{"id":10516,"date":"2023-11-15T23:36:14","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T04:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=10516"},"modified":"2023-12-13T16:39:25","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T21:39:25","slug":"chicken-plucker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/?p=10516","title":{"rendered":"Chicken Plucker"},"content":{"rendered":"

We got a chicken plucker for processing birds this year — the metal on the base is really<\/em> thin, the motor appears to have come pre-rusted, and they somehow consistently put one of the rubber sticks in upside down (although, after using it, we think this might<\/em> be intentional and kind of “sweep” the feathers from underneath out the shoot).<\/p>\n

We have been very hesitant to buy one of these — they are expensive<\/em>. But it takes us so much time to butcher birds. I see videos on YouTube of people plucking a bird in five minutes. That’s not us. At first, I thought maybe it was a “get better with practice” sort of thing. Or that we weren’t scalding enough. Or that we were doing something else<\/em> wrong. But it’s been years. We’re not getting much quicker, the scald is fine, and the only thing we might be doing wrong is being too picky about what constitutes “plucked”.<\/p>\n

The biggest hurdle was that we couldn’t really see<\/em> one work to determine if we’d be done defeathering in a minute or if we’d still be spending half an hour plucking feathers. There wasn’t a good way to find out, though. People post videos online, but they also post videos of themselves plucking a bird in a few minutes. So that’s not really trustworthy. We finally decided to just spend money and buy a plucker. They work! There may be a few big wing feathers to pull. There may be a few smaller feathers near the feet. But the bird was plucked <\/em>within a few minutes. It takes me about fifteen minutes to butcher a bird, and Scott was able to get a bird to the “ready to be butchered” point in fifteen minutes (that includes walking across the yard twice). This is such a huge difference — we were able to process all of our turkeys in a single day. It wouldn’t be a short day, there’s a good hour or two to clean everything up once we’re done. But it’s done in a day<\/em>. And the birds were plucked very well.<\/p>\n

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We got a chicken plucker for processing birds this year — the metal on the base is really thin, the motor appears to have come pre-rusted, and they somehow consistently put one of the rubber sticks in upside down (although, after using it, we think this might be intentional and kind of “sweep” the feathers …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1066,1443,1805,1365],"tags":[252,1446,1445,1285],"class_list":["post-10516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chickens","category-ducks","category-business-homesteading","category-turkeys","tag-chickens","tag-ducks","tag-poultry","tag-turkeys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10516"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10554,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10516\/revisions\/10554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}