dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2017-04-06 11:12 am
dragonlady7) wrote2017-04-06 11:12 am
theforceisstronginthegirl replied to your post
via http://ift.tt/2o0E5dz:theforceisstronginthegirl replied to your post “more animal husbandry on the farm, warnings for discussion of…”
heyyyy thats pretty cool! I raise beef cows! granted i dont process them myself i send them off to UGA but still.. when i was in high school i did learn how to do it tho my ag teacher was real old school like that so we had to learn how to do literally everything if we wanted to show cows also i think he just wanted someone else to learn how to de-horn so he didnt have too and the rest just followed… i definitely named the steers i ate back then too lol
Yeah, cattle require kind of specialized equipment because of their sheer size, so it’s not something you’re gonna do on your own unless you can sell the result. Processing a pig on the farm is something we only do so far for personal use, although they’re considering looking into what it would take to get licensing etcetera, because it’s something the two livestock peeps are interested in doing. (The farm has grown in staff enough to have two livestock people full-time– B-I-L and the Assistant Livestock Manager, who’s only full-time in the summer so far– and two plant people, my sister, who focuses on the flowers, and the Vegetable Manager, who is full-time year-round and lives in the tiny house attached to the big house.)
no gross stuff behind cut particularly, just more nattering on about farming
There used to be cows on this farm, but my sister and her husband couldn’t afford to buy the herd when they bought the farm, so there aren’t now. Maybe someday, but cows are a ton of work. And since Farmsister and her husband’s main livestock experience had come from both of them working for a commercial-organic hog farmer back in IL, they went with pigs instead, as a much lower barrier-to-entry kind of animal. And of course, kept the meat and egg chickens that had been on the farm, because chickens are easy. So that’s why there’s an all-stainless clean room on the farm– there’s a 5A-certified slaughterhouse facility (NY state, meaning whole poultry [and rabbits, we’re not sure if we’re really considering that] can be sold at retail and wholesale including to restaurants, and parts can be sold at retail) in the barn, with a separate kill and clean room as per state code. And the inspector told us we’re legally allowed to use that clean room for anything we want as long as we clean it– we were worried we had to keep it single-purpose, but he said nah, that’s the reason every single surface has to be washable. So long as you wash it, it doesn’t matter what you did. So we wash eggs in it, and sometimes process other animals.
I can’t tell you how great it is to have an entirely washable room, though. I wish I had one in my house. I’ve gotten to the point where hosing and scrubbing and bleaching it down is very soothing and satisfying to me. Yesterday, even exhausted, I was still motivated to hunt down a little piece of stainless steel and burnish a couple of rust spots that turned up over the winter. That gleaming expanse is important to me.
I forgot the whole punchline I forgot to put in last night, which is that my business cards now, because of the meat grinding, are going to have my old title and my new title on them, both– “Eviscerator, Grinder” because I think that sounds badass. (For honesty I suppose I should probably write “Eviscerator, Grinder, Flower Arranger” because that’s mostly what I do here.)
And re: naming meat: well, the child names the meat sometimes, because she’s three. So far, being three, she does things like name the collective 180 meat chicks “flopsy, flopsy, flopsy, flopsy, and flooey!” but she has given other animals names that stuck. So far that’s been ill-fated, she named a boar Earl and he died of mysterious causes not long after (lungworms? who knows! we got more aggressive about parasite control after that!) but her mother has been enforcing an old family rule we grew up with, which was no Christian names for animals. So the pig breeding stock are named Cookies (because she looks like Cookies N Cream ice cream), Big Red (guess what she looks like), Rocky Road (Cookies’ daughter, similar but with brown spots too), and the boar is Peanut Butter for no particular reason but that it’s hilarious to call a 450-pound creature with tusks “Peanut”. Despite his size, though, he’s actually a very sweet and agreeable creature, and his offspring have been, surprisingly, a cheerful and good-natured bunch, so even though he didn’t seem particularly promising when he turned up, he wound up being a good investment. He really is very sweet, and despite pigs having no parenting instincts, last year when the newborn piglets discovered they could get into his enclosure, he actually didn’t hurt any of them, and even seemed to enjoy their company, and willingly shared his food which is a lot to ask of a hog.
