We Put Meat in the Freezer That We Raised

We had been talking about raising our own chickens when Chris started looking for a chicken tractor.

He found one on Marketplace, and that pretty much moved the conversation from maybe someday to let’s try it.

Neither one of us had ever raised meat chickens before. Chris had raised egg layers, and we already had meat goats, but this was different. We wanted to see if we could raise our own chicken for the freezer—and maybe sell some along the way.

There were a few reasons for it beyond possibly making some cash. We wanted to know how our meat was raised. We liked the idea of being a little more self-sufficient. And, honestly, we just wanted to try it.

We’d ordered our day-old chicks online a few weeks earlier, and on August 25, they arrived.

They were tiny.

We started them out in a wire cage in the shop — until we realized the chicks were small enough to squeeze right through the wire. A few of them made a break for it before we figured out how to wrap the bottom to keep them in. They grew fast enough that we moved them into a modified water trough before long.

By the time they were about two or three weeks old, they were ready to move outside into the chicken tractor.

That was when things really got started.

Fresh Grass Every Day

The chicken tractor was designed to move, and we moved it every day. Chris mostly handled that part—he’d move the tractor onto a fresh patch of grass, and we’d fill the feeders. It didn’t take the chickens long to figure out that when the tractor moved, food was coming.

They were growing faster than I expected, too. I didn’t do a very good job of taking pictures every week, so I don’t have a great photographic record of just how quickly they changed. But looking back at the pictures I did take, the difference is pretty amazing. By September 25, they didn’t look much like the little chicks delivered to us a month earlier.

And they weren’t always where they were supposed to be. We had a few escapees along the way. One apparently decided that sitting on top of the chicken tractor was a perfectly good place to hang out—I still have a picture of it sitting on a rake like it had planned the whole thing.

By October 2, they were getting big enough that the chicken tractor looked a whole lot smaller.

By then, I was also thinking more about how we were raising them. I’ve been reading more about commercial poultry production, and some of what I am learning makes me angry. It definitely has made me even more appreciative of what we are doing with our own birds.

Our chickens had plenty of room. They were moved to fresh grass every morning. They had high-protein chicken feed, along with bugs, grass, and kitchen scraps.

They were outside being chickens. That matters to me.

Then It Was Time

We knew from the beginning that raising meat chickens meant there would eventually be a processing day. That was the whole point. Still, knowing it was coming and actually doing it are two different things.

On October 14, we processed our first chickens. Chris caught and dispatched the birds. We both worked on the scalding and I did most of the cleaning, with Chris helping along the way.

Once we got started, there really wasn’t much time to think about anything except the next step.

Scald. Pluck. Clean. Ice.

It was our first time, so there was definitely a learning curve. But we got through it. The chickens went into ice overnight, and the next day we finished getting everything packaged.

Chris and I have always looked at raising our own meat animals pretty simply: give them a good life, and then one bad day. That was processing day.

It wasn’t easy. But knowing that these chickens had spent their short lives outside, moving onto fresh grass every morning, made a difference to me.

From Chicks to the Freezer

A couple of months earlier, we had a box of tiny chicks. Now we had chicken in the freezer that we had raised ourselves.

And we didn’t just put whole chickens in the freezer.

We cleaned up the gizzards (I love gizzards), and cut some of the chickens into parts. I also used the saved bones and some chicken feet to make a batch of chicken broth a few days later.

And then there were the parts we weren’t going to eat ourselves. The hearts, liver and even heads went into the dehydrator to make treats for the dogs.

It was a lot of chicken—and I was determined not to waste what we had raised.

We know where these chickens came from. We know how they were raised. We know what they ate and where they spent their days.

This is a pretty good feeling.