a little on the garden and meat situation we have. Its just good to be self sufficient and as a whole my family enjoys that.
kids have no issues picking off a rabbit out back and dressing it out (with a little help).

I was mostly raised in the city I'd say, but on the outskirts. All my family is farmers back east.
 
My cousin built one, but I don't have any photos of it. Just a half of a plastic 55 gallon drum with the bottom cut out. Put a piece of plywood in the bottom hooked to a motor so it will spin and then put some rubber fingers in the barrel. You can buy the fingers on amazon as replacements for commercial pluckers. Still need to scald them, but you scald them throw them in and grab them out 30 seconds later mostly picked clean.
 
Runningquarters said:
It takes a lot of them to justify the cost to me. The pluckers are great and I keep thinking of building one because you can do small pigs in them too. But I have a place about 30 mins away that I just back the trailer up to with 50-100 birds and 2hrs later I leave and they are whole or quartered on ice for a buck 75 each. Screw with doing it myself.
Click to expand...

I would likely do it, if it was that cheap around here.

I knew that i wouldnt have time, so I just bucked up and bought one. I looked at the whiz-bang barrel plans and washers, and both seemed like more than i had time for.
 
Pics of your rearing setups? I want to raise quail for meat.
 
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