Joel Salatin | Broiler Processing Demo Homesteaders of America 2019

this video is sponsored by Cornerstone farm ventures also brought to you by McMurray hatchery so we're going to process these chickens and so just a little a little bit of word about that I don't want to go off into lala land and mysticism but it is important to realize the sacredness of life and the responsibility that comes with taking a life and I think that in general we earn the right to participate in the life death decomposition regeneration life death decomposition regeneration cycle as we honor the life in sacredness as it's lived it's one of the beauties of pastured poultry remember it's not pasteurized pastured poultry is one of the one of those single biggest components of it is that we are trying to create a respectful honoring life for the bird which then makes the death of thing of sacrifice as opposed to a thing of sacrilege that's what separates the act that we're going to do from a place front from a place that's that's without meaning to a thing that is with with meaning and we definitely believe that exposing young children to this is really good to find out the chickens don't talk and the chickens don't they don't they don't understand and so I'm going to talk you through the process as we go through but we even though I've killed you know hundreds of thousands of chickens in my life I never approached this just nonchalantly it's it's a serious thing and the question is have I honored if I honored this being in life enough to to deserve to be able to take the life in the end that that's the question and so so we pause to appreciate that okay so what we're going to do is is we want this to be as as yet just grab me one if I get over there to four so these are these are Cornish cross I don't know how old they are but I expect they're nine weeks hey little over nine little over nine weeks yeah with this kind of bird a week makes a big difference the difference in 89 weeks is the difference is like a pound because they really create okay pretty big bird do you want it before do you want it before I kill it to get to get a weight before I kill it Jim Jim McLaughlin is this equipment is from cornerstone farm ventures and so we're just I'm an imposter here Jim's the one guy that has all the stuff and he's he's complicating my situation by wanting a live weight so we're so so what we do is we like to grab and kind of like this and just and hold the wings okay if the bird is cackling and carrying on the stuff then you're doing something wrong notice this bird I can I can kind of move it around and and and putting your finger between the legs like this so that if they start clawing they don't claw you is a critical element so they're kind of sitting in the palm of your hand okay but he knows I mean I can turn around he's perfectly comfortably and I've got my hands on his wings okay so I'm gonna stick him in headfirst okay all right get your get your weight well I can say this is complicating my situation okay okay we'll try again all right yeah alright so we put them in and and and what you're going to try to do is right here's the waddle okay the waddles right here so we want to go as close to that as possible in your own jugular your your jugular veins come up along your windpipe and then they separate under your under your chin right here one comes up under your ear here one comes up on your ear here same way to the chicken so the closer we get to the head the better chance we have of catching just the jugular and not hitting the windpipe so we'll catch the and you want a good stream of blood right there that bird is literally flatlined in what a tenth of a second I mean it's very very quick okay and whatever convulsions now you see or simply contraction most muscle contractions like that the cone keeps the bird from yeah I'll take it on the cone keeps the bird from keeps the bird from from bruising itself okay and and so and the cone also acts as a as a temple grandin those of you who are familiar with Temple Grandin it acts as a you know a hug holder okay so you notice there's no you know there's no didn't get that one exactly right you know they they go they go flatline pretty quick okay let's get another one so we're gonna we're gonna kill three then we're gonna pick three and we're gonna do three more okay so the point is to get up there as close to the head as possible the other reason to get as close to the head as possible is that it that it means that if you get as close to the head as possible it means when you pull the head off that you're going to get the you're gonna you're gonna the next gonna separate at the vertebrae and not separate way down the neck those of you who are over there remember that I said there are a lot of places in this process where you can lose an ounce of weight okay and that's one of them if you if you are if you cut the the neck at the vertebrae at at the next-to-the-last vertebrae before the head or one farther back that's where the next gonna separate when you pull the head off and you're going to lose one or two vertebrae that's a half an ounce okay so coming as close to the head as possible allows you to preserve that that last thing okay all right we just got to give them a game a little bit taste think about a minute and a half or two for them to finally finish all the contractions and get still okay the stall water the scald water we want the skull water to be about 145 do we have a preset okay once the skull are to be about 145 and we put some soap in it there's some some subsides in here the soap breaks the surface tension if you remember your your high school science class you know how water beads up on a surface okay so I just this water sits up on the table here but when I touch it with the water with the water that I just pulled out of that skull tank okay when I touched it with this it's got a little bit of soap in it and touch this water it immediately spreads and breaks the surface tension so what you're trying to do is get is get water to penetrate farther into the you know into the end of the feather follicle brew don't I must not have gotten these are big birds there all right now the old the old hatchet system you know that grandma used behind the backs to the problem with the hatchet system is that it that it puts the bird into shock so by just cutting the jugular and leaving the windpipe the autonomic nervous system continues to function so the heart continues to pump and I actually pumps the blood out of the body this is this is basically a halal kosher pipe kill okay and and we don't do electrocution we don't do you know gassing this is that this is the ancient procedure and it it pumps the blood out of the body if you go to the store and buy a chicken