2.7. The poultry abattoir

A poultry slaughterhouse includes:

- A reception room for live animals (chickens, spent hens, etc)

- A slaughter room equipped with stunner, bleeding funnels, scalding tank, plucker, finishing rack (evisceration), trolleys.

- A storage (coldrooms), packing and shipment room.

Various other utensils are required: knives and scissors for sticking and bleeding, shackles, knife sharpeners, small utensils for evisceration, plastic crates for transporting the birds, cleaning equipment.

Choice of site

The supply of clean water should be guaranteed.

It should be located in a poultry production area (chickens, spent hens) so that live animals do not have to be transported over long distances. Refrigerated vehicles will be used to transport fresh produce over long distances. Access should be easy. The location should be such that once the prevailing winds have swept over it, they do not then reach the poultry houses.

Production capacity

Slaughter may be manual (units handling 50 to 80 chickens per hour) or semi-automatic handling 250 to 500 chickens per hour or automated, producing 5,000 chickens per hour. In the Sahelian zone, manual or semi-automatic abattoirs with a low throughput are advisable.

It should be noted that a poultry abattoir consumes about 1.2 to 1.5 litres of clean water per chicken per hour, i.e. 300 to 375 litres per hour for an hourly production of 250 chickens.

The abattoir will not slaughter birds for more than 4 to 5 hours per day, the remaining time being needed to clean and disinfect the utensils and rooms and to organize the work.

Capacity of coldrooms

Ready-to-roast chickens weighing about 1.2 kilos: about 200 kilos/sq m/m height

Boned chicken flesh: about 250 kilos/sq m/m height.

With these dimensions, the ground area includes the space set aside for storage and for access. It is advisable not to store in piles higher than 4 m.

Maximum duration of storage in coldrooms (temperature 2-4°C):

- drawn chicken (intestines extracted) 72 hours;
- eviscerated chicken (intestines, crop, gizzard, oesophagus, head and feet removed): 7 days.

The best deep-freezing technique is the quick method reaching -40°C which allows the product to be stored for several months at a temperature of -20-25°C provided that the cold chain is not broken. Arrange for a back-up generator.

Recovering slaughterhouse waste

When properly processed and dried, slaughterhouse waste, feathers, blood, heads and feet, lights) can be reused for animal feed, but processing equipment is only available for large industrial units. Moreover, these processing plants consume an enormous amount of thermic energy. It is estimated that daily waste production must reach 1 ton per day to justify a plant to process feathers, which must be hydrolysed under controlled pressure, and waste to be converted into poultry by-product meal.