Processing 1000 broilers in a week with 2 people

Welcome back to another video, folks, and I want to share with you today the process of slaughtering 1,000 broiler chickens with just two of us. Now, long-term viewers will remember that I've posted the full process of how we raise everything on this farm, as well as how we run the slaughter facility and the packing. You can find out so much information on this channel if you look back over the years. However, we've never had the opportunity to do it just two people, and I've always been curious about how we would organize ourselves, and I want to share a bit of that process with you today. Firstly, quick disclaimer: we believe in animal-based agriculture and we believe it's the foundation of a healthy human diet. You might not believe that, we don't want to hear about it on this channel. And there are animals being slaughtered in this video. This is your disclaimer. If you don't want to see that, please don't watch, but please don't leave silly comments on our channel. You will be banned from my social media If you do. So I'm watching the stunner to make sure the amperage gets up before I cut the carotid arteries, make sure they're bleeding on both sides. So 12 birds at a time, and then we undress and go back out and collect more birds. And then we've worked out the workflow where Nora does scolding, I help with the feet and the plucking, and as soon as there's birds to eviscerate, I take them. And Nora finishes the others, and then she goes on to the clean station. And we'll take a look inside when we get to that point. So Nora now cleans down and is then getting in to receive the birds. Once they're bled out, I take the heads and pass them through, and by the time I pass these in, I'll start the next 6, pass them in, then I clean down, put on a different apron and wash my hands on the outside here and then go in, wash my hands again, and then I'm in evisceration mode. So we'll pop inside and see what that looks like. So to do this with 2 people requires a lot more time in cleaning down between the stations. That's really the sticking point. So in the flow of it, Nora would come out of the unit first, go down to collect birds, come back with birds, at which time I finished up inside, I would come out, wash down on the— so you wash your hands before you go out, change your boots, come out, and you wash on the outside too. Then we will go to here and Nora will put the birds in the kill cones and I will stun and bleed them, and they take a minute and a half to bleed out. So she's finished before me, she will wash down, change, wash her hands again, and come on the inside. I then pass 6 birds through and then the other 6 birds through. She's already started scolding And then the feet are removed and they go in the plucker. A little bit after, I come in, I wash down, I come in, change, wash. I help with the first run of 6 birds going through the plucker, then I can start eviscerating. Nora continues and does the other 6, then she washes down here and goes into the clean station and starts doing the fine details, checking the birds are immaculate. I help eviscerate until I'm out of eviscerated birds in the batch of 12. Then I go on to the clean station, then I wash down and change boots and come into the clean room while Nora goes out and collects more birds. I then hang the birds up in the chiller here, and then I wash down and come out, and the cycle starts again. And so we've got a pretty smooth way of running that with running 12 birds at a time to make sure they get into the chiller and chill down really fast. So the next step is I come in and I've changed and I take those legs and get them in the plucker, and Nora gets the next 3 in the scolder. And then once these 6 are in the scolder, I'll turn the scolder on, and then I can start eviscerating, and Nora will continue the next 6. So then the next step in the process, I start eviscerating as soon as Nora's done those 6. She will then start the clean process, and then once we've got all the birds ready, I will wash down again. Nora will go out and start collecting the next 12 birds, and I'll hang them up in the chiller, and then I'll go outside and I can clean down and put on slaughter gear again and kill the next batch. So we've got a good system going there that we can work best with 12 birds at a time like that and work in a hygienic, clear way. So then once I've processed those birds, I join in on the clean team and we get all those 12 birds ready before we change and get into the chiller. Pause for a quick ad read. Most of my subscribers here and followers on social media haven't actually read my books, and this is the most condensed, practical information and knowledge that I can share with you. My book, Regenerative Agriculture, is available on PDF as well as hard copy. We ship all over the world. The Ridgdale Farm Builds is 3D CAD plans of how to build all the farm infrastructure you see around on our social media. That one's only available as PDF. And our Farm Cookbook is focused on year-round nose-to-tail seasonal eating. It's just a joy to use and preserve all the food we have at the farm as well as what we fish and hunt. You can find them in the links in the bio. Check them out. Common question at past poultry trainings we've run over the last decade is, how would I set up a space if it was just me or a couple of people running the operation all the time. And in that case, I would build a more linear style setup, maybe 2 of these containers put together, and then I would invest more in machinery. So you can invest money and eliminate the need for other people to whatever degree you like. There's automated gutting machines, automated stunning machines, etc. But there's a low end and a high end to that. So one thing you can do is have an automated scolder that lifts the birds out the water when they're done. And is higher powered so it doesn't lose any temperature between. You can have a plucker that ejects the birds onto a conveyor belt that they roll down onto the evisceration table for you. So you can cut out a lot of the roles that we use here just by automation. Obviously that's a bigger investment initially, but bear in mind we built this unit for €14,000. This is an approved, uh, unit. It's the lowest cost unit I know of in Europe that's approved by the authorities for us to sell to restaurants, shops, customers, whatever. So if you double that investment, you could automate quite a lot of it, and if you tripled it, you could automate a bunch of the workflows