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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2v9dv78
Talked about this over on pillowfort, but
I did a double-header of two slaughter days in a row.
First for my sister’s farm, and it was fine– 260 chickens, a few more than normal but not too many. I stood in the spot at the pass-through window at the finish pluck table, and squeezed and rinsed the carcasses (to get as much poop as possible out) before plopping them into the bucket for the eviscerators to take from. Veg Manager stood on the other side of the window and kept tabs on the bucket, making sure the oldest carcasses got passed on down the line first. Between the two of us, we controlled the speed of the line; I tended to hold carcasses on my table a moment longer if I noticed the bucket getting full, and he’d pull carcasses out of the bucket and stack them neatly on the table in order so that they’d be passed down to the other eviscerators first. If I saw more than six carcasses sitting on the table, I’d hold two or three on the table while I kept working. That meant that there wasn’t much room for them to come out of the plucker, so they’d keep them clipped into the scalder, and the kill cones wouldn’t be able to be emptied.
And B-I-L, who was killing, would asked concerned questions now and then, but I’d wait just a moment and then pass through the carcasses I’d been holding, one at a time as I saw eviscerators take the backlog away to work on, and the backup would clear, and the next ones would come through, and we were getting through maybe 60 in an hour so that’s really not bad.
We had a big crew, 13– so, a full six eviscerators, shoulder to shoulder all along the counter, plus my sister delunging, checking temperatures, keeping the birds organized into the chill tanks.
We didn’t stop to take a break, and so the last 60 or so birds, we slowed down and it took us more like an hour and a half, as everyone was getting tired. The plucker had to take a break, a couple of the eviscerators swapped out and got coffees and such. We’d had to clean out the line after the first 60, because we were processing them for another farmer and it’s imperative to keep the two groups separate– we even sterilized the line in between. But we didn’t stop. B-I-L hates stopping for some reason.
We started at 8 and finished at 11:30, and it wasn’t bad. We had to package them too, and of the 60 birds for the other farmer, he wanted 20 cut for parts, and 20 cut in half, and then the last 20 bagged whole.
Cutting up birds takes a long time, so we’d completely finished bagging all the whole birds by the time they came to cut up the birds for our own farm’s sales. But they cut those birds while we cleaned and then dispersed the other workers to do all the afternoon livestock-care chores, and they’d finished just as the rest of us finished, and everybody got to leave at the same time.
The next day, I started off by taking the two biggest coolers on the farm and filling them with ice. (We’d had to use them to temporarily hold the other farmer’s processed birds, so I’d had to scrub and sterilize them both before and after that– so they were clean and sterile and ready to go.) I’d left the ice machine on, and after we’d filled our chill tanks, the machine had made what turned out to be exactly two big coolers full of ice. So I got those filled, and Sister helped me get them into my car, and I drove up over the Petersburgh Pass with the car feeling kind of heavy, behind. (I don’t know that it was, but it handled funny. Can’t have been that many pounds, if I could lift half the cooler, but it was enough that I noticed it in the steering.)
Got to Square Roots over in Old Cheshire, MA (it’s 23 miles away, but a 45-minute drive because of Extreme Topography)– the scenery was fucking amazing, with little shreds of clouds covering bits of mountains and such– and used that ice to start off their stock tanks. They don’t have an ice machine that works, so the rest all had to be bagged ice from the grocery store, and there’s never enough of that!
They’d just started; I pulled in just before 8, and they catch their chickens the night before so they start at 7:30.
I washed up and got my boots on and hopped in, and spent the day eviscerating. The woman of the house was intending to help, but the baby’s only 4 weeks old now and he was having some tummy problems, and was fussy, so she kept having to hold him, and go feed him, and take him inside, and also her back was bothering her a lot so she couldn’t bend much, and it was all very hard on her. So I was glad I was there to help keep up the pace.
