Raising Chickens for Meat

We are on a mission to provide nearly all of our own family's food. Not many first-world people nowadays know how to do that. Meat, especially, raises some obstacles that most are not willing to tackle - namely, killing an animal to put food on the table. Sure, the majority of the world EATS meat. But using your own two hands to bring the animal to the plate is another story.

This weekend, we butchered almost a year's worth of chickens for our family. We raised 20 baby chicks for the purpose of putting meat in our freezer. It was a sobering, rewarding process.

This is how the sweet baby chicks arrived to us. Aren't they cute? (Don't be fooled. They poop more than you could ever imagine.)

A few weeks later, they were ready to go outside into a portable chicken coop that we built for them:

Then, once they were 9 weeks old it was time to send them to freezer camp.

We learned how to process chickens by observing other friends do it, watching YouTube videos, and by trial and error as we did it ourselves. We set up a processing line with stations for killing, scalding, plucking, and eviscerating. It was a physically and emotionally demanding 6 hours.

At the end we were tired, sore, and dirty, but we had 20 cleaned chickens in the freezer ready to feed our family.

We do not take the harvesting of meat lightly. When you do it yourself, it's quite the opposite. You experience the true realization that an animal had to die to feed your family. It's sobering and humbling and makes you deeply appreciate the value of food.