On Thursday, November 4th, Milan Zoology classes prepared to travel to Munsell’s chicken processing plant in Fowlerville for the annual broiler contest hosted by the FFA. The students started their day by arriving at school by 6 AM. They were tasked with loading up the top five chickens from each of the 8 pens. Unfortunately, multiple chickens that were chosen died the night before and the students had to quickly choose others to replace them.
After an hour-long ride to the plant, the students were ready to watch the processing of the chickens. Right after the chickens were processed, one student from each pen entree chose the top three birds to be officially judged. Following the judging, the chickens were put into ice buckets for an hour and a half. After the chickens were cooled down, students grabbed them out of the iceboxes and then took them to be vacuum sealed and taken back to the bus for transport back to the high school.
Once the students got back to the high school, multiple students stayed in the greenhouse to clean up, and start disassembling, the pens. Many of the students went into the classroom afterward with the finished and packaged chickens.
As a reward for the students who raised the chickens, they were allowed to take one chicken for free. The rest of the chickens were to be put up for sale at 10 dollars apiece. When asked how she felt about the turn out of the contest related to last year, the Zoology teacher, Ms. Forbush, said “It went well, considering we were only allowed one person per pen last year due covid and it turned out to be three people plus me. Whereas this year we had a total of 21 people”. As far as the competition part of the contest, there were not any notable entries for the Milan chapter. The Milan FFA is also offering chickens for purchase to anyone who may be interested in a chicken for Thanksgiving.
*Photo taken by: Josephine Forbush
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