Our friend Shane drove down from Charleston, just to help us for the day.
In their new paddock.
Mary Ann took care of the turkeys since she arrived in late August. Processing them would not be easy for her. I was so blessed to get this picture of her with the turkeys. (She doesn't like photos!)
Our group working. We had four WWOOFers, and another family of three that wanted to process their own birds joined us to help. In addition we had Dad, Shane, JB (of course!) and our new friend Rick from church who helped us with BOTH the chickens and the turkeys.
Then we move into the garage for quality control. The birds were SO big we had to use this tool that our WWOOFer Lane is holding to remove the necks. All the birds ranged between just under 15 to close to 29 pounds!
This is just ONE breast cut down. We took a few turkeys and cut them down. We plan to grind some of them in the next few days/weeks.
This was our largest Tom. 28.5 pounds!
In the end we ended up with about 1,030 pounds of meat. And here is where you feel your hard work finally pay off. It cost us approximately $3,000 to buy these birds (about $18 a piece as a baby!) and feed them for 18 weeks. We have sold about 20 and have made about $2,500. We hope to sell around 5-10 more, but even if we don't, we can eat the other 500 pounds of our meat for close to free. This has been our goal all along, to make the kind of meat we want to eat and be off-set our costs by selling the meat to other people who appreciate the high quality of what we do and value that we are treating our animals with respect until their last moments.
It was a HARD day but MAN did it feel good to be so productive!
1 comment:
I heart this on so many levels!!!
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