The Story of the Featherman

Raising pastured poultry Salatin-style in the mid-90s put our meat business on the fast track. (If you are raising chickens you must have Pastured Poultry Profit$ by Joel Salatin.) Seven neighboring families joined together to build pens, buy chicks, compare, compete, commiserate, and, mostly, to process together. We won a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant and built a mobile processing unit after a few hundred birds were processed in our shed.

The mobile processing unit being assembled

We drove 5 hours one way to pay $750 for a used stainless steel plucker that was 4 feet in diameter. We considered ourselves lucky since pluckers were rare as hen’s teeth at that time.

We soon found that four birds spinning in a plucker designed for 12 to 15 just didn’t pick well no matter how we scalded them so we re-rigged our home-made dunker to hold eight birds. (The metal cage to the left of the yellow, half-drum, scald tank held eight birds and, with a single pull of a wire rope, would release them into the plucker.)

That worked better but severely taxed our 30-gallon scald tank with electric heating elements. A bigger problem still was that our lift motor on the dunker was now under powered and needed a human assist on every raise. It was the ten power lifts per batch of birds that broke the camel’s back – in this case I was the camel!

Alice and I were processing 160 birds per day and I was crippled by the end of the second day. We limped over to the Amish butcher shop and helped Ernie Kauffman and his family clean the last of our birds.

Ernie Kauffman’s original tub plucker

We showed Ernie the video of Joel’s machinery and processing methods and he was mightily impressed. At the time Ernie could pluck a chicken in less than 30 seconds with his ancient table top plucker. After I took Ernie to see some expensive equipment up close, Ernie went right home and built a plucker with a cut down 50-gallon drum, a 2 x 4 frame and a lawn mower engine. This is the photo I submitted to Farm Show magazine in 1995 with the words, "Somebody ought to develop this."

Ernie’s machine spawned a revolution in small scale processing. It inspired the Jako line of equipment, designed by our friend Kenneth King, as well as several simple plan sheets (the first by me) and Herrick Kimball’s Anyone Can Build A Mechanical Tub Style Chicken Plucker in 2002.

As fate would have it, Alice and I stumbled upon a mini-scale of processing poultry at the Hong Kong farmer’s market.

(After communal slaughter and scald, vendors at the Hong Kong Farmer’s Market cart their chickens to their stalls to pluck. Five birds are bundled by one foot through slaughter and scald. Note also the crates filled with chickens and the large green feather barrel. These guys sell a lot of chickens every day and there were dozens of venders like this. Transparency in food preparation is normal in countries still strongly connected to the land.)

We saw the same thing in Indonesia where Alice’s parents live, and, with great anxiety, piles of red tape and translation nightmares, we imported a batch of them. We named it the Featherman Jr.

The Featherman Junior at work

It broke the $1000 price barrier (before Jako you had to spend $3600), picked beautifully, but had two drawbacks – an 18” tub diameter (leaving 12” between fingers) and a belt drive. That meant two chickens at a time, no turkeys and periodic belt adjustments. We knew we could improve on it and save on shipping fees and heart attacks.

Syl’s plucker, the first Featherman plucker

The first, full sized Featherman pluckers – with genuine 50 gallon drums as tubs! – were made by me and another Jamesport Amish neighbor, Syl Graber. They looked like Ernie’s but had metal frames, shrouded 1 horsepower motors, and 10:1 speed reducers. After two years we designed the current plastic model of the Featherman.

Whether you are using a Featherman Junior, one of Syl Graber’s originals or our current Featherman plucker, you owe a debt of gratitude (as do we) to Amish ingenuity, Asian miniaturization, and my - formerly - bad back.

The Journey to Wonderland

Our journey to this these 64-acres we call Wonderland, next door to Poosey Conservation Area and the largest Amish settlement west of the Mississippi, has taken us through overlapping periods of row crop farming, purebred cattle business, management intensive grazing and a natural meat business.

We migrated from the center of conventional agriculture to the edge of alternative agriculture. When you start as green city kids that is a long row to hoe. Fortunately, we had many amazing teachers along the way and – the real blessing of being new to it all – we kept our minds open to the many possibilities available.

It’s always more fun on the edge (and the lead dog always gets the best view!) so, in the spirit of chronicling and showing off, but also with the sincere hope of inspiring your ride on the edge, I'll share some views and activities that led us to Wonderland.

The purebred Gelbvieh herd and controlled grazing – 1980s & 90s.

With a 45-day calving period, management intensive grazing and no supplemental feeding, we developed an elite herd of females recognized by the Gelbvieh Association for outstanding reproductive performance. The Gelbvieh cattle were our bread and butter through the 80s.

Grassfed meant organic in 1995

After travelling to New Zealand, first in 1987, then '91 and finally '95, we become fervent believers in the power of proper pasture management. To that end I organized the Green Hills Farm Project grazing group in 1988 and helped Jim Gerrish and Fred Martz start the popular University of Missouri Grazing School at Linneus.

During this period, I couldn't stop preaching the gospel according to grass and contributed to the Stockman/Grassfarmer frequently as well as a smattering of other magazines like the Country Journal above.

From pasture raised to direct marketing didn't seem like a big leap. We already had a unique, healthy product that was simple to sell. We knew the world was going to discover grass fed meats when Jo Robinson discovered them and produced her fabulous little book (below) and seminal website, www.eatwild.com.

Schafer Farms steer and lambs on the cover of Pasture Perfect by Jo Robinson

Pastured pigs that come when they’re called

Bush pigs that don't

Free Ranger chick on border patrol - Prairie Schooner in background

Schooner as Shade Mobile in mid-summer between batches of chickens

To better utilize the forages, we added lambs in 1989 and began direct meat sales to consumers. Pastured chickens and pigs were added in 1993, doubling our direct marketed revenues every year for the next four years. Seeing the potential to support ourselves on our own farm, we left the 540-acre family farm and homesteaded our own 64-acres eight miles away.

Putting the straw bales in

Having lived in a drafty, old, secondary farm house for 20 years, we opted for an efficient and environmentally friendlier alternative and built our Wonderland home. 1998-2000.

Those are the highlights of two decades of agricultural adventures. For an historical perspective of the evolution of the Featherman plucker check out "The Story of the Featherman."