Poultry Processing machines

Chicken processing machines are used by slaughter houses to process chickens into sellable cuts and portions. A poultry processing machine will kill, de-feather, and debone your chicken. It will also cut the chicken into salable portions. A slaughter house should not be on the same property as a broiler house or chicken layer house. The chance of disease is too great – not to mention the fact that the smell will cause much distress to your live birds, which will in turn affect your production figures.

If you are doing broilers on your farm – or layers, you do not really want to start processing chicken meat on the same premises – not matter how fancy your processing equipment is. The chances of disease crossing over to your chicken house is just too great. Even small farms who take small batches of broilers across to slaughter houses have problems when they are miles apart. In rural areas you will often find that the chicken farmer is also doing the slaughtering – and without any fancy equipment – they slaughter by hand and pluck by hand. They then pack and clean in the same room – not great – but that is how it goes in poorer rural areas. All of this is totally unmonitored – I doubt any official will have ever visited the facility to check on health issues and cleanliness issues. While on a small scale this may not result in any problems it is still a concern for the community – they of course know nothing about the condition of the poultry processing plant – if you could call it that. The chicken farmer will say nothing – both operations belong to the farmer. What the farmer does not realise is that he or she is not doing them selves any favours – the chances of either his broilers getting sick – or of contamination to his chicken meat, are very high – and after a few months of slaughtering any facility without stainless steel counters and concrete floors is going to become a real bacteria farm. With no record keeping – manuel or computerised, tracing the supply chain just is not going to happen. Poultry software is not something the farmer even knows about – how can the farmer even think about software when they do not have electricity to even run a computer.

The chicken farmer would do much better to allow a proper facility with poultry processing machines and chicken processing machines do the job -  slaughter equipment is expensive though – and in the backwaters of South Africa money is scarce – the volumes required to make a god profit on a slaughter house are just to high to set up such a business – with the result being that the farmer must do the job themselves. Transporting the flock that is ready for slaughter a few hundred kilometers is just not an option – and naturally there is the return trip with the processed chicken. Government will do well to supply grants for processing equipment and slaughter houses – especially as they cannot monitor what happens in rural areas – they cannot even monitor what goes on in large processing plants in larger cities and towns. WIth the challenges of no running water, no rubbish collecting services, no electricity at all in most rural areas it is no wonder that enterprising farmers are handling the whole supply chain – from growing the chickens, slaughtering and packing the chicken meat and then selling directly to the public. While this is a fact of farming in rural areas it does not remove the threat to the customers – no testing or refrigeration through these processes means that at some stage or another someone is going to get sick – and when they do there is going to be very little done in finding the source of the illness – if indeed it is at all possible to trace the food and the supplier – most of the packaging is done without branding and all of it is done without sell by dates and other legal information that should be on all packaging.