There were two new people there– one woman was a former intern from the farm, and she was getting married soon, so we spent a long time discussing whether it was acceptable to have a potluck wedding. We thought so. It sounds insipid, to talk about wedding plans so long, but it was actually really funny; the woman in question is an artist, and quite foul-mouthed and of a very earthy sense of humor. She had some poignant notes too– her parents are both dead, so she was asking how on earth she could have a ceremony where it wasn’t a thing that she had no father to walk her down the aisle. I recommended that she look around and find an officiant she clicked with, and that person would probably have some great ideas for how to make that not be a big thing. It’s surely not unheard-of. And her husband-to-be has no relationship with his father. We said, well then, subvert the whole thing, and have his mother walk him down the aisle and give him away to you, since that’s the only parent any of them has. She wasn’t sure about this, but it gave her something to think about.
The other new person is the new intern they’d hired at the farm, and she said basically no words all morning, because she was concentrating so hard on what she was doing. But at lunch she got about 10 ounces of coffee into her and then everything was hilarious and amazing and we all laughed a lot.
Lunch was also improved by the farmer guy and his mother (the farm’s owned by a married couple, and his parents live right down the road and help out a lot), collaboratively giving a dramatic recitation of The Owl And The Pussycat. There was a bit where they stopped, and the guy was like, “I won’t say this next part because [About To Be Married Lady] has such a filthy mind, she’ll take it the wrong way,” and she was like “What! I can be a grown up! What is it!” and they went back and forth, and finally he went on and it’s the part where the owl addresses the pussycat as “Pussy” a bunch of times in a row. He’s kind of a stern-looking guy, often, so it was unutterably hilarious to have him just saying the word “pussy” a whole bunch of times, and so [Soon To Be Married Lady] and [Quiet New Intern] and farm guy’s mother and his wife and I were all laughing so hard we were crying, and meanwhile, his dad and his daughter (who is three) were staring stone-faced across the table at one another, like “what is wrong with these people”.
I stayed for packaging, which they do differently because you can’t sell birds that have been cut up for parts in Massachusetts. I didn’t get back on the road until around 6pm. It was a long day. I didn’t think I was that tired, but I got myself together and went out to the yurt and zonked the fuck out, and this morning I cannot concentrate or plan or do anything. (And when I left, I was given three quite nice steaks, and a farm t-shirt for my troubles, which I quite enjoyed. Everyone else got chickens, but they agreed it was kind of silly to give me a chicken. I got back and Farmsister was like, “You should get a chicken, we could do a side-by-side comparison!” Listen, they raise the same variety we do, in almost the same kind of operation? The difference would be so subtle. First, their chickens do free range, and are kept alive by a livestock guardian dog, but is that going to make a flavor difference? Second, they process a week early, to try to keep the size down– but it’s one week! And third, they cut the necks out of theirs and package them separately, while we just leave them attached. I feel like any difference in flavor would really come mostly from them being on the east side of a mountain in MA and ours being on the west side of a mountain in NY. I doubt proximity to a Maremma dog is going to alter the nature of a chicken very much.)
Fortunately, my task for this morning is to entertain Farmkid while Sister and B-I-L move literally every animal that needs moving. (The hens! the broilers. The small pigs! the large pigs. All of them need fresh pasture because it is not only Thursday, it is Hell Thursday. This is why pasture-raised meat is expensive, by the way: moving the pastures is a fucking pain in the goddamn ass.) Extremely fortunately for me, Farmkid is so sated with attention from every other day of the week when somebody more dedicated and attentive than I watches her, and so she’s mostly playing by herself, and only occasionally asking me to contribute.
Farmkid has just shown up and is asking me to type things for her, so:
HOW DO YOU WALK A CAR : YOU PUT A LEASH ON IT AND TURN IT AROUND.
Thanks, Farmkid!
She also said, of her parents going up to move the small pigs (who are like, 75 pounds each at this point, the size of large dogs), “Those guys? Give me a break! They can be boiled in a minute, in a big pot of ducks!”
(She is quite enamored of her own command of nonsense.)