and you seal that black around the bones that's clotted blood from lack of bleeding I can tell you that if these are electrocuted first you'll get about half the blood out of them that we're getting with this the the this is called a sanguine ation if you want a nice big word and that's what we're after okay I think we're good to go here your stockbroker is calling okay so then they go into the scholar here yep and so the thing about these birds is if you're if you're doing them at home and you don't have this nice equipment which you should get this there are there are thresholds for getting this equipment in my opinion once you've passed look anybody can dress twenty or thirty birds in your backyard with a wood fire or a pot you know or you can get that hand pick them in that sort of thing but as soon as you pass about a hundred virgin year you're gonna want to you know you're gonna want to get some equipment and the beautiful thing is and we we started to this whatever forty years ago this kind of equipment was not available I mean that this whole thing was did not exist and so and so today we have small outfits like this that are selling a lot of this little equipment into the homestead so it's a real different deal a lot more available and a lot cheaper this stuff is a third the price today that we paid forty years ago for the same stuff because now there's so many you know competition smaller scale you know it's just more available the thing about this this scholar you see them kind of it's a rotor each called a rotary scholar there are scholars that dip the other hull by the legs they dip up and down all right the problem with that is that that the the breast the breast is the most tender part of the bird the legs are the least tender part and so if it's just going up and down legs to you know the head first it means that what has been scalded the most is the breast and what you need scalded the most is the feet and so the rope that the rotary scholar allows 100% of the chicken to be scalded at the same amount all the time okay so this is water is about 100 five degrees 45 degrees before we do you have it set on a minute and a half 90 90 seconds all right and oh I got it okay so now we're going to put them in the picker and we're gonna we're going to put some cold water on them that acts as a blimp like when you're making green beats candy green beans and stuff the blanch the clothes the clothes shop on the bird actually I'll kick the shower nozzle for the cold water and the fritters actually helps you to pick faster to fix better do it cleanly it also helps to wash them off after picking so they so they actually pick up okay we're gonna Jim Jim's just going to continue behind me and I'm just gonna take these three on on forward in the process but those of you have never seen a picker work before as we say that's a right Purdy chicken okay and those of you who picked on the clothesline or in a wheelbarrow by hand this is almost unspeakable okay all right so there's the bird Jim I can probably flip around so you'll have to jump up here and pull resentenced already oh I just see these in here for now just not enough room to work okay all right so you want you want to make sure that any little pieces of manure are off your table please all right so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pull the head off and then I'm gonna cut it off we're gonna pull it off that ensures that the the net breaks at a vertebra if we cut it off then we're gonna be we're gonna have little bone shards and you know it's gonna be hard to hit that vertebrae so we just pull the head off okay then we're going to cut the feet off all the cuts all the cups are in valleys your inspiration okay so so here's the thing if you're cutting bone you're not cutting the right place okay so you're cutting in valleys so if you notice this this foot here has a has a valley has a yep so we're going to we're going to hit that valley right there and just cut straight through all right again go to the valley straight through okay if you're cutting your cutting bone something's wrong now that I are we saving the feet we're saving the feet five years ago we were composting our feet and today we need four-legged chickens because we can't get enough feet and we started selling for 50 cents a foot I mean 52 pound and then I went to a dollar pound move it's a dollar fifty a pound now we're two bucks a pound I mean this has added fifty cents of chicken from five years ago that we didn't have five years ago so thank you thank you Weston a price foundation for creating that market all right so we got we got the feet we've got the head off all right now we're gonna flip I've got my monitor over here now so watch all right so now we're gonna flip the bird around and I'm gonna put my thumb up behind the tail like this I'm gonna take the oil sac out okay there's the oil sac take that out and I'm going to flip the bird around Jim go sidekick left me I was just gonna start those start those going I think it's okay Oh hobby what did he get in a button here we have not rehearsed we've not rehearsed this gig look what a man this is why he's in sales man this rise in sales sales is all about the need and the expectation so if you have a need and you have a and you have a fantasy if you can meet somebody's fantasy or need you can sell all right okay so remember I said all valleys okay so here in the crop now I assume these what you want is these birds to come fasting if they're full feed that makes a mess so so what we're looking for here is this valley right here in the breasts I'm going to just pinch that and I'm just gonna cut that skin just just barely enough to poke my finger in and here's the crop right here okay that's why it's important for these birds to come fast it we like to take the feed away close to 24 hours you know somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 hours before slaughter so if we're going to butcher them this morning I want these birds to be out of feed by noon yesterday okay so they so all that feed and grass and stuff comes out through their through their digestive system and they're nice and clean on the inside Jim I'll take these out here man these are big birds okay so here's the crop you can see it right here in the breasts okay and so now this thing is slick I mean it's like snot after birth I mean name your slick stuff it's slick okay I figured this crowd would enjoy the afterbirth part and so so it's real hard to pinch it and get loose all right so what I do is I grab it and curl my thumb underneath okay and and that gives me way more you know I kind of catch it under the under the edge of my thumb there and curl around gives me a lot of surface and then switch hands pull loose now I've got