Poultry Feather Plucker for Chickens

Raising poultry for food is an economical and healthier alternative to grocery store purchases. You monitor (a) what they consume (no steroid abuse for quick in-the-factory growth) and (b) how large to grow them based on your family’s needs. But what about all those feathers to pluck? We’ll get to saving time and money on chicken pickers below.)

If you don’t think the chicken you buy in the grocery stores are loaded with steroids, chemicals, antibiotics and hormones, do a quick search on google for the thousands of fines laid annually on commercial poultry growers in the United States and Canada. You’ll never eat chicken or poultry that you didn’t grow yourself again!

Growing poultry is one thing. Easy enough if you have a little extra space. Processing the birds is an altogether different challenge!

flewthecoop

There are two alternatives to preparing your birds for the freezer:

hire a professional to kill, clean, pluck and wrap (around here it costs approximately $5 per bird), or
do it yourself (it really isn’t that challenging). If you need advice on the process drop me an email, or buy the book "Raising Chickens Right" for complete instructions that you can read offline, print out or easily reference at any time.

Processing your own poultry for the freezer is time consuming work but when you consider the alternatives (eating all those chemicals and hormones) it is time well spent. Plus, there are shortcuts and ways to ease the pain of laboring over plucking chicken feathers all day.

Poultry Plucker – "Aw Chicken Feathers!"

The longest and more tiresome part of the job of preparing live chickens for the freezer is plucking all those darn feathers.

Although incredibly helpful to the task of plucking your own birds, the two items at right are often sold out and the site not particularly reliable as to when more will be ordered. However, they are the only site online offering these products – and even the local country feed and seed stores don’t sell these (although for the life of me I don’t understand why not)!

(You might want to click through those links to check if they’ve come in since my time of writing – they seem to come into stock during summer months.)

I did find that McMurray Hatchery was selling similar pluckers to the ones you’ll see in the Country Store at prices of $500 to $1000 – I just couldn’t with good conscience let you spend that much money for a small home flock when I know much cheaper exist.

You’ll find a lot of links online to build your own – but you can tell just by looking at them they aren’t going to last for more than 3 birds. Who has time and money to spend just to create something that barely does the job and only has the power to do a few birds before it collapses?

If you are big on time, you can buy a book to build your own plucker – the mechanical tub variety is the only style worthy of your efforts.

If you’re short on time (waiting on a how-to book, gathering the supplies required, building the darn thing) – gosh that’s a few months anyway – you’re best off buying a new or second hand model – directly from the Country Store, at reduced prices.

I show a few below that are available at the time of writing – poultry pluckers for small scale farmers.