it's goin'
May. 29th, 2019 06:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7First Chicken Processing Day of the season was yesterday. (Now's when the trigger warnings I posted about eons ago in my pinned post come into effect: the farm raises chickens and pigs for meat, and has its own poultry slaughterhouse on premises, so. TW animal slaughter discussion.)
(Has it been long enough since I wrote up the explanation of how it works on Tumblr like two years ago? Probably, enough of you are different-- should I do a new version for Dreamwidth? What actually happens in a small NYS section 5a slaughterhouse, and how it works? Maybe I'll just write it new from scratch and then go see my old version, it's always interesting to compare how time and use erode Truths into new forms. Not like it's that complicated, but every time I explain it to someone new I feel like i'm seeing it differently.)
Anyway, all warnings aside, there's nothing particularly graphic here, I didn't take pictures or anything, but we wind up sort of casual about various gross bodily things in this line of work and it's hard to remember what normal people might find upsetting.
It went well; there's always a hitch, and this year's hitch was that the new (used) scalder came to us with a kink in the gas line so the burner didn't work. BIL spent a day trying to fix it, and what wound up being the solution was just to remove the burner and sub in the freestanding propane burner from a turkey fryer, which we use for the simmer tank to shrink-wrap the carcasses afterward. This was fine, as the burners were of equivalent size, but the crucial factor he did not consider was that the freestanding burner was several inches farther away from the tank than the attached one would have been, and so it wasn't able to get up to temp. We lost AN ENTIRE HOUR first thing, standing around to get it up to temp.
But. This meant that the two employees working on chores had time to finish, and VM just took most of the crew out to the greenhouse and got about three man-hours worth of work done on seeding that he'd been figuring he'd have to do alone that afternoon anyway, and I? Well, I stood around chatting to Pete and Christine, who I hadn't seen since last year. So. That was great.
We had one person who was scheduled to come in an hour late (that was when she was available), and the scalder got up to temp literally the moment she came in the door. We said, "Oh, we've been waiting for you, we just didn't know what to do without you!" and much hilarity ensued.
And then we got crackalackin', and we'd expected the scalder wouldn't be able to maintain temperature, but blocked up on some scrap chunks of 2x4 it actually kept up just fine. All our years of data suggest that 148 degrees F is the absolute perfect temperature for the water, and any colder gives you broken pinfeathers and a hard time at the plucking table. The whole day, the scalder never got above 142, it just couldn't, not with the new water trickling in that it needed to keep the level because it was leaking slightly, and yet-- even with two absolute rookies on the plucking table, the carcasses came through to us pink and clean. So who knows; science sometimes doesn't strictly apply, which I suppose means that there's variables we're not aware of.
It was only 143 birds plus a dozen for another producer (our license lets us do that, but we're discovering it's almost never worth the hassle so we only do it for people we owe favors and never for money), instead of the 200 we'd been averaging last year, and so we whipped right through it and got done by noon.
At the end we ran through six egg hens from the flock that needs culling. Two were at the request of a customer, we did two more on speculation, and then I asked for two, feet-on, because I want to try to cook them and see what the fuss is. Now I gotta figure out what to do with the un-scalded foot, because the claws are still on it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. As a bonus, one of the eviscerators was really interested to keep the yolks of the unformed eggs in the layers' reproductive trains-- she was super pumped about saving them, and that was nice to see them not just consigned to the compost-- it's not waste, it's just less enjoyment.)
I wound up eviscerating the whole time; BIL had meant to have me train the newbies on the plucking table but then there'd be no room for a dedicated heads and feet person, and I don't do heads and feet-- I've done it like, once, and by that I mean one bird not one entire time; it's one of the tasks I genuinely don't enjoy and so avoid.
So we put Alix on the pluck table instead, because she finds the heads and feet removal to be satisfying, and she got the apprentices whipped into shape. (She also keeps the feet, so is invested in seeing them correctly removed, so she likes being put on that duty because then she can clean the feet for use as she goes instead of having to do it afterward.)