(Your picture was not posted)
Talked about this over on pillowfort, but
I did a double-header of two slaughter days in a row.
First for my sister’s farm, and it was fine– 260 chickens, a few more than normal but not too many. I stood in the spot at the pass-through window at the finish pluck table, and squeezed and rinsed the carcasses (to get as much poop as possible out) before plopping them into the bucket for the eviscerators to take from. Veg Manager stood on the other side of the window and kept tabs on the bucket, making sure the oldest carcasses got passed on down the line first. Between the two of us, we controlled the speed of the line; I tended to hold carcasses on my table a moment longer if I noticed the bucket getting full, and he’d pull carcasses out of the bucket and stack them neatly on the table in order so that they’d be passed down to the other eviscerators first. If I saw more than six carcasses sitting on the table, I’d hold two or three on the table while I kept working. That meant that there wasn’t much room for them to come out of the plucker, so they’d keep them clipped into the scalder, and the kill cones wouldn’t be able to be emptied.
And B-I-L, who was killing, would asked concerned questions now and then, but I’d wait just a moment and then pass through the carcasses I’d been holding, one at a time as I saw eviscerators take the backlog away to work on, and the backup would clear, and the next ones would come through, and we were getting through maybe 60 in an hour so that’s really not bad.
We had a big crew, 13– so, a full six eviscerators, shoulder to shoulder all along the counter, plus my sister delunging, checking temperatures, keeping the birds organized into the chill tanks.
We didn’t stop to take a break, and so the last 60 or so birds, we slowed down and it took us more like an hour and a half, as everyone was getting tired. The plucker had to take a break, a couple of the eviscerators swapped out and got coffees and such. We’d had to clean out the line after the first 60, because we were processing them for another farmer and it’s imperative to keep the two groups separate– we even sterilized the line in between. But we didn’t stop. B-I-L hates stopping for some reason.
We started at 8 and finished at 11:30, and it wasn’t bad. We had to package them too, and of the 60 birds for the other farmer, he wanted 20 cut for parts, and 20 cut in half, and then the last 20 bagged whole.
Cutting up birds takes a long time, so we’d completely finished bagging all the whole birds by the time they came to cut up the birds for our own farm’s sales. But they cut those birds while we cleaned and then dispersed the other workers to do all the afternoon livestock-care chores, and they’d finished just as the rest of us finished, and everybody got to leave at the same time.
The next day, I started off by taking the two biggest coolers on the farm and filling them with ice. (We’d had to use them to temporarily hold the other farmer’s processed birds, so I’d had to scrub and sterilize them both before and after that– so they were clean and sterile and ready to go.) I’d left the ice machine on, and after we’d filled our chill tanks, the machine had made what turned out to be exactly two big coolers full of ice. So I got those filled, and Sister helped me get them into my car, and I drove up over the Petersburgh Pass with the car feeling kind of heavy, behind. (I don’t know that it was, but it handled funny. Can’t have been that many pounds, if I could lift half the cooler, but it was enough that I noticed it in the steering.)
Got to Square Roots over in Old Cheshire, MA (it’s 23 miles away, but a 45-minute drive because of Extreme Topography)– the scenery was fucking amazing, with little shreds of clouds covering bits of mountains and such– and used that ice to start off their stock tanks. They don’t have an ice machine that works, so the rest all had to be bagged ice from the grocery store, and there’s never enough of that!
They’d just started; I pulled in just before 8, and they catch their chickens the night before so they start at 7:30.
I washed up and got my boots on and hopped in, and spent the day eviscerating. The woman of the house was intending to help, but the baby’s only 4 weeks old now and he was having some tummy problems, and was fussy, so she kept having to hold him, and go feed him, and take him inside, and also her back was bothering her a lot so she couldn’t bend much, and it was all very hard on her. So I was glad I was there to help keep up the pace.
