We often have two schools in our house….Anita’s school of planting seeds around the community and seeing if they will grow into a business; and my school of ‘if we build it they will come’. These schools met head on when it came to processing equipment. The cautious school wanted to process the birds by hand to learn from the experience, while my school said ‘this is the make or break step in the process for most producers- we should throw money at the problem and at the very least give this a fair shake’ (I am sensing slight bias here – anyone else picking up on that). Since we will have friends and customers helping with the processing we really want this to be a good experience for all – we went for the equipment.We picked the Featherman pastured poultry insta-kit – everything we need to become processors in one shipment. We ended up with a Featherman Pro plucker, a 40 gallon scalder, and dunking helper, and a carousel killing cone setup. The Featherman folks were great to work with and everything arrived in good condition. They also threw in David Schafers’ book(which I am almost finished with 12 hours later), a couple of feeders, a float for the scalder, and a threaded ball valve for the drain. They did a good job giving us a complete package.Today we are going to look at a used trailer to mount the equipment and create a mobile processing unit. The Featherman folks are also looking at adding a rental network to their website for equipment. We are thinking about this option; however, we really want to fully break in the machinery before sending it out. Rentals are definitely on the horizon. We tried to rent a unit from the Willamette Valley but couldn’t work out the logistics on our end.Next post will hopefully showcase the Mobile Processing Unit (MPU).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We often have two schools in our house….Anita’s school of planting seeds around the community and seeing if they will grow into a business; and my school of ‘if we build it they will come’. These schools met head on when it came to processing equipment. The cautious school wanted to process the birds by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[23,25,27,26,28,177,29],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-processing","tag-featherman","tag-mobile-processing-unit","tag-pastured","tag-plucker","tag-poultry","tag-processing","tag-slaughter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatamericanegg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}