it in my left hand and I'm gonna just poke my thumb underneath the windpipe and the esophagus okay and I'm gonna pull out the windpipe in the esophagus so here's the windpipe there's the windpipe it feels like a like a vacuum cord and there's the esophagus and it goes to the to the crop all right I'm not gonna cut that off I'm gonna let that sit all right I'm not I'm not doing anything with that okay I'm just let that sit the whole idea here of this procedure is that you don't break any digestive juices into the carcass all right so now I'm going to pull up real tight on the on the vent area here let's go ahead and pick those so they don't sit too long right Jim I'm will let you give a shameless plug what what does what we're seeing here cost about five to six thousand dollars yeah so all the equipment that you see here five or six thousand dollars okay heavy quality stuff and again again not this dis with this setup here a crew of three people could certainly run sixty Birds an hour 60 Birds an hour in suite in three hours little three-and-a-half let's just make it 200 birds in the morning okay 200 birds in the morning at an average cost of let's just say 15 bucks a bird $3,000 you do that once a week for 20 weeks that's $60,000 for a one-time capital investment or five or six thousand dollars you show me any other piece of farm equipment that will give you that kind of payback in one season and I want to talk to you because I want to invest there I don't know I don't know any other equipment except maybe a band sawmill that might come I mean if you really use it if you really use it but anyway that's our assumption here too all right so now I'm going to pull up will pull off on this it's your question we run it for $100 a weekend we should have one of these in every county across absolutely absolutely shut down the factory farming system there's not a single reason for any of it so here we go we're going to pull up on the abdominal cavity here the reason is because I want to tighten this up because I don't want to lose any skin everything below my cut everything below my cut to the vent I'm going to lose so if I cut that abdomen way up here being sloppy I've just lost some more weight okay so that's what I want to pinch it up and cut it as close to the vent as possible I'm going to tear it open okay then I'm going to go in and pull the fat off of the gizzard as I want that fat look at all that fat that's half an ounce it's ten cents okay I mean I'm I'm making it because the secrets of the details right it really is and and so and and and like that but that's where it's at that's where the taste is your customer when they cook this chicken yeah that's gonna be what makes the gravy and the taste and all that all right so we'll get that fat off leave that with the carcass and I'm gonna go in with my fingernails against the smooth keel bone okay and I'm gonna hook I'm gonna hook the esophagus around my pointer finger okay so here comes the esophagus here comes the crop okay it's all hook it's all coming out the back of the bird no breaks no digestive juices there's the there's the windpipe it's all there okay all right here all right now I'm gonna roll it over so here's my heart my liver look at that beautiful liver that is a gorgeous liver and right here is the thing you don't want that's the gallbladder when I say bitterest gall it's bitter let me tell you I've tasted it it is not good our son Daniel's rule of thumb for this whole procedure here the processing is there are two rules one is keep your mouth shut and the second one is if you feel something on your lip don't lick it those are the two rules of processing so we're gonna roll this over and we're gonna pitch that gallbladder off okay there's your heart and liver this is this where we're putting everything yeah get this barrel down here with cold water okay so everybody I mean that's a beautiful liver I hope everybody and appreciate and see that that's just a gorgeous gorgeous liver okay good color everything okay all right and now that leaves the viscera in my left hand and I just give it a very gentle tug and I've got three cuts now left I'm gonna cut down I'm gonna pull my intestinal my intestinal tract to the to the left cut right down a lot of event on this side now I'm gonna move it over here cut right down along I'm sorry the left side right and in left and then I'm gonna cut underneath it okay that's going to take out the last of the viscera again notice I've left this big glob of fat this is the pubic fat right here right on the pubic bones there again there's another half an ounce if you do a sloppy job of getting the vent and you just carve out that whole thing you've just lost another half an ounce of flavor and fat okay all right now what's left lungs all right someone go back in and the lungs are down in the ribcage there's one there's the other one and the ribs the ribs are perpendicular to me okay so I'm not going in clawing this way I'm going this way now Jim sells a handy dandy little one for that you can go in and you can grab them and pull them out with a lunker I want to move my hand just to show you that it can be done I'm not trying to reduce sales Jim I'm just trying to trying to do this as simple and gentle as possible and empowering as possible okay so there's the two lungs alright now we'll [Music] we're going to spray this booger out inside a little bit now we're gonna now because we've cut so low we've got this all this beautiful skin here in the back we're gonna cut a little tiny incision right here that we can then poke the legs in okay and we have an oven ready bird okay with no point we don't use bleach we don't use nothing no all right here we go again feet okay this little blunt little pinning knife here is to get these little pin feathers I'll tell you another tool that works extremely this works very well so a dull knife pinning knife like this works great for little pin feathers and kind of scrape it off and things but another thing that works really well is a catfish Skinner it's a real wide mouth pliers with just a simple thing as opposed to needle needle nose pliers and you can really grab things and get those they're very very good okay oil stock here comes okay let the bird around okay pinch the skin cut it open we got Jim got one more ah - okay yep yeah you don't want to pick one at a time because you want the other one for them to be to hit up against to help flop around better okay now this one's got a little bit of manure so it's going to be a little bit you don't want you want to keep that washed off okay now we're gonna take our fat this one's got a lot more fat big bunch of fat there okay then we're gonna go in scoot down I think it comes your crop livers not quite as good as that other