Exactly. Looking forward to my Chicken Coop (in the barn) being ready to receive come April or May. I’ve missed having chickens.
I’m sure we’ll be adding meat chickens to the mix in the near future, too.
Beau would LOVE to make one of those feather plucking barrels; he’s always looking for the next project. ;)
My survivalist chicken finally disappeared. I’ll have to get some more fertilized eggs from the neighbor and incubate them or get some day old chicks from the hatchery.
Me and a neighbor went in on two dozen meat birds once and I built a chicken plucker. It ended up being PTO driven. I took the gearbox of my PTO mower and ran it backwards to slow it down as opposed to sped up. Had to idle the tractor at 800 rpm but it worked great. By then, the birds were at the neighbor’s because he had a 16x16 chain link dog pen which worked well to keep them in. So I drove my chicken plucker up the road. LOL
I still have the barrel part, disc and plucker fingers. Just need a frame to put it in, couple of pulleys and an electric motor.
We went with the red ranger, red broiler types instead of the cornish cross so we had to feed them longer. Then hunting season got in the way which added two weeks. We had big birds that cost $5-6 each. Next time, I would get the cornish cross and go exactly the 42 days or maybe even take the roosters 2-3 days earlier. That means two processing sessions but depending on how many you have, that might be a good thing.