It’s a beautiful September day here on the farm. The temperature is perfect, it’s not too hot, but not cold either. Fall is definitely in the air!

With fall comes the processing of animals that we’ve raised this year. The first ones we’ll butcher are the cornish cross chickens. Their sole purpose in life is for meat. They are easy to butcher at 8 weeks old. Any longer than that and they start having health problems. We’ve actually had some die of heart attacks in the past.

This year we managed to raise our chickens on grass. They get feed too, but they haven’t had any of the health problems that we’ve faced in the past with keeping them penned up. They all look healthy and happy running around eating bugs and grass.

Our thought process is that we want them to only have one bad day in their whole existence with us, and that is their last day. Thats not to say that they will suffer, it’s quite the opposite. Their demise is swift and painless. They don’t even know it’s coming. I think the worst part for them was that they didn’t get any breakfast as we wanted their system to be free of food for butchering. Don’t worry, they had a big dinner.

The boys brought them over to a temporary pen so that the Rudd Rangers, our other meat birds, could go ahead and eat. It was closer to where we were setup too.

This year we bought a plucker. That thing was a gamechanger! In the past, I have mostly plucked the birds, and every time the kids all promised to help. Well they would get thru one and decide they didn’t like it so much. So I would be stuck plucking all those birds, and as much as I don’t mind it, it takes a while to do. This sweet machine takes care of plucking in 15 seconds! I can’t tell you how giddy I was watching it work!

I won’t go into very much detail about the day as some don’t like to hear about it. However I will state that it was a smooth process and everybody did great helping. We even managed to recruit help from one of the kids down the way. All in all we ended up with 134 lbs of chicken to hopefully get us thru the winter. We still have 29 Rudd rangers to process in the next couple of weeks too. I think with all of them our family and our extended family should eat pretty good this winter

In other news, the pigs are weighing in around 200 lbs. They’re getting so big, but luckily they’re still pretty friendly. Our garden is mostly finished for the year so once the goats clean up what they can, the pigs will have their turn rooting and turning it over.

On the goat front, our little bottle babies only have two weeks left until they are completely weaned. They are just the sweetest little things too. The rest of the goats are doing great too. Breeding season is officially here and the bucks are making sure to let us know! They stink to high heavens, and are making all kinds of ridiculous noises trying to woo the girls.

Oh I almost forgot, we’re finally getting green and blue eggs and boy are they pretty! We’re still having to hunt for some of them because I am overdue in clipping wings. We’ve got some plans for expansion on our chicken run soon so hopefully that will deter the desire to escape as much.

All in all, everything seems to be ok for the most part around here. Hopefully all is well in your neck of the woods too.