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Jun. 11th, 2019 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So we decided to do the hens first, because they were going to be much more difficult.
We had a huge crew-- everyone was present, including the entire Overqualified Moms crew.
I guess I should go into some detail about the Overqualified Mom Squad because they are possibly the most charming part of Chicken Days.
I'm not sure how it started, but there's a woman and her father-in-law that have been coming for years; this woman has a daughter who went to the school Farmkid goes to now, and she herself is an architect who is taking a few years off to raise her daughter. Then there's another woman who has a PhD in classics, and two young daughters, who she's been homeschooling but she did send the younger one to the Montessori pre-K that Farmkid's been going to, and she's quite fast friends with Farmkid now. And then the neighbor of the first woman has been coming as well, and I know less about her but she is a fantastic worker and the kind of person who can manage an entire line just by being cheerful and noticing what's going on and doing what needs to be done.
Then we've got an older fellow who has run the plucker for maybe a decade or so, an old friend of the previous owners who is just a sweet and gentle person who believes sincerely in doing the right thing, and also likes all of us, and even as his health is failing, he's determined to keep showing up for as long as he still can, because he likes the work and likes us. (BIL told him today, "If you ever decide you've got to retire, we'll still send you a chicken every other week.")
Two of the Overqualified Moms mostly get paid in chicken feet, though we also give them a chicken too. We only recently talked the third one into taking a chicken home with her. The dad-in-law always takes two fat chickens and four dozen eggs, which is perfectly reasonable, as well as all the chicken hearts we have going spare; sometimes that's all of them, sometimes other helpers want some too. (I don't, no thanks!)
And we've also got a young woman who's been coming for years, and she's moved out of town but at the moment is between jobs so she's been happy to come. Her thing is that she loves to take damaged chickens, or parts that no one else wants, things she thinks might go to waste. Livers, hearts, feet if no one else is taking them. And she doesn't always take a chicken home-- only if there's a damaged one she thinks no one else wants! It's quite funny. We're glad she finds things she wants.
Then there's the rotating cast of the farm's paid help-- a young man whose cousin just won a Tony for directing Hadestown, for one-- he comes two or three mornings a week? We like him, but he's a bit eccentric-- I mean, so is everyone else, so-- and then the two apprentices, who this year are two young women, one twenty and the other in her thirties. The young one is a grown up farmkid from a dairy family in central NY, while the older one is from Pittsburgh and has a more varied background that doesn't include much experience with livestock. Both are fairly agreeable sorts.
After we were done, BIL proposed we get pizza and invite-- I thought he said "the princesses" and it took me a moment to sort out that with the faint hint of having lived in literally half a dozen states across the midwest and South that sometimes shapes his vowels, he'd really said "apprentices" with his narrow e's, "apprintices", which sounds just like "the princesses" in the local accent which I do have and don't realize I do-- so now the apprentices are called The Princesses which is hilarious because neither of them is in the slightest bit princess-like in any way at all. (It's not that he has an accent, notably, nor that I do, but I can't hear a difference in the way he pronounces Is and Es in the middles of words. I literally can't tell whether he's saying "pin" or "pen", ever, which mostly doesn't matter but occasionally really does.
Anyhow-- we started off our processing this morning by doing the culls from the laying flock, about 70 hens from last year's flock whose time had come. They were in a gross bit of over-used pasture closed in to the barn that's meant to be shut up for the summer, and last year we sold off the culls but this year we figured, you know, we should just process them and sell them as stew hens. So we did, and we also figured we better do them first, because they're much harder to process and if we save them for last we'll be really miserable.
And it was difficult. See, the broiler chickens we do, they're a commercial hybrid called "cornish cross" that are just meat blobs on semi-functional legs, designed solely to size up as efficiently as possible. They're so stupid they can't keep themselves alive on pasture and have to be kept in these pens called "tractors", bottomless to give them access to grass, roofed so hawks and owls don't just eat them like popcorn. They size up so fast they've barely got feathers and some of them genuinely can't walk and just sort of flop themselves across the pasture when forced to move, and from egg to freezer bag, they're about 8 weeks in age.
The laying hens are such a different breed they're like entirely different animals-- bred solely for maximal egg production, they're also quick-witted, ruthless, nimble, neurotic, and brutally lizard-y. (Heritage breeds have been bred for looks, for temperament, for size, for reliability, for friendliness, all kinds of things; commercial egg chickens have been bred for eggs only and so anything else just is what it is.) It makes it a little harder to kill them, morally-- the broilers are so goddamn stupid they have no idea, but the egg hens absolutely know what's going on. The only consolation is that this breed tends to crash out and burn at 2 to 3 years in age, so at going on 2 years old, a bunch of these ones were starting to have health problems and quality of life issues. I definitely processed a couple that were clearