7/20/2012

What's up with the Young Turk's?

Back to those turkeys. It turned out that apparently Mr. Thomas had a preference for only one of the ladies.. The one who laid 28-32 eggs did not have a single viable hatch. Hell I don't know, maybe she was gay and didn't like the attentions of that guy.

On the other hand, the remaining hen was well serviced because after laying about 20 eggs, today we were greeted with 18 baby poults of which 17 survived the birth ordeal. After leaving them with mother for just one day, we removed them too the brooder cage we built specifically for doing this to chickens and turkeys.

Didn't want to leave them to the vagaries of nature as there are many hawks and Herring Gulls that are adept at grabbing small hatchlings right out from under moms nose. She is not to happy with the situation as she can hear them cheeping away but cannot see them or get to them. Oh well, such is life on the farm when you are in the process of providing some protein for the extended family.

I am typing this in the early evening and had wanted to take a couple of pictures to include in these two posts. A few of  them will be of the Whizbang Feather Plucker the boys and I built. Well, I started it and about half way into the process was oh so gently elbowed the hell out of the way!! Anyway, it turned out very well and will remove the feathers from a properly scalded chicken/turkey in about 15 seconds.

When I mentioned I had this machine to a couple of my cohorts in chicken raising, they wondered if I might be interesting in trying it out on a few of their birds that were ready for the freezer. I said yes and so we arranged to do them on a Sunday morning. After Church of course!

On the appointed day they each arrived with their respective victims and we proceeded to do "the deed". There were 17 of them, mostly roosters and with the aforementioned devices, we were able to do them all in about an hour and a half. That was from setup till cleanup was finished! What would usually have been at least a six or seven hour job was thereby reduced to a time frame we were all impressed with! The black table is two plastic pallets held together with 2, 2x4's screwed to them on the inside. The sink is a small cast iron one salvaged from a friends "sink heap"! She has a few! And the water fed hose nozzle is hooked to a hose under the table. The 2" PVC pipe is just there to keep the water and small pieces of viscera out from under foot.

I originally built this for my own use as we will now be getting back into raising meat bids solely for the freezer. But after looking at how well it did the job, we decided that we would lend it out to any and all folks here on BI that wished to make use of it for a nominal fee. NOT cash, but maybe a chicken or two depending on length/amount of use. Some sort of barter, as I am sure we will all be delving into that manner of payment in the not to far distant future.

So now I am going to "save" this till tomorrow morning when I'll try the picture imbed trick! HA HA!

Well that didn't work worth a shit so I guess I'll just try and post the pic's in another separate post and write underneath them like I see all the smart people out there do. Well that lets me out! TIFN

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Good luck with the pullets... and no the pics didn't come through.

Everett said...

Yeah, I just discovered that! I only put this post up to see if it would work and then because of our very limited access to the internet, real small bandwidth with no hope of increasing it, I COULDN"T GET BACK ON TO EDIT IT OR TAKE IT DOWN

Besides all the above, I have no clue as to what the hell I was doing trying to put pictures up there.

Now I am going to see if I can just erase those picture thingys!