There were two new people there– one woman was a former intern from the farm, and she was getting married soon, so we spent a long time discussing whether it was acceptable to have a potluck wedding. We thought so. It sounds insipid, to talk about wedding plans so long, but it was actually really funny; the woman in question is an artist, and quite foul-mouthed and of a very earthy sense of humor. She had some poignant notes too– her parents are both dead, so she was asking how on earth she could have a ceremony where it wasn’t a thing that she had no father to walk her down the aisle. I recommended that she look around and find an officiant she clicked with, and that person would probably have some great ideas for how to make that not be a big thing. It’s surely not unheard-of. And her husband-to-be has no relationship with his father. We said, well then, subvert the whole thing, and have his mother walk him down the aisle and give him away to you, since that’s the only parent any of them has. She wasn’t sure about this, but it gave her something to think about.
The other new person is the new intern they’d hired at the farm, and she said basically no words all morning, because she was concentrating so hard on what she was doing. But at lunch she got about 10 ounces of coffee into her and then everything was hilarious and amazing and we all laughed a lot.
Lunch was also improved by the farmer guy and his mother (the farm’s owned by a married couple, and his parents live right down the road and help out a lot), collaboratively giving a dramatic recitation of The Owl And The Pussycat. There was a bit where they stopped, and the guy was like, “I won’t say this next part because [About To Be Married Lady] has such a filthy mind, she’ll take it the wrong way,” and she was like “What! I can be a grown up! What is it!” and they went back and forth, and finally he went on and it’s the part where the owl addresses the pussycat as “Pussy” a bunch of times in a row. He’s kind of a stern-looking guy, often, so it was unutterably hilarious to have him just saying the word “pussy” a whole bunch of times, and so [Soon To Be Married Lady] and [Quiet New Intern] and farm guy’s mother and his wife and I were all laughing so hard we were crying, and meanwhile, his dad and his daughter (who is three) were staring stone-faced across the table at one another, like “what is wrong with these people”.
I stayed for packaging, which they do differently because you can’t sell birds that have been cut up for parts in Massachusetts. I didn’t get back on the road until around 6pm. It was a long day. I didn’t think I was that tired, but I got myself together and went out to the yurt and zonked the fuck out, and this morning I cannot concentrate or plan or do anything. (And when I left, I was given three quite nice steaks, and a farm t-shirt for my troubles, which I quite enjoyed. Everyone else got chickens, but they agreed it was kind of silly to give me a chicken. I got back and Farmsister was like, “You should get a chicken, we could do a side-by-side comparison!” Listen, they raise the same variety we do, in almost the same kind of operation? The difference would be so subtle. First, their chickens do free range, and are kept alive by a livestock guardian dog, but is that going to make a flavor difference? Second, they process a week early, to try to keep the size down– but it’s one week! And third, they cut the necks out of theirs and package them separately, while we just leave them attached. I feel like any difference in flavor would really come mostly from them being on the east side of a mountain in MA and ours being on the west side of a mountain in NY. I doubt proximity to a Maremma dog is going to alter the nature of a chicken very much.)
Fortunately, my task for this morning is to entertain Farmkid while Sister and B-I-L move literally every animal that needs moving. (The hens! the broilers. The small pigs! the large pigs. All of them need fresh pasture because it is not only Thursday, it is Hell Thursday. This is why pasture-raised meat is expensive, by the way: moving the pastures is a fucking pain in the goddamn ass.) Extremely fortunately for me, Farmkid is so sated with attention from every other day of the week when somebody more dedicated and attentive than I watches her, and so she’s mostly playing by herself, and only occasionally asking me to contribute.
Farmkid has just shown up and is asking me to type things for her, so:
HOW DO YOU WALK A CAR : YOU PUT A LEASH ON IT AND TURN IT AROUND.
Thanks, Farmkid!
She also said, of her parents going up to move the small pigs (who are like, 75 pounds each at this point, the size of large dogs), “Those guys? Give me a break! They can be boiled in a minute, in a big pot of ducks!”
(She is quite enamored of her own command of nonsense.)
(Your picture was not posted)
