Chicken pluckers - feasible?

[CJ]

When we get our place set up to live on, I'd like to count on chicken as the bulk of our produced meat, say 3 times per week. If we are going to butcher that often, would a chicken plucker be worth the expense?

And, how well do they work?

I don't want to skin the chicken, I like to cook our chicken with the skin on.

[Filas are Prima]

I used to help work the cattle of folks on the other side of the mountain.
They asked me to come help butcher some broilers they'd raised. Best rodeo that ranch ever had!
They had a chicken plucker machine, which, as I recall 3 decades later, was a rotating cylinder with wires embedded all over it. We'd hold the chicken like an ear of corn, going side to side and rotating the chicken as the feathers became a cloud of poof anournd us.
We processed over 100 roosters that day. Wheather having one of these torture devices for a chicken dinner a few times per week is a good idea, or not, I wonder.

[agmantoo]

It is a lot faster and not near as stinky if you learn to skin the broilers. Could be more healthy not eating all the fat that is with the skin also.

[RockyGlen]

We have a chicken plucker. We raise up all our broilers, then butcher all in one day. The new pluckers have rubber fingers instead of wires, but can still bruise the chicken if you are not careful.

It is well worth the money if you are going to do huge batches a couple/three times a year. BUT......it is a pain to clean, and I would not use it for 2 or 3 chickens at a time.

[moopups]

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/w...ickenpluckers/

[JHinCA]

I like my chicken plucker. We got it second hand and it was not inexpensive, but well worth it since we do around 500 chickens during the summer. The first year we raised meat birds we did 1 or 2 hundred (don't remember exactly) and I plucked them all by hand, but this is so much faster. It also gets off the little hairs so you don't need to singe them. Since we have one already, I would use it for 2 or 3 birds at a time, but I don't know if I would purchase one for only that many. Ours is the tub style, not the kind you hold the bird up to.

Someone on the poultry forum made one out of an electric drill a year or so ago. You could search there for the instructions.

[CJ]

Hmmm... okay. With a plucker, do you still have to scald the chicken first?

I have seen the electric drill ones.

[JHinCA]

Yes, and it is more important to be careful in the scalding than it is when hand plucking. If you over scald a little when hand plucking you can just be more careful. If you over scald when using the plucker, you will get torn skin. I guess torn skin is no big deal when they are for your own use, but we don't sell them with torn skin.

If you under scald when hand plucking, you just work a little harder. If you underscald with the plucker, you end up handplucking.

[moonwolf]

Originally Posted by CJ

When we get our place set up to live on, I'd like to count on chicken as the bulk of our produced meat, say 3 times per week. If we are going to butcher that often, would a chicken plucker be worth the expense?

And, how well do they work?

.

Yes, for me it is. I bought a kit with the rubber fingers and a drum that you can attatch to an electric motor. I can't remember if I bought it at McMurray's or not. It was less than $100 for the kit (less motor).
I've used that for hundreds of chicken pluckings and muskovy duck pluckings also. I'll post pictures of the thing and how it works some day.
A plucker like that, after scalding, can pluck a chicken in about 30 seconds to the stage where very few feathers are left to handle manually for another couple minutes. In my opinion, it beats skinning and makes a nice attractive carcass for freezing with the skin intact. Only problem might be if you have very young birds with lots of pinfeathers. The machine won't pluck those out.

Hope that helps.

[farminghandyman]

there are plans out there for what is called the the Wisbang chicken plucker, it will cost a couple of hundred dollars to build and if you can find used parts some savings,

If your going to do it one chicken at a time it will not be worth you efforts,

but many people raise what is a cross bird, made for meat production, and then "harvest" them all at one time, as they will not live well for long periods of time, as they will out grow there bodies,

when we raise meat birds we, order in 50 or 75, chicks and in 6 to 10 weeks there ready to butcher, and we butcher them all in a day or few days time, putting them in a freezer for later use,

if your going with layers and a straight run of chicks, (both male and female birds)doing "culling" and butchering the roosters, one or two at a time would work, but there is more feed and in my opinion mess as your doing this receptively time and time and time again,

but if your going to do a big batch of meat birds either order 25 and take your time learning, planing on a few days, at first, or find a butcher or place that you can take them to have them butchered or some friends over and have a butchering party,
then when you have the system down, then consider larger batches to raise and to do,

starting out with layers is fine, but the meat quantity is less for the feed used, you may be able to find some one with a plucker you can borrow or rent, as well,

like some one said some people like to skin them, and not pluck, at all, do some Internet searches on butchering chickens, home processing, chicken plucker's, killing cones, backyard chicken processing, etc,

[Callieslamb]

Have you tried plucking after scalding a chicken? Our one and only experience in butchering chickens was done by scalding the bird first and I was able to have it plucked in about 3 minutes - that's ALL feathers. I was so totally amazed. We did 24 birds at once and it only took 2 hours start to finish. We used a turkey fryer to scald them in, since it had its own heat source. It really isn't that hard. If I were going to butcher chickens again, especially only a few at a time - I wouldn't bother with the plucker at all. Just another piece of equipment to store and keep running. If I were doing 50 or so at a time - it might be more worth it to me.

[Christiaan]

It would depend on how many you plan on butchering at a time. Working by myself it takes me less than five minutes per bird from kill to scald to pluck to gut to ice. Given the price of the Whizbang I wouldn't invest in a plucker unles I was doing more than 30 birds at a time. The only real problem I have is the arthritis in the hands is really murder the next day.

[CJ]

I was only wanting to process one or two at a time. I guess the plucker's don't make sense then. For some reason, I thought you bypassed the scalding process when using them, eliminating that step.

[JHinCA]

I have heard rumors of a plucker that does not require scalding, but have never seen one or talked to any one who used one. I have a vague idea that the no-scald ones are for waterfowl rather than chickens? Though that doesn't make sense because ducks are notoriously harder to pluck than chickens?