Of the egg hens, they’re all commercial Red sex-link crosses, so they all have identical appearances, but the roosters are a wild mix of castoffs and hatched school experiments, so there are some pretty ones mixed in. (Roosters are useful for free-ranging chickens, because they do actually defend against predators to an extent.) The only named one of the egg chickens is the only one really distinct enough, and he’s the top rooster of the whole bunch, an enormous golden creature of uncertain ancestry named Fabio.
heyyyy thats pretty cool! I raise beef cows! granted i dont process them myself i send them off to UGA but still.. when i was in high school i did learn how to do it tho my ag teacher was real old school like that so we had to learn how to do literally everything if we wanted to show cows also i think he just wanted someone else to learn how to de-horn so he didnt have too and the rest just followed… i definitely named the steers i ate back then too lol
Yeah, cattle require kind of specialized equipment because of their sheer size, so it’s not something you’re gonna do on your own unless you can sell the result. Processing a pig on the farm is something we only do so far for personal use, although they’re considering looking into what it would take to get licensing etcetera, because it’s something the two livestock peeps are interested in doing. (The farm has grown in staff enough to have two livestock people full-time– B-I-L and the Assistant Livestock Manager, who’s only full-time in the summer so far– and two plant people, my sister, who focuses on the flowers, and the Vegetable Manager, who is full-time year-round and lives in the tiny house attached to the big house.)
no gross stuff behind cut particularly, just more nattering on about farming
There used to be cows on this farm, but my sister and her husband couldn’t afford to buy the herd when they bought the farm, so there aren’t now. Maybe someday, but cows are a ton of work. And since Farmsister and her husband’s main livestock experience had come from both of them working for a commercial-organic hog farmer back in IL, they went with pigs instead, as a much lower barrier-to-entry kind of animal. And of course, kept the meat and egg chickens that had been on the farm, because chickens are easy. So that’s why there’s an all-stainless clean room on the farm– there’s a 5A-certified slaughterhouse facility (NY state, meaning whole poultry [and rabbits, we’re not sure if we’re really considering that] can be sold at retail and wholesale including to restaurants, and parts can be sold at retail) in the barn, with a separate kill and clean room as per state code. And the inspector told us we’re legally allowed to use that clean room for anything we want as long as we clean it– we were worried we had to keep it single-purpose, but he said nah, that’s the reason every single surface has to be washable. So long as you wash it, it doesn’t matter what you did. So we wash eggs in it, and sometimes process other animals.
I can’t tell you how great it is to have an entirely washable room, though. I wish I had one in my house. I’ve gotten to the point where hosing and scrubbing and bleaching it down is very soothing and satisfying to me. Yesterday, even exhausted, I was still motivated to hunt down a little piece of stainless steel and burnish a couple of rust spots that turned up over the winter. That gleaming expanse is important to me.
I forgot the whole punchline I forgot to put in last night, which is that my business cards now, because of the meat grinding, are going to have my old title and my new title on them, both– “Eviscerator, Grinder” because I think that sounds badass. (For honesty I suppose I should probably write “Eviscerator, Grinder, Flower Arranger” because that’s mostly what I do here.)
And re: naming meat: well, the child names the meat sometimes, because she’s three. So far, being three, she does things like name the collective 180 meat chicks “flopsy, flopsy, flopsy, flopsy, and flooey!” but she has given other animals names that stuck. So far that’s been ill-fated, she named a boar Earl and he died of mysterious causes not long after (lungworms? who knows! we got more aggressive about parasite control after that!) but her mother has been enforcing an old family rule we grew up with, which was no Christian names for animals. So the pig breeding stock are named Cookies (because she looks like Cookies N Cream ice cream), Big Red (guess what she looks like), Rocky Road (Cookies’ daughter, similar but with brown spots too), and the boar is Peanut Butter for no particular reason but that it’s hilarious to call a 450-pound creature with tusks “Peanut”. Despite his size, though, he’s actually a very sweet and agreeable creature, and his offspring have been, surprisingly, a cheerful and good-natured bunch, so even though he didn’t seem particularly promising when he turned up, he wound up being a good investment. He really is very sweet, and despite pigs having no parenting instincts, last year when the newborn piglets discovered they could get into his enclosure, he actually didn’t hurt any of them, and even seemed to enjoy their company, and willingly shared his food which is a lot to ask of a hog.
Of the egg hens, they’re all commercial Red sex-link crosses, so they all have identical appearances, but the roosters are a wild mix of castoffs and hatched school experiments, so there are some pretty ones mixed in. (Roosters are useful for free-ranging chickens, because they do actually defend against predators to an extent.) The only named one of the egg chickens is the only one really distinct enough, and he’s the top rooster of the whole bunch, an enormous golden creature of uncertain ancestry named Fabio.