one it's a little bit paler it's not not throw away a ball but it's just you see that little bit of difference in the color not quite it's not quite as perfect as the other okay do we not have a market for gizzards no we do not have a market for gizzards but if you want them we will give them to you and we have cured a lot of people of their gizzard love by giving them two five-gallon pails of liver business the secret is they have to clean them and that's what does it okay however we have just begun saving all of our gizzards for a pet food company called farm hounds in Atlanta they're taking every gizzard we can give to them at four bucks a pound to dehydrate and put into dog food to scare dog food so yeah it's okay so so that has added 40 cents a chicken again so you got the feet and that we're up we're up a bucket chicken just with you know stuff that we used to compost so it's pretty cool do you want to stay at the geezers lungs okay all right yeah there we go head a couple of those tail feathers okay um let's let's let's go to some let's go to some questions what's what's on here what's on your mind yes yes what breed okay well so I've talked about were you in over there where I was okay so so we've raised all different kinds of birds Cornish cross freedom Rangers you know the kosher kings you know heritage birds so if you're going to if you're going to be in the meat business the Cornish cross is hard to beat okay I mean that's them and it has the greatest greatest customer acceptance it looks the most like what they're used to in the store okay so you don't have all those kinds of things going on now at our place we now offer four kinds of chicken one is that's a better-looking liver that's good one is a horse cross like this the other one is a is a heritage bird that's the that's the brother of the rolls so we're hatching our own layers so we hatched you know four thousand chicks and 2,000 loads gonna be males and so we raise those up 16 weeks and they make about a three and a half pound carcass razor breast all dark meat orange fat unbelievable taste unbelievable bird now there's no doubt in my mind it's a superior bird okay but takes twice as long to raise you got to charge twice as much work for all the labor and you don't get much at the end either okay so so you know you take your you take your pictures but we do sell those but they're hard to sell we all we can only we can only sell about oh we only sell about less than 500 of those a year and we're trying to get the same dog food place to take some of those and then we do our stewing hands so those are old spent hens same procedure we're not lacking for water pressure that's for sure we're we got so we've got we've got these we've got the heritage rooster not the stewing hen and then this summer we added a a soybean free chicken because we have so many people wanting soybean for you so we added that so we got four different kinds I mean if I was just if I was just raising meat for myself we wrote a family consumption Cornish cross is hard to beat they they're they're they're really uh give you a lot oh yes a better breed for a hot versus cold climate you know certainly certainly the the non Cornish cross is a little bit harder for whatever extreme cold whatever but no these these birds are raised everywhere they're raised all over the world yeah skin them that any minute hey I'm not chicken uh-huh so so that the thread here is I'm concerned about not getting everything out so we just quartered them and that way we can kind of see make sure we got everything out of the inside you know you can eat the lungs there oh absolutely hey there's a lot of stuff you can eat that orthodoxy in America would say you can't eat and so so I mean you know you can you can look inside the bird I mean when you're done you can look inside it no that's not a problem just pull it all out you come here there it is right there question yes women wait to look we'll put pit hit a pause button here [Music] you want to keep your surfaces clean that's that's really a big deal and this little table here is kind of slick in that it it has to working it has to sink and working spots where where if this table were used the way it's designed to be used and just show you here in case you don't realize it you've got a a sunken thing here to work with so that a person can cut here and a person has got here and there's no cross-contamination between the two birds somebody breaks a gallbladder or breaks of intestine there's no cross-contamination that's really cool there you go yeah so now it's a fight to the finish yeah so so this is a slippery and right here a bucket a bucket sits in here I assume for for livers and hearts and stuff yep what we compost everything feathers blood guts everything we compost it all and and our favorite carbon material for composting is is wood chips straw and hanging things they tend to they make tunnels and the tunnels then make Vince for smells and things get to get out of whereas the wood and sawdust is too heavy but wood chips are fried ball enough so nothing digs in it because of all collapses on them you can't make a tunnel in it and so it's so it's the perfect balance between loose but heavy enough that that that it goes in around it the other thing is we leave we make sure we have a 12 inch a 12 inch space around the pile so we're putting it in a middle to keep it saucer shaped we build a pile up saucer shaped and we use gates on the edges because it's you know goopy stuff it you don't want to blow out okay and so we use gates you can use pallets or something right just to keep side straight and we have about a 10 or 12 inch nothing but wood chips around the edges we build it all right like saucer shake okay that way nothing can doesn't get tip over the edges and and you don't have any guts right up against the side because you've got your 10 inch burn are you with me and so we put it on then we put some more on and keep it saucer shape all right build it on up and yeah everything I mean it it's something to go in there and see the like the the head you know everything compost well it's got a little skull a little itty bitty part of the beat all the cartilage you know compost away everything compost away it's just wonderful yes ma'am what do we do for inspection what's inspection well right here I'm looking at it and if you want this chicken you come look at it okay and we say we're customer inspected that's the best inspection inspection so we're under the public law 90 - 492 exemption which is a federal exemption some states are more restrictive than others but it allows you to do your own birds on your own place without an inspector on-site the only requirement is that your procedure and the bird has to be sanitary and