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So tomorrow we’re processing the turkeys to sell for Thanksgiving.
Preorders were uneven this year but in the end we’ve sold just about all of
them (the key is to not oversell! very very difficult to count live
turkeys).
So the turkeys, like all the animals here, are raised out on pasture– being
outdoors instead of in confinement is generally considered to be better for
the animal’s wellbeing and health overall, and in some animals is linked to
a better nutritional profile in the meat, and such. For the purposes of
this farm, the extra reason is that the animals on pasture add fertility to
the soil by, well, you know, shitting eveywhere, since that’s what animals
are good at. Like, there’s a whole thing about integrating pastured
livestock into farms and such, so you can go read more about that if you
want.
Anyway. The chickens, we load into coops to bring down to the
slaughterhouse. The pigs are loaded onto trailers, live or dead, to be
taken away for processing. But the turkeys? They’re quite large, don’t fit
into coops, and there isn’t a trailer on the farm that would easily
accomodate them. So the way they’re transported down the hill to the
slaughterhouse is that they’re run in a particular pattern (we move the
fences every few days to give them fresh pasturage) so that their last
pasturage is just up the hill from the barn, not very far at all. And then
on the day before processing, we set up all the extra fencing we have
because all the meat chickens are done, and we park everyone’s cars
strategically, and the tractor on the other side of the barn, and we prop
up fencing and poles and things, and then we take down the fence of their
pasture and get them to walk, or sometimes run, down the hill to the barn,
where their last night’s pasturage is waiting, tucked up next to the barn.
We call it the Turkey Parade, and it’s a fantastic time to observe turkeys,
which are very different critters than chickens. They have some individual
personality, but mostly the flock as a collective has a kind of overarching
nature. And so every year the Turkey Parade is a little different.
Universally, they are always astonished by the gravel driveway. They all
have to stop and peck at it, in great detail, and it’s always a challenge
to keep them going.
But this year we had enough people and got them moving well enough that
they made their way down (following my sister, the traditional Pied Piper,
with the feed bucket, about whose contents they cared not at all in the
face of So Much New Stuff To Peck). This year also was the first year
Farmkid was really big enough to help.
Before the parade started, she stood atop the big round haybales stockpiled
there for winter use in the barn just across the way, and harangued them.
(Sister said she was addressing them, my mom pointed out that she’d been
pretending to conduct an auction and had sold the turkeys the entire farm.)
Sister posted a video of it on her Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/p/CH0-8ihp8-f/ and I must say, it is really
entertaining.
I just did an instagram post of it which may or may not crosspost here.
Turkeys, tame ones like this, are not bright. They’re curious and nosey,
but they really have no wits at all. But you can see the echoes of how
smart wild turkeys were, and sometimes the sort of haunting scary
remainders of how terrifying their dinosaur ancestors were.
I’m not super looking forward to tomorrow, as it’s going to be hard work,
but– the state inspector came by while I was cleaning the slaughterhouse,
and i had just sprayed down the whole room including the ceiling, and the
entire room was full of soap suds, so at least he could tell I was really
cleaning the place, LOL.
I’m as ready as I can be. It was a long day today, and tomorrow will be
longer, and Sunday is packaging and pickup day which will likely be pretty
exhausting, and then Monday i get to clean the slaughterhouse again and
then we repeat the whole process on Tuesday except we get to do the
packaging right away then too. And then Wednesday we have to tear it all
down for the winter and put everything away.
but on Thursday I get to see family, which is something a whole lot of
people aren’t getting this year. That’s my silver lining. I’m here for
work, but my mom’s here too, and my pop, and that’s nice.
And I get to eat a turkey I helped raise and helped process, and know 130
other families are being fed by that same labor, so. I mean, someone’s
gotta do it.
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