Promised Land Homestead

Processing Turkeys

I have 4 days off this weekend because of Veteran's Day so we decided to process our turkeys.  We should have done it 2 weeks ago, but we went on a church camping trip and then to see our parents, so this is the first weekend we've had the chance.

We decided to process the biggest one first to see how big he was.  We needed about a 15 lb turkey for Thanksgiving this year, so we were hoping he would be at least that big.  Uhhggg!  I could barely carry that sucker to the tree and it took three tries to hold him up with one arm while I wrapped the rope around this feet with the other hand.  After cutting his legs and head off I scalded him and put him in the plucker.  I flipped the switch and nothing happened!  The motor was trying its darndest to work, but he was so heavy that it just sat their humming, bogged down.  We tried picking him up, letting the motor work up to speed and then lowering him in.  No dice.  It just bogged down again.  Sooo...we spent the next 20 minutes hand plucking him.  After processing and bagging, we weighed him.

23 LBS!!!

Wow.  I guess you could say we grew him too long.  I love leftover turkey, but that's going to make a lot.  We knew all the others were smaller, but if we had to hand pluck those birds it was going to be a long day.  We did two more hens and they weighed in at 14 and 15 lbs respectively.  The Whizbang plucker had no problems with those and didn't bog down once. 

After those were done we processed one cockrel that was getting too old.  He'll probably be tough so we'll have to crock pot him.

We were beat after that and decided to call it quits.  Monday we're going to gauge how much room we have in the freezer and see about processing some more chickens.  We have three more turkey hens to process, but no room in the freezer to keep them.  I'm going to deliver two of the turkeys to some friends this coming week to free up some freezer space.  Then we'll process the remaining turkeys next weekend and deliver them as well.

We still don't know how much poundage we have total, but if our estimate on the weights of the remaining bird are correct, the turkeys came in at a cost of just over $2 per lb.  Not bad.

I would have taken pictures but our new digital camera has been in the shop for warranty work for a couple of weeks.  It's anyone's guess when we're getting it back.

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10:46 AM, Sunday, November 9, 2008 .. Posted by morningsunshine

wow - that is one big turkey. It would be interesting to know how much they weighed BEFORE processing, just to get an idea of how much meat you would get from a bird still walking. At least, that would interest me.... lol!

Untitled Comment

4:21 PM, Sunday, November 9, 2008 .. Posted by borderling

We butchered our turkeys and four unlucky chickens last weekend. We hand plucked five turkeys and it sure does take awhile. Our biggest weighed in at 18 pounds dressed out. The rest were real close. We roasted one up last Saturday and it sure was good. Having turkey soup today! The chickens were about 2 lbs. a piece. Small and hopefully tasty.
From Glory Farm,
Rhonda

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1:27 PM, Monday, November 10, 2008 .. Posted by Anonymous

We just butchered some of our turkeys and they were well over 30 lb, maybe even 40. We still used the whizbang plucker but we had to hold the turkey and kind of just roll it around in there while taking most of the weight ourselves. Got everything but a strip of feathers along the back, which were easy to hand pluck.

Jenny