unadulterated now we all I'm sure sitting here if I asked for a definition from every person of what's sanitary and unadulterated we would all say exactly the same thing and that's the problem it is very subjective so for example back years ago when we got our when we got our number we were the first one in Virginia number 1001 and the guy came looked at us looked at what we were doing basically gonna set up like this and we were in the open air I mean it under a shed but that was all open air by the time he'd spent his morning he looked at me he said man it's been the morning with you makes me wish I'd stayed on the farm in Tennessee and and and instead not gone worked for the government he was three years away from retirement got our number he couldn't been more supportive he retired next guy came on he came down next year so this is all in illegal and we'll close you down same law same everything nothing had changed just a different bureaucrat so this is the this is the capriciousness and of course we fought that and if you want to read about it you get my book everything I want to do is illegal and you'll read you'll read all about the stories and by the way that's a good segue to next write this down next January 25 in Cincinnati Ohio we're convening the first rogue food conference January 25 since that Ohio you can Google just Google wrote rogue food conference it'll pop right up and what we're doing and the theme is circumvention not compliance and what we've come to in our country now unfortunately is that in many things like this it's actually cheaper and and simpler more you know application to to circumvent I didn't say to be illegal I said circumvent there's a difference between certain invention and being illegal than it is to comply them everybody's you know jigna flexing and carrying on trying to figure out how to comply and a lot of times it's better to just circumvent and so for example in North Carolina there's a lady Nita Bali and she has started a 501c3 food church if you join her church you can get everything illegal you can imagine and the state keeps trying to close her down a park outside her house they try to interrupt her customers and she just keeps right on going she's an amazing amazing lady so she's gonna be one of the speakers so the idea of the conference is to showcase these very creative savvy people around the country who have developed certain legal legal circumvented techniques whether it's pet food food Church Country Club private membership you know work where the food is not being sold its the food is a is a is a dividend of your investment okay so there's there's every kind of thing you can imagine so that the transaction is not in commerce that's where they come and get you I could give these chickens away right everybody be happy what is it that if we trade money for them suddenly they go from benevolent to hazardous you know in the drug war we have going on right now if you want cocaine it's considered a hazardous substance I won't get in a big debate about drug war I don't believe in but anyway the point is that the prohibitions are you can't own it you can't use it you can't give it away you can't sell it you can't buy it you can't write in food all the prohibitions are only on the seller there's no prohibition on the buyer no prohibition for feeding it to your kids and all the neighbors the prohibition is only on the seller which means it's really not a hazardous substance it's not about safety it's about defining what's accessible in the marketplace okay and so don't let anybody tell you that this is about food safety because it's not it's it's about it's about defining what's available in the marketplace and so when you when you you know view it that way you kind of you know you're able to point out that the emperor has no so inspection as long as we don't sell across the state lines doesn't mean we can't deliver them across the state line if they're pre-sold I think I could run for election here today I don't mind the time I just don't like the money so you know there's there's there's just a lot of things going on out there and so January 25 Cincinnati we want to showcase all of these cool savage creative sir conventions that are going on around the country so that people who attend can leave and be empowered with templates okay to to go the other thing is to join the farm of consumer legal defense fund I can't say enough good about them they are probably doing more to preserve freedom of food choice in this country you know we actually have federal judges that are writing opinions saying Americans do not have the right to choose the food of their choice in this country we have those opinions coming down and so right now in my view the where we are is right now about where home schooling was about 35 years ago we homeschooled our kids and it was when we pulled the shades you didn't ask you didn't tell you didn't go to town and didn't say you didn't do anything and because at that time they would actually send out truant officers and take your kids into state custody for being so negligent and abusive as to conceive of something as antisocial as homeschooling as neglectful as home school and and thankfully through the efforts of home school Legal Defense Association bike repairs and others we won that battle and and it's a whole different it's a whole different climate today the new the new bogeyman and the culture is food and one of the reasons is because people don't know anything about food anymore and you're always fearful about what you don't know about we get calls from customers how do you thaw a chicken you know we've been vegetarians for 30 years my husband wants a hamburger how do you make a hamburger I mean you wouldn't believe the level of culinary ignorance there is out there well you're always fearful of what you don't know so as we have as we have lost our knowledge of food we have become paranoid about it as a culture and and that paranoia has has demanded interventive you know government oversight which which ends up actually making it very hard to have an antidote to the problem stuff of the system question yes so the language that we're breeding ourselves oh we buy these from a hatchery I mean these are just over just from Tyson yeah and and and I'm it's the same genetics but race completely different and I may add they have a completely different profile the polyunsaturated saturated unsaturated fat profile completely different the nutrition is completely different everything's different about these birds so the same bird raised differently you know the average person if they quit smoking and drinking and living on on food out of sheets gas stations the same person same genetic will be a very different kind of person are you with