Poultry Processing, Rettland Farm Style

So tell me. What do you see here?

"Well", you say, "I see a U-Haul truck that rolled off the assembly line sometime back when Milli Vanilli was a really cool music act, ole Ron Reagan was riding off into the sunset, and Freddy Kreuger was scaring the hell out of a whole generation of pre-teens. Oh yeah, and the aforementioned truck also looks like someone spent a little quality time gettin' jiggy with a DeWalt sawzall..."

Um. Okay. Correct on all counts.

But dude. Let's take a look in the box, that's what really matters. Come on, walk around back here with me...



So, whaddya think is behind the door? An ultimate party wagon complete with big screens, leather recliners, and multiple beer meisters to be used for hardcore tailgating at PSU Football games this fall, you say? No. But a damn good idea though....(stroking chin thoughtfully...)

All right, all right, enough suspense. Let's take a look. That's it, roll up the door, and feast your eyes upon the interior...

Tah. Dah.

Welcome to the Rettland Farm Mobile Poultry Processing facility, or MPU for short. This is my solution to the problem of finding local, reliable, sanitary facilities to slaughter the poultry that is raised on small farms like mine.

I wanted to build a facility that met a variety of needs. First, I needed a place that matched or exceeded any food processing facility in cleanliness. I needed to be sure that the integrity of every chicken was as high when it came out of the facility as it was when it went in. So we needed washable floors, walls and ceilings. We needed bright lights so we could see what the heck we were doing. We needed REALLY hot water. We needed LOTS of stainless steel.

Second, I wanted a facility that could be used to educate the public in general, and my loyal customers in particular, about what went on behind the closed doors of a facility that turns live animals into food. I think it's highly unlikely that the public would ever be given that opportunity to "peak behind the curtain" at a large scale, commercial slaughterhouse, and I think that's unfortunate. For my operation, I wanted to literally throw open the door, and shed light on the whole process, from the kill to the chill. To welcome and even encourage the presence of those people who are the ultimate end users of my birds.

Lastly, I wanted this facility to be a resource for other small farms like me, who may otherwise decide that the rewards of selling amazing, wholesome poultry to people and their families just wasn't worth the hassle of getting it to them. I wanted them to be able to use this facility on their own farms, using their own labor and their own quality standards to process the food to which they affixed their names. Take the abattoir to the animal instead of the other way around, so the animals died where they were raised, and didn't spend their last day (or two) crammed into a cage on a fast moving truck.

So enough background. Ready for a tour?

First stop for the birds: the kill station. The birds are placed head down in these stainless steel funnels, and their heads protrude from the bottom. One quick, small cut with a sharp knife, and they bleed to death.

Just across from the kill station are the defeathering machines. The machine on the left is a scalder. The scalder is where the dead birds are placed in scalding hot water, which they rotate through for about a minute or so. This process loosens the feathers.

The chickens then go into the machine on the right, called the picker or the plucker. This has about 1oo rubber fingers inside it, and a rotating disc on the bottom that spins the birds around for another minute or so, until the feathers are gone.

Next stop is the eviscerating (a big word for "gutting") rail. The shackles you see hanging on the rail hold the birds, so there is no surface contact that could be a source of bacterial contamination. At different points on the rail, the birds are alternately hung by the neck or the feet to allow the worker to remove the entrails and wash the carcass thoroughly. After all other unusable parts have been removed, the feet and the neck come off, and the result is a bird that looks like...well, like the raw bird that we're all accustomed to seeing.

The carcass now spends about a half hour in a cool bath of tap water to start the chilling process.

But after that...

...it's into the chill tank. This to me was a critical piece of equipment. It was very important to me to have a reliable way to chill a large quantity of chickens to a safe temperature very quickly. I think this tank serves the purpose. The tank will hold up to 500 gallons of water, at least 200 chickens, and chill it to 34 degrees F, and keep it there indefinitely.

The bird spends about an hour or so in the tank, but it is usually chilled to below 40 degrees F in a half hour. Not much chance for bacterial growth there.

After the bird comes out of the chill tank, it hits the table. Here it can simply be bagged whole, ready for delivery to the customer, or it can be broken down into breasts, wings, leg quarters, whatever we have a need for. This is a new service that we couldn't provide before, and based on the way these parts are snatched up, it is definitely nice to have this ability. I also don't use any machines, other than the knives you see here, to break the birds down into parts--we don't need them. How do you break down a chicken with just a knife, you ask? Come see us sometime. We'll show you.

Sooo, this concludes your nickel tour of the Rettland Farm MPU. If you'd like the chance to see the facility in operation, please contact me--we'd love to have you come out and look over our shoulders for awhile. If you're a small farmer who is looking for a way to process your poultry in a safe, reliable way, I'd like to hear from you too. This old U-Haul truck holds a lot of opportunity for everyone.

Now, about that PSU tailgate mo-sheen...

Note: I owe an incredible amount of gratitude to my cousin, Marc Barron, who is a skilled electrician, and who generously gave me many of his Saturdays off this winter and spring to help me wire this baby. I am many things, but an electrician isn't one of them, I discovered. If it weren't for him, I'd be in the fetal position in the corner of a padded room right now, muttering incoherently about wire gauges and full load ampacity, with my vision for this MPU laying in tatters with the rest of my sanity. Thanks Ned. You rock.