too. So they're things to consider, but I would try and make it a more linear flow just so you can work with conveyors between the different stations just to make it much more useful for you. So we're typically running at 80 to 90 birds an hour, and we've also done 100 birds an hour with a really well-trained crew. With two of us, we're limited to more like 30 birds an hour. And one thing that really held us back this time was a lot of black pin feathers, which are unsightly and need to be picked out. And that's often dependent on the age of the birds. As they're growing out their feathers, they go through different stages of development where it's hard for the plucking machine to deal with that. So this batch really slowed us down and it took a lot of time, but we pride ourselves in making sure every bird is flawless and perfect. And that's something that industrial machinery just can't do. When we first built this unit 11 years ago now, we went out and we bought examples of every chicken available in the market. There were no organic chickens in Sweden at that time, and there's certainly no pastured poultry going on in Scandinavia. And we bought chickens of all the types we could find, and there were feathers left on them, there were— the oil gland was left on, there were bits of lung and you know, they're just processed en masse by machines in a way that we can always outcompete in terms of quality and, you know, taking care of doing a really immaculate job. So we're very proud of that, and we're super excited for all the people we've taught who have gone off and built their own facilities and run this as an enterprise themselves. And we're glad we can help you and serve you in that way. Okay, so packing with two people is a little bit more complicated because we have to do double work. We have to pack the birds, put them in grey crates and stack them up. Then we'll have to weigh them and label them and record the weights as a separate step. If you had 3 people, it'd be very fast, but with 2 people it's kind of double work, but that's the way it is with 2. As always, we're using our hot water treat bags. As long as you've got clean clothes— these are freshly laundered clothes— we seal them off. With cable ties. And you see I use masking tape on my finger because when you're pulling hundreds of cable ties, it cuts quite aggressively into your fingers, and that's exactly why I pull it. Then we've come to the clean scolder, and this scolder is only used for hot water for cleaning the slaughterery, and only this bucket goes in it ever, so it's always clean. And about 18-19 grease, and that's perfect for the hot water shrink bags. So now what I'm doing is storing these in sixes in the grey crates, and we'll stack them up, and then we'll do the labeling process afterwards. Okay, so birds are all stacked outside of the fridge now, but bear in mind the fridge is set at 1.4 to 1.8, so the birds are very cold inside. They get dipped in hot water, and they're in plastic now, and there's a lot of thermal mass in a small space, so they don't gain any temperature. Maybe on the surface 1, 1.5 degrees. As soon as they're labeled, they're going to the freezer space, so there's no issue about the temperature control. These are the labels you can look up, and they come in different sizes. But if you have a Dymo laser printer, this is a type of label that sticks in the freezer down to -40, which is fantastic. So you can just see the dates and our logo, and it's a frozen chicken, whole chicken. And so now we have to do this double step. We have to weigh the birds, and all we've got the dates on here already, so we just have to add the weight, and we'll write the weights down. So what we'll do is I'll put the bird on the scale, I'll write down the weight with the corresponding, uh, lists as the birds went into the chiller that you see in the record-keeping sheets. I write the weights down because they lose weight, they lose some water as they drain off in the chiller. So we record their final weight Write that on the label. So I'll pass this over and Laura is going to dry it off on the surface on the front just to make sure it's— the plastic is dry, and then stick the sticker on and put them back into crates. One thing to just think about is what your capacity is for the day. Now obviously clean down is a big procedure for us, and that works the same for however many birds you take in a day. So in this style, it's a lot of work each day just in the cleaning cycles and also in the day process where we're having to clean between stations, which you wouldn't have to do with more people. So all the little things that add up and take more time, but you've got to find out in your space and circumstance with the resources you've got what you can fit into a comfortable day for yourselves. So for reference, 1,000 birds with an average weight of 2.2 kilos at today's prices in Sweden wholesale, I can get around €28,000 for those birds. And if I was to sell them private to direct customer, then I'd get about €35,000. We're selling a lot more wholesale these days, some privately and some within our restaurant, but to give you some context, bear in mind we're in Sweden, cost of living, taxation is very high, and the pattern languages translate across countries and cultures maybe, but the specific pricing is very specific to Northern Europe, Scandinavia here. So it was an intense week, and we had lambs coming through, and we had the garden and all the nursery and cows and sheep and a lot going on, all the admin for the companies, and it was pretty intense. But I'm really glad to have had the experience to do that. It's taught me a bunch of little nuanced things that I wouldn't know without that experience. And yeah, I think if you organize your workflow, you know, it's certainly comfortable for most people to do 100 birds and pack them in the same day. So you could organize around, say, batches of 300 birds and process 100 a week would be very manageable, or you could bulk batch it like we did, and you could always do 2 slaughters a week for 3 weeks in a row and cover 1,000 birds quite comfortably. You have room to do that several times in the season, such as us. So it's a very great enterprise that I stand behind, and I'm definitely glad of having a bigger crew during the main summer months. But it was a very rewarding process, and we did an extremely good job. So hope this video was useful for you in some way. And let us know in the comments if you've got further questions, etc. See you in a video soon, folks!