me and the same way these chickens so you know don't don't get hung up on the genetics it's about the diet the management system the you know the love the grass does all that stuff okay yes question another I know there's more question just man are you using virtual neutral balancer alright nothing else talk about I mean I'm serious folks it's like when people ask me about cows well then I got weeds I got this I got that I got Cali I said you moved them every day nope no nothing else talk about I mean to me it's so fundamental to meet that new tree and I'm not trying to pick on you but it's so fundamentally to make that nutritional requirement and if you're if you're getting your feed from a regular mill that doesn't carry it get it back and just top dress it with something okay just so they get something it makes that big of a difference it makes that big of it because it because it's satisfies that's the thing well the behavior that you're seeing is a symptom of dissatisfaction alright and now if you ask the chickens why are you doing this they will not give you a Shakespearean soliloquy on dissatisfaction alright but but they feel it way down in their gizzard okay and they know what they know what they're what they've got okay and so so start there so get their nutrition requirements satiated first that's that's the first thing and then and then see where you are beyond that there are different strains of birds from different hatcheries so we have used over the years we've probably used I don't know probably not ten but more than six different kinds of hatcheries around the country and we have found I mean even though this is supposedly the industry bird the industry breeds for cut-ups for whole Birds they've got a whole different strains for if we're going to cut it up if we're gonna if we're going to do whole broilers or if we're going to turn them all into McNuggets okay I mean they have they have different genetic that's how sophisticated the genetics are in the industry all right I don't know what ours is but I know that from hatch you actuary there's a pretty big difference and so I tell people if you're not satisfied I mean do the first row first if you're not satisfied then try a different Hatcher there's a lot of them and try them until you find the one that works we actually have used hatcheries that just didn't work at all for us and run into people that say I tried all the hatcheries and in only one it works for us is this one and it's one it didn't work for us so I know we're back to the gentleman's question about you know eating cold and all that you know I don't know what all those nuances are but just start experimenting you know and you'll finally you'll finally hit on the one that works okay great question yes yeah the liver that the number one thing on the liver would be coccidiosis which is white spots so if you have white spots in the liver those are little spots of infection and you're gonna throw that liver away okay excuse me birches itself is fine - yeah just don't eat that liver okay you know if you've got another another real common one is is pneumonia and that'll be where you have a bunch of water in the cavity you know and you you pop it open and there's just all these gooses of liquid and water that's why people who have pneumonia you drown you don't actually suffocate where you suffocate because you drown all right because you can't get the fluid away that's that's pneumonia and again the chicken is fine to eat you just don't eat any of the guts a chicken makes itself no good if you get a chicken that bad you'll know it yeah and you know once in a while yeah you just have one that's what emaciated just you know just awful looking and he goes in the can yeah but fortunately you don't have very many of those with this country another question yes ma'am about the nutrition the fur trail nutria balancer fur trail fer tre ll and quartered in Bank bridge Pennsylvania and they have distributors all over the country it's the name of the company the name of the supplement is poultry nutria battle so the name of the company is portrayal the name of the of the supplement is nuclear balance or poultry nutria balancer they make one foot pigs and one four chickens and you know different yeah it's formulated to go in at sixty pounds per ton sixty pounds per ton now if you're not doing the volume you know tons then you know you'll just we'll just put it in at that rank under some more okay another question yes sir [Music] Taman ate the meat can you just piece it behind like wash it off I mean having haven't you ever had your hands in a cow manure and you just wash them off and eat a candy bar yeah yeah right I was trying to think the other day I had some visitors they were out moving the cows with me and I was I was showing them how after I moved the cows and set up the water trough then I drink out of the water trough to feed my microbiome and they're you know I haven't been sick for 15 years you're not even a cold all right Wow well you know I'm not harder than anybody else but I like you know I wouldn't have any trouble at all right now eating up eating food with my fingers but many I got I must have a tremendous microbiome but I'm just gonna drink out of the couch off the other couch drinking right here I'm drinking right here I mean a little bit of slobber that's good stuff you know hey if I could digest as well as a cow man I'm I'm in good shape okay so so ya know just just wash it off that's fine yes sir wait about oh boy yeah so it's it's Austrian peas flax seed oil and a little bit of extra man Hagin fish meal none of which is grown locally the soybeans are so here's my deal with a soy you guys get me in all sorts of trouble so here's the deal with the soy beans and listen you know I love people that don't want sleepiness but you're doing soybeans all the studies two things the studies that have linked soy to estrogen I mean that's the big deal right have all tested soybean meal 98% of soybeans don't are not used as whole beans they're there they're separated to the oils from the meal so the livestock industry uses the meal and then the oil goes into human food and and and oils and all that sort of thing okay so see where I was here so the American pasture poultry producers Association a papaya which everybody should join did a two-year study for two years on this question and they did a bunch of feeding trials and you know what they found the highest estrogen levels in chickens that had access to clover now folks are we really gonna not let our chickens eat clover if you raise chickens you know that's their favorite food I mean they eat clover like Breyers ice cream there's not a chicken in the world gonna like clover and and they do well on it they love it that