A little farm photo dump in reverse chronological order...

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A little farm photo dump in reverse chronological order including some stuff I’ve put in my stories this past few days, and some assorted photos around and about. I got a cat-themed birthday cake via farmkid’s art directing, and we’ve been busy in various ways. (at Laughing Earth) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEoXFdnBzS3/?igshid=yywexr6n3911

drenched-in-sunlight: a witcher game where we can put eyeliner...

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drenched-in-sunlight https://drenched-in-sunlight.tumblr.com/post/627257378714370048/a-witcher-game-where-we-can-put-eyeliner-on-geralt :

a witcher game where we can put eyeliner on Geralt when….pls im weak and wanting…..

hm, new followers

animal slaughter, animal death

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I’ve been suddenly getting this steady trickle of new followers and I have a sudden suspicion that they’re spam. like, i just got two in a row with almost the same name? sus.

am i going to click through and look? no.

We processed 308 (or something like that) chickens yesterday, 280something of our own, and 23ish for another guy, some smalltime homesteader type.

an accounting, behind the cut, of the day, no gore really but i mean, you do what’s right re: clicking that or not. Mostly I’m talking about logistics.

TWO of the guests who come help us were missing, both of whom often work in the evisceration room, and the farm is permanently down one employee (they replaced both sweet enthusiastic young men with one sweet enthusiastic young woman), so we had instead of four, two and a half eviscerators. (Farmsister usually does quality control and delunging at the end of the line, and to keep up with four eviscerators leaves her no time to do any eviscerating herself; with only two of us working, she could eviscerate about one chicken to every two we did, so.)

The morning went fine, we managed to mostly keep up, and we were done at 12:30 in time for lunch. But the afternoon. oh god. the afternoon. We package in the afternoon, after the carcasses have sat in icewater for the hour of lunch, and so. we started at 1:30, punctually.

We got the other guy’s 23 packed up neatly, and the one broken one nicely labeled with an X. Meanwhile, BIL started his endless slog of cutting up. (What we do with our broken/cosmetic imperfect chickens is that we cut them up for parts. Our slaughterhouse license allows us to sell parts retail, so we do.) It always takes him longer than us, because it takes him about a minute and a half to completely cut up a carcass, and if he’s doing 30, or 40, or 50… well, it adds up.

We moved on to packaging our own, after stashing other guy’s 23 nice whole chickens in the walk-in cooler (in his cooler. it’s so nice to just be able to put an entire cooler into a fridge. Gosh it’s super super nice.) and it just. went on. and on. Sister was nice and said “you do the labeling and load the tubs but once it’s full I’ll go put them into the fridge,” which is great, because to put them into the fridge you have to lift from waist height and then carry a tub with ten chicken carcasses in it (the largest of which might be a bit over six pounds but mostly they’re in the five-pound range, so, like fiftyish pounds) about twenty feet, and then set it down, and then repeat the feat with another tub, and then do that as many times as there are wagonloads. I have discovered that while fiftyish pounds is something I certainly can lift, I can do it about… mm maybe like ten times in a day, and then I’m all set, and I’m probably going to be tired the next day too. And when you consider I’ve also had to individually pick up, put down, and carry each five-pound weight several times apiece before that, it’s actually kind of a lot of lifting. And I can do it, I just. By the end of the day, I would have been quite sad. So Sister was willing to do the big carrying part of the job, which made it easier.

I was keeping track as she went, and writing on a scrap bit of label. 20, 40, 60… we were aiming for 180 in the fridge. It had been hours and it was still like. 100. Oh gosh. We were never going to get done.

At one point I got a text, and I pulled my phone out to look at it. It was Dude, texting me a 420 text to be an ass, which he has frequently done for the last several years. Fuck, we’re usually done by 4…

A little later I heard a voice. Farmkid’s distinctive shrill holler. Oh my god. I looked out and sure enough, here she was, a vision in pink and excitement, sprinting over to us. There’s my dad, dropping off her day bag in the house. Done babysitting. Bye. He took off, and we now had an extremely excited six-year-old who was so psyched to help us. Oh gosh. Well, she can’t fish around and pull the raw carcasses out of the ice-filled stock tanks because her tiny hands would fall off and also I dont’ think she can reach without falling in. she can’t reach to do the inspecting. She can’t exactly dunk the plastic-bagged chickens into the boiling water to shrink-wrap them, as the boiling water tends to surge up and scald your hands too and it’s a bit much to ask that of a six-year-old and her small grip strength. (Also really she should not be anywhere near that big propane burner, as she’s six, you know?)

She wound up being in charge of carrying each chicken to the tub, and then helping her mom put them into the fridge, and then the next trip we’d finally made 180 so the rest could go into the freezers. She was extremely diligent and also it was a huge pain to have to get them set aside just right for her so she’d know which ones to take, because she can’t see up onto the table. But boy was she excited, and she did in the end put each of the chickens into one of the chest freezers along the aisle of the barn. And she only dropped one, and it was okay, I rinsed it off, the plastic hadn’t broken so the packaging was intact and it’s perfectly fine to rinse that off and dry it carefully and still sell it. (Shhh no it really is fine.)

Meanwhile we’d accumulated a collection of broken or flawed birds that didn’t make the cut-up cut either. One had an unsightly bruise, another had gross skin on its back that looked ugly, one had a broken wing and was too small to bother cutting up, one fell into the shrink-wrap water when the bag split unexpectedly and got slightly over-scalded.

So those four ended up in the walk-in cooler for personal use, and today I cut two of them up, boiled up the remains for stock, and cooked the rest as paprikash. So there’s a huge huge pot of paprikash in the oven currently, which i’m about to pull out and thicken with some yogurt (we don’t stock sour cream up in this piece), and the leftover stock from that will go into tomorrow’s lunch.

Not too shabby.

I don’t feel like a truck hit me, exactly, but I do rather feel like I got hit by a go-kart. Which is acceptable.

glumshoe: This breathy female duet cover of ‘Sixte

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glumshoe https://glumshoe.tumblr.com/post/164956041704/this-breathy-female-duet-cover-of-sixteen-tons :

This breathy female duet cover of ‘Sixteen Tons’ by My Terrible Friend is just the thing to send delicious tingles down the back of your neck.