Building the Whizbang Plucker

When deciding to raise chickens for meat, a number of considerations need to be made. “How many do we need?” “Where will they live?” “What will we feed them?” Perhaps the most difficult question in an aspiring poultry farmer’s future, though, is, “How will we process them?” When processing a chicken (or any other form of poultry, for that matter), the most difficult part, and often the most time-consuming, involves feather removal. Anyone who has plucked a bird or two knows just how much work this is — and it’s tedious work at that. Some time ago, I had a mind to fill my freezer with fresh poultry, but the prospect of plucking all those birds by hand struck me as daunting, if not impossible.

Fortunately, the mechanized feather