sometimes I think we almost become too sophisticated for our own good and and so so here's my deal with with with the soybean meal is we all know that things happen when you break apart stuff it would be like saying well since high fructose corn syrup comes from corn I'm never you're gonna eat corn on the cob okay we all know that when you break things up you break whole foods up it changes things and so that's kind of where I am and and the reason I can say that was a little bit of confidence is because we've been in this for 50 years we've had every kind of Lulu person that you can imagine I mean crystals chromatography pendulums everything you can imagine okay and we have never failed a test from both Orthodox empirical science to all the way to this real fringe you know stuff and so I just think that the key is the grass chlorophyll is nature's number one detoxic Oh number one chlorophyll it's like it's like a natured roto-rooter okay cleans you out all right and so I say let's put our emphasis on making sure the grass is right that we're moving them at the right time of day have the right you know do all the things the habitat stuff that encourages and facilitates the most aggressive ingestion of chlorophyll possible and you can cover a multitude of sins that's right trust the grass trust the grass yes sir no compost the offal and just take a couple of used pallets and make a nice straight sided compost pile with woodchips and layer it in there like lasagna and you'll have wonderful compost wait long uh you know you're probably gonna wait six months okay we send ours through three three times because we use a lot of extra carbon for the material and so we actually I we actually get three terms from the offal compost we get three turn from our carbon till it's actually down to you know pretty good compost you with me okay good another question yes how do I cleaner process of gizzard well what I should do I mean the ideal when I do this and I have done this to show people when I do this I'll take the first chicken and put it on ice because you want to do it cold if it's cold you can you can do it a lot better I'm gonna save that tell you what let's just gonna just drop that in that cold water for just a minute and then fish it back out let me do this last event all doing the gizzard that way it won't contaminate okay another question yes we're back in the back what kind of knife do I use to cut the throat a sharp one it doesn't style doesn't matter what you want is sharp otherwise you're just sitting there grinding you know and so you want you want something that's really really sharp and yes you don't have a sharpen a knife practice so you can now yep sharp sharp knives for this whole process are really good did you stand a lot better chance of not cutting yourself with a sharp knife than a dull knife it's a building life you're having to really you know go at it and a sharp knife you kind of let the let the knife do the work yeah yes [Music] yeah well the the market firm for the heart and liver all that is are people who Western a price you pay me Oh Kito all right you know all of your people that are into you know protein and getting away from carbohydrates and all that they're all into you know into the Bofill material yeah no yes yes ma'am oh okay I'm sorry yeah go ahead okay stabilizing our shelters during high wind situations we've had our sheltered shelters handle 80 mile-an-hour winds no problem okay once in a while we've had a door blow off but you got to remember that there's a lot of difference between the air flow at at 8 feet and the air flow at 2 feet across a field the other thing is that remember I said about a balanced ecology so we have made sure that our criterion and our riparian and woods areas grow up as wind breaks so it stops to wind across the field the only time that we ever lost a bunch of shelters was whatever seven years ago and that derecho came through that was a hundred mile an hour straight line winds for three hours in fact it killed a couple of people in our area and that night we lost 20 shelters but I mean I say lost I mean lost I mean they were gone we went out in the morning and there were chickens in the field and but but people with big types of chicken houses Cargill Purdue chicken houses they lost their houses and all the chickens and it took two months to rebuild we just went out to the shop and in a week we built all 20 shelters back everything was back up and running that's the resiliency so here's the thing if you build something if you build something but I'm sorry Jim if if you build something mobile that can withstand the most the worst case that you can imagine it'll be so heavy you'll never move it okay so what you do I mean that's the way all design is so what you do is you build for you build for 98 percent and the 2 percent well you just have to babysit a little bit okay like for example cold all right water freezing that sort of thing you do you do what's what's good for 98 percent of time and tubes are the tiny let it drip that's a lot cheaper than trying to build a system that can go 250 degrees below Fahrenheit you know go to our historic record and stay there for a week what are the chances not much chances are it'll be 20 years before that happens again and if it does you spend those two days babysitting you know you're always in this kind of you know balance between you know something you know a fortress versus you know what can actually put you actually do where's that gizzard now Jim one of the best markets for gizzards is our catfish fisherman because a gizzard thinks the gizzard is is hard enough that it'll go on a hook whereas a heart/liver that sort of thing it's real fleshy and it's easy to pull off but a gizzard they put that on a hook pull that along the bottom of a stream and it works really well question right yes he said stand up I'm concerned about this go better here talkin trash Oh chickens in the woods are great these are these are layers you're talking about layers yeah yeah so they'll they'll range a lot farther yeah and we don't have our layers on our little shelters either they're in netting or totally free-range and they go to the woods and they're all over the place we got whatever bunch other so so yes chicken chickens and woods are wonderful okay honking cameras up here so so the the gizzard has of course it has an inlet and an outlet and what you're going to do is you're going to cut it open and it has a it has a lining inside and if so the this is the lining and and I because it's not cold if it's cold you can actually cut it gently like I did and and you can actually break the you know break the gizzard away from the lining since this isn't cold I can't do that and there's what's in the gizzard now look