Last week, the Goldstream Farmers Market was cancelled due to air quality issues. Smoke from the wildfires in the area was drifting into Fairbanks, resulting in conditions too extreme for conducting business outdoors. In consequence, we were not able to sell any of the chicken meat we have harvested. That problem, mostly an inconvenience, rippled down the logistical chain to cause a greater concern. Our freezer space was almost fully occupied and we still had 14 broilers in the pen. We resolved to reduce the volume of our personal meat supply to free the freezer space necessary to complete the season’s harvest.
Yesterday, we completely emptied the freezers that hold our personal food items. Meat that was in vacuum sealed bags was returned, untouched. Any chicken from a previous year that was still in whole bird form, or that was stored in freezer bags was set out in a cooler to thaw overnight.
Any backs, necks, or feet that had been kept for making stock were reluctantly discarded. We make efforts to avoid wasting anything that can be put to good use, but these items were of the least value and can be replaced when we do the parting of this year’s birds, if there is space available.
The reader might ask why we would not simply delay the harvest of the remaining live birds until after the meat in the freezers has been sold? The main reason is that the 14 broilers still in the pen are eating food that must be purchased, steadily increasing our expenses. Secondarily, the broilers keep growing, increasing the probability of death or injury from natural causes, which would decrease our profit. Lastly, quartering the larger birds is almost required because the price of a whole bird triggers sticker shock in the mind of the customer. In our area, other vendors are selling home-raised chickens for $8-12 per pound. We are selling whole birds for $6 per pound and quartered birds for $7 per pound. Even at our lower price, one of the larger whole birds might come to $50. Such a price seems objectionable to us, even if it is proportionally cheaper than the quarters of a similar-sized bird.
Today, we set about trimming the meat off the bones in preparation for grinding it. We started with the meat that was the most thawed and left the cooler open to hasten the thawing of the remainder. The grinder is most efficient when the meat is partially frozen and leaving the meat in strips helps the auger pull it through the system.
We ran the collected meat through the grinder each time we accumulated a sensible volume. Because we were trimming whole birds, there was both light and dark meat in each batch. To make the ground meat more uniform, each batch was run through the grinder twice. It turns out that there is no way to make the process photogenic. So, I am only showing the end product.
A couple of hours of effort resulted in 10 bags of ground chicken, each weighing about 1.5 pounds. The reduction in volume was sufficient that we will now have room to store the meat from the last broilers. They are getting so large that we will probably part all of them, rather than store any as whole birds.
