So this Saturday we are butchering our broilers. It's our first run that we are doing for our customers. I'm sure everything will go fine, but I kinda want to puke a little with anxiety. I really haven't felt this way since I was in high school, the night before I had an article due for the school paper and hadn't started writing it yet. My English teacher hated that about me, but I do surprisingly well under pressure. Several of the articles that I wrote after the due date won awards. This Saturday will be a learning experience and we will learn what worked and what didn't. We will learn from our mistakes and refine and improve the process. Life is a learning experience that you must actively participate in, assess your successes and failures, and move on, striving to be better with each passing day.
So, I've got some last minute prep work to do, and to be sure I've got Nemo working over time weed whacking around the buildings. I've got to pick up some equipment I'm borrowing, and get the disassembly line set up, but all in all I think we are good to go.
We are processing them outside in the fresh air following the procedures of Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia. Salatin has been running his pastured poultry business since 1983, and raises and home-processes thousands of birds each summer. As odd as it may seem, his home-processed birds have been scientifically proven to be cleaner than birds processed by large producers such as Tyson and Perdue. Two college students at James Madison University took swab samples of his chicken and compared them to chicken purchased in the supermarket. They cultured the swabs and results were:
Supermarket chicken: 3,600 colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter to the second permutaion
Polyface chicken: 133 colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter to the second permutation
Polyface chicken was 25 times cleaner than industrially raised, butchered, and packaged chicken. That's the model we are following. That is the cleanliness we are striving for here. I know it may seem unsanitary to process outside, but the fact that Salatin's chicken was 25 times cleaner is a testimony of just how unsanitary mega-processing plants are. When you are processing hundreds of thousands of birds a day it is nearly impossible to keep things clean and sanitary. When you are producing small numbers like we are you can focus on quality not just quantity.