I think I did pretty well, but it meant I was busy, so I didn't get to take any pictures or anything.
Packaging also went smoothly enough, but training new people means we didn't really hit our stride and it took forever. I spent a lot of time kicking around waiting for them to bring me chickens. (I always wind up consigned to the hallway, and they bring out the carcasses and dunk them in the simmer tank to shrink the freezer bags, and then I have to do all the rest of the minutiae-- trim the excess bag away, dry the bag off, adhere the label, weigh the carcass, write the weight down, and mark the batch number on the label. It's a lot to do once I get the carcasses, but then I stand around a lot betweentimes.)
I spent the downtime fishing things out of the storage room and cleaning and sanitizing them, because so many things got put away dirty last year or somehow got caked in mud over the winter, or had a mouse crawl in to die or whatever. I'd started this process before, during setup, of course, but had needed to focus on just what we needed this time, but I decided especially the white Teflon totes needed love; so many of them had become consigned to the Gut Tub pile but weren't really that gross, they just needed to be cleaned. So I got a ton of those cleaned up and put away while waiting for carcasses.
I sliced the pad of my left pinky somehow during all this, not deep enough to bleed but plenty deep enough, it turns out, to destroy the fretting callus and make the banjo exercises I'm to be practicing this week impossible to do. Bummer.
Sister's MIL had volunteered to cook dinner, but after work was done and she came home from her three-hour excursion to Wal-Mart, I asked her if she needed anything to prepare dinner with and she had no memory of the conversation. Turns out she'd been drunk when she'd made the offer, and so had no idea she'd promised this.
It was fine, we went out instead.
It was pouring rain and about 50 degrees by bedtime, so I went out to the yurt in some dread. The roof hole cover needs reinforcement, but doesn't leak, it just only works if someone's there to keep poking it. But I was there, so.
I put on three layers of pajamas and put on a woolly hat and some woolly fingerless mitts, and fell asleep when there was still enough light coming through the roof hole to be slightly distracting.
OK I got a lot of work to do today. But, the excitement: a chicken for lunch, at last. (We've been sold out so long that most of us haven't had chicken in months, by now.)
(Has it been long enough since I wrote up the explanation of how it works on Tumblr like two years ago? Probably, enough of you are different-- should I do a new version for Dreamwidth? What actually happens in a small NYS section 5a slaughterhouse, and how it works? Maybe I'll just write it new from scratch and then go see my old version, it's always interesting to compare how time and use erode Truths into new forms. Not like it's that complicated, but every time I explain it to someone new I feel like i'm seeing it differently.)
Anyway, all warnings aside, there's nothing particularly graphic here, I didn't take pictures or anything, but we wind up sort of casual about various gross bodily things in this line of work and it's hard to remember what normal people might find upsetting.
It went well; there's always a hitch, and this year's hitch was that the new (used) scalder came to us with a kink in the gas line so the burner didn't work. BIL spent a day trying to fix it, and what wound up being the solution was just to remove the burner and sub in the freestanding propane burner from a turkey fryer, which we use for the simmer tank to shrink-wrap the carcasses afterward. This was fine, as the burners were of equivalent size, but the crucial factor he did not consider was that the freestanding burner was several inches farther away from the tank than the attached one would have been, and so it wasn't able to get up to temp. We lost AN ENTIRE HOUR first thing, standing around to get it up to temp.
But. This meant that the two employees working on chores had time to finish, and VM just took most of the crew out to the greenhouse and got about three man-hours worth of work done on seeding that he'd been figuring he'd have to do alone that afternoon anyway, and I? Well, I stood around chatting to Pete and Christine, who I hadn't seen since last year. So. That was great.
We had one person who was scheduled to come in an hour late (that was when she was available), and the scalder got up to temp literally the moment she came in the door. We said, "Oh, we've been waiting for you, we just didn't know what to do without you!" and much hilarity ensued.
