How an animal is raised is very important to us. We take great pride in how we treat our animals, how we care for them, and ultimately how we process them for consumption.
It’s never a good day for anyone on the farm, but it is a necessary day if we want to provide high-quality food to our family, our friends, and our customers. If you’d like to learn more about how we process our animals, please keep reading below for a detailed description of our process. If you prefer to skip this page, we completely understand. You can leave this page knowing that we process them as quickly as possible, as humanely as possible, and with as little stress on the animal as possible.
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If you’re still reading, we know that the details of how a meat animal is killed and is treated during that process are important to you. While we will try not to be gory, it is a graphic process.
The night prior to processing day, we remove feeders from our coupes. We will top up all of the watering systems so that the animals can stay hydrated, but we don’t want excess undigested feed inside the animal as it can lead to contamination of meat and can make the process more difficult.
As we’ve mentioned throughout this site, we raise our poultry in mobile coupes on our chemical-free pasture. As a result, they are often out in the field several hundred feet away from our house and garage area where we process our animals. We think this is a good thing.
When it’s time to process our animals, we take the animals one at a time from the mobile coupes. They are held upside down with their head facing down towards the ground. In this position, they relax and nearly fall asleep- it is very calming to the animal. Since our family interacts with our animals each day, picking them up and taking a walk isn’t something that is out of the ordinary. We walk the animal over to our processing area and place them in a restraint cone, again with their head facing down.The restraint cone holds the chicken and prevents them from getting too excited or flailing around.
To slaughter the bird, we use an extremely sharp knife and make a single cut, just below the ear, to the jugular and the carotid artery. This cut, in combination with the animal being positioned with their head down, ensures that it passes out very quickly from blood loss and feels very little pain.
While we do not bless the animal or the facility during this process, the practice we use to slaughter the animal is the same one used in Halal and Kosher methods. Respect for the animal, both in life and in death, are of the utmost priority for our family.
After the animal passes, it is allowed to drain to remove the blood from the carcass. Once this is completed, the bird is placed into a scalding tank of hot water. This step helps to open up the animal’s pores and allows the feathers to be removed more easily.
The bird is then removed from the scald tank and placed into a plucking machine that removes the feathers from the animal. Once plucking has completed, a visual inspection takes place to check the skin of the animal for any additional pin feathers that may have been missed as well as for any severe blemishes, bruises, or sores that would prevent the animal from being processed further.
At this time, evisceration occurs. This is the process of removing the internal organs from the bird. The organs are removed and carefully inspected for proper appearance and function. If everything looks good, the bird is then rinsed, cleaned up, and put into a bath of ice water to immediately chill.
The birds will chill in an ice water bath overnight to relax their muscles. If they are frozen right after butchering, the meat can become tough. This process helps to prevent that. Once removed from the ice water bath, they are again inspected for any defects. If the animal is free of defects, it is placed into a heat-shrink bag and packaged. It is then weighed, labeled, and placed into one of our freezers to be frozen.
Thank you for taking the time to read about how we process animals at Our Way Farms. We hope that you understand the amount of care that goes into making sure our animals live a good life each and every day. Even on their last day, we want to make sure that they have a quick and humane death. It is incredibly important to us that we show these animals respect, and that we honor their death by utilizing the entire animal to provide high-quality nutrition to our local community.