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Chicken Pluckers Make Selling Poultry Easier
Pluck'n feathers is the toughest part of getting chickens from the feeder to the freezer. Pickwick & Knase has equipment that makes the job fast for any size operation.
"We have equipment to do one bird at a time or 300 an hour," says Tom Knase, owner of the company. "People get started raising 30 birds for the
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Chicken Pluckers Make Selling Poultry Easier 29-1-7 Pluck'n feathers is the toughest part of getting chickens from the feeder to the freezer. Pickwick & Knase has equipment that makes the job fast for any size operation.
"We have equipment to do one bird at a time or 300 an hour," says Tom Knase, owner of the company. "People get started raising 30 birds for themselves and then a couple hundred to sell to friends and some expand to a couple thousand a year."
At the bottom end of the poultry processing line is a tabletop scalder like the $190 30-gal. PKES Electric Scalder that makes feathers easy to pluck. A tabletop picker sells for $170 without a motor or $470 with a motor. It can defeather a bird in one to two minutes.
At the other end of the line there's an automatic scalding unit at $6,200 that dips up to five chickens at a time in boiling water. Once scalded, the five birds can be dropped into large drum-type chicken pluckers like the $4,600 Spin-Pik Jr. Batch Picker. In 20 seconds they are plucked clean, including pinfeathers, and ready to be butchered.
Chicken pluckers simply consist of a series of rotating rollers with rubber fingers. The fingers pull on the feathers as they rotate against the bird, rubbing the feathers away from the skin.
"Much of the equipment was designed in the early 1930's and hasn't changed much," says Knase. "The chicken plucker is a very simple machine with not much that can go wrong. People are often amazed at how well it will pull the feathers out of a bird."
Other equipment offered by the company in their catalog and on their website includes stunning knives, gizzard peelers, overhead shackle lines, powered eviscerators and worktables. Everything from a knife for sticking a bird to plastic bags to freeze it is available.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Tom Knase, Pickwick & Knase, 7887 Fuller Road, Suite 116, Eden Prairie, Minn. 55344-2100 (ph 800 808-3335 or 952 906-3333; fax 952 906-3335; website: www.pickwickknase.com).
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