And then we got crackalackin', and we'd expected the scalder wouldn't be able to maintain temperature, but blocked up on some scrap chunks of 2x4 it actually kept up just fine. All our years of data suggest that 148 degrees F is the absolute perfect temperature for the water, and any colder gives you broken pinfeathers and a hard time at the plucking table. The whole day, the scalder never got above 142, it just couldn't, not with the new water trickling in that it needed to keep the level because it was leaking slightly, and yet-- even with two absolute rookies on the plucking table, the carcasses came through to us pink and clean. So who knows; science sometimes doesn't strictly apply, which I suppose means that there's variables we're not aware of.
It was only 143 birds plus a dozen for another producer (our license lets us do that, but we're discovering it's almost never worth the hassle so we only do it for people we owe favors and never for money), instead of the 200 we'd been averaging last year, and so we whipped right through it and got done by noon.
At the end we ran through six egg hens from the flock that needs culling. Two were at the request of a customer, we did two more on speculation, and then I asked for two, feet-on, because I want to try to cook them and see what the fuss is. Now I gotta figure out what to do with the un-scalded foot, because the claws are still on it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. As a bonus, one of the eviscerators was really interested to keep the yolks of the unformed eggs in the layers' reproductive trains-- she was super pumped about saving them, and that was nice to see them not just consigned to the compost-- it's not waste, it's just less enjoyment.)
I wound up eviscerating the whole time; BIL had meant to have me train the newbies on the plucking table but then there'd be no room for a dedicated heads and feet person, and I don't do heads and feet-- I've done it like, once, and by that I mean one bird not one entire time; it's one of the tasks I genuinely don't enjoy and so avoid.
So we put Alix on the pluck table instead, because she finds the heads and feet removal to be satisfying, and she got the apprentices whipped into shape. (She also keeps the feet, so is invested in seeing them correctly removed, so she likes being put on that duty because then she can clean the feet for use as she goes instead of having to do it afterward.)
I think I did pretty well, but it meant I was busy, so I didn't get to take any pictures or anything.
Packaging also went smoothly enough, but training new people means we didn't really hit our stride and it took forever. I spent a lot of time kicking around waiting for them to bring me chickens. (I always wind up consigned to the hallway, and they bring out the carcasses and dunk them in the simmer tank to shrink the freezer bags, and then I have to do all the rest of the minutiae-- trim the excess bag away, dry the bag off, adhere the label, weigh the carcass, write the weight down, and mark the batch number on the label. It's a lot to do once I get the carcasses, but then I stand around a lot betweentimes.)
I spent the downtime fishing things out of the storage room and cleaning and sanitizing them, because so many things got put away dirty last year or somehow got caked in mud over the winter, or had a mouse crawl in to die or whatever. I'd started this process before, during setup, of course, but had needed to focus on just what we needed this time, but I decided especially the white Teflon totes needed love; so many of them had become consigned to the Gut Tub pile but weren't really that gross, they just needed to be cleaned. So I got a ton of those cleaned up and put away while waiting for carcasses.
I sliced the pad of my left pinky somehow during all this, not deep enough to bleed but plenty deep enough, it turns out, to destroy the fretting callus and make the banjo exercises I'm to be practicing this week impossible to do. Bummer.
Sister's MIL had volunteered to cook dinner, but after work was done and she came home from her three-hour excursion to Wal-Mart, I asked her if she needed anything to prepare dinner with and she had no memory of the conversation. Turns out she'd been drunk when she'd made the offer, and so had no idea she'd promised this.
It was fine, we went out instead.
It was pouring rain and about 50 degrees by bedtime, so I went out to the yurt in some dread. The roof hole cover needs reinforcement, but doesn't leak, it just only works if someone's there to keep poking it. But I was there, so.
I put on three layers of pajamas and put on a woolly hat and some woolly fingerless mitts, and fell asleep when there was still enough light coming through the roof hole to be slightly distracting.
OK I got a lot of work to do today. But, the excitement: a chicken for lunch, at last. (We've been sold out so long that most of us haven't had chicken in months, by now.)
