Yes, we butcher our own chickens - and here's why.

It’s chicken processing week here on the farm. On Friday evening, after the sun has gone down, we’ll take the chickens from their outdoor portable shelters. And early on Saturday morning, we’ll work with our crew to butcher and flash freeze all of them. 

It’s a lot of work to butcher our own chickens. The days can be tiring and stressful. And it’s taken quite a bit of investment, too – we rebuilt half of our barn to create a special processing area. 

So why do we do it? Why not drive them several hours to a USDA processing facility? I think the best way to answer this question is to tell you a story. 

It was a freakishly cold day in October, about four years ago. Temperatures were dipping into the thirties, the wind was picking up, and freezing rain and hail were expected. 

At the time, I was still working at the community college teaching classes, and I had early morning classes that day. But despite the conditions - and the lack of other adult help - Joe knew that it simply was the day we were supposed to process our chickens. They were loaded up in the crates and ready to go.

So, Joe bundled up our three young boys on his own, set up the tables under the pop-up tent, and amid the flickering propane light and his freezing fingers, butchered and eviscerated the last fifty broiler chickens for the season.

Some days on the farm are just like that. Everything seems like it’s working against you, and yet you have to press on. Days like that can be demoralizing. They are long and arduous. But they can also be inspiring and affirming.

It would be easy, after a day like that, for Joe to decide to throw in the towel and move poultry processing off the farm. In fact, many small family farms at our scale – we now process 300 chickens in half a day – do just that.

But we decided to dig in. Over the winter, our friend Logan built a simple processing facility that could withstand the elements, and allow us to keep the work here. So, the question is – why? Why is it important to process our poultry ourselves?

From an ethical standpoint, processing our poultry here ensures that our chickens always receive the highest standard of care, from the beginning of their lives until the end. 

They do not have to endure the stress of riding for hours in tightly packed crates in a truck. They are killed humanely, in a manner that minimizes pain and suffering. They are handled with the same care and respect that they have received in life.

Yet processing our birds here also allows us to design an efficient system that prioritizes quality. Our chickens go through four stages when they are processed – they are killed, scalded, plucked, and eviscerated (feet, head, and organs removed). They are then inspected, sprayed with a simple vinegar and water mixture (not chlorine, which is used in USDA facilities) and placed in a bucket of ice to chill before being sealed and labeled. 

This process – from the killing to the ice bath – takes about 3 minutes, which is a much shorter period of time than would occur in a large processing facility. 

In that process, we inspect every chicken by hand. Because we’re feeding our family with this food, we care about the quality. We want you to have the best food possible – the kind of food we’d be willing to feed ourselves.

As the kids have grown, they’re no longer toddlers tugging at Joe’s pants as he completes this work. They’re now large enough to help in the work – and they’re quite eager to do so. In fact, as they help me pull chickens out of the ice bath, bag them, seal them, and label them, they often elbow me out of the way if I’m not moving fast enough for them.

We’re proud to process our poultry on the farm. It not only ensures our standards, but helps insulate us from the fragile systems in our country that are prone to breaking down, as we learned just a few years ago during the pandemic. 

In a time when we have to schedule beef and pork appointments 12-18 months in advance, we can control our poultry processing schedule. Likewise, because we work with a small team of people from Siler City, we can put our money toward people in the community - not a large corporation. 

We hope that you can recognize this quality and care in the chicken that you put on your table. Want to see a (very brief) tour of our processing facility? You can do so here.