at all the grit and the rocks there's all sorts of cool stuff in there see there's there's a rock and I can put it out here on the table see see it but yeah there's that bird had good grit in it that was well done probably one reason why they look so healthy lots of good grip there's different kinds of sizes of grit there's the birdsburg you get bigger bigger kinds of grit okay take that off so here's your yellow lining okay again if this is cold if this is actually cold you can do this and never and never pop into the gizzard itself but when it's warm like this it's it's hard to do but you just take that lining and you just pull that lining off work it work it carefully again this is warm so it's a lot harder but you just work that lining around okay and you just pull it off okay and there's your gizzard and there are people that love that stuff what's our timeline we over we're done one more question two more questions wait way back yes ma'am if you feel like an auction got one here got one here yes that's a whole bird the easy way to cut off a neck is with a nice big heavy cleaver a meat cleaver and get a heavy one don't get a cheap one get one of those $40.00 cleavers big heavy you know weighs like a pound because you want the tool to do the work it's like the difference between uh you ever had a light post hole digger and a heavy post hole digger or a light shovel and a heavy shovel you want the tool to do the work okay and so get a good heavy cleaver and just rock the neck off that's the easiest we do we sell we sell boneless skinless breasts so we didn't want to do this I mean yeah we I'm done I'm done butchering I want to clean up and go put my foot up an ice cream sandwich okay what's the hands that have been in the chicken all right and so so but but we had the same thing you know years ago customers know I buy more chicken if I could get you know parts and play the piece of blah blah blah and course we'd always say we'll come out a little bit early to pick up and we'll show you how to cut it up and we did that did that but that still didn't they wanted parts pieces so the point is that the first year we offered parts and pieces and full cut ups we made an extra $20,000 on chicken without selling it without raising another chicken that's what value-adding does and so we set our price so right now our boneless skinless breasts are $14 a pound we can't keep them in crazy yeah but yeah but I mean this is our culture convenience you know I want what I want and we're way to be gentle you you might be able to take their money someday careful what you say about them there they might be your customers okay but we like people that get bum the skin distress because we have our prices set so we make seventy five dollars an hour doing the work here not want to work for seventy five bucks an hour I'll work for seventy five bucks an hour so so yes that's a huge it's a huge value added component yes we take and so so what happens if we have extra backs and necks so we send those up to a soup company that turns them into stock for us and we sell that chicken stock and it gives us the equivalent of two bucks a pound for our necks and backs so you just you just adjust your prices to take your extra labor and to protect yourself from an inventory problem so we set the price on our breasts so that we could throw away the rest of the chicken and still make the same money and that's it and that's one and then you just scramble around trying to make sure you move all the pieces and parts okay so you just adjust your prices to where the inventory works and so we just kept raising the price raising the price until we could keep breasts in and this is a mistake people make they go to the store do you realize the the industry has equipment that you and I don't have and they have labor that you and I don't have and I don't want to get into the labor issue but okay so we want to actually get 20 or 25 bucks an hour right I mean if you can't get that you might as well go work for McDonald's right so so we have a certain threshold it's going to attract us into this all right and and so the industry has this huge advantage so they don't have to have as big a spread between boneless breasts and thighs for us because all handwork and we want to get paid a decent and maybe we don't even like to do it that much for us we consider luxury item so we adjust the price accordingly and that and that keeps our breasts in so we always have breasts in stock as long with thighs and wings and necks and backs and all that stuff okay great one more and we're gonna quit I think yes sir great question thank you that I suspect it to say that and that's my pet the question is tell us about aging the bird for tenderness alright so this is a good question end on thank you Jim meat meat has to go through it's what we call its rigors or its relaxation and so so if chicken is gonna be cooked fast the way most Americans cook chicken now if it's gonna go if it's gonna go in a stew like most chicken is cooked around the world Americans are the ones that cook fast chicken if you go anyplace else in the world use Becca stand Venezuela about that I'm half chick is there anymore but wherever you go in the world chicken most chicken is slow-cooked just part of a stew of some sort of you know a student alright it's a long slow alright in America you know we fry it we broiled it you know we tend to cook it fast and when you do it in a stew it's very forgiving you can kill it one minute throw it even warm into the pot and it'll be fine alright because it's a long slow gentle thing but for us where we're gonna fry it broil it cook it a faster we need it to be to go through its rigors to go through its it's where the connective tissue relaxes and so we do not recommend we learned this from our restaurant chefs we do not recommend eating a chicken the same day you processed it kill it we want to we want the carcass to be at 40 degrees within two hours stop bacterial growth and then we're going to put it in a refrigerator or on ice overnight and cook it tomorrow if you have people complaining that your chickens are tough is probably because they're so excited about getting your chicken you butcher it this morning they take it home and cook it for supper it's tough because it hasn't had time to cool down and go through a three taxation time just like aged beef chicken is not as long pork is not live long but it still needs that same cooldown cure time great great okay we're gonna have to quit there thank you all I'll be around arrested [Applause]

Channel: Homesteaders of America

Views: 827,190

Keywords: broiler chickens, grown your own food, Joel Salatin

Id: irtfnJ4QekQ

Length: 81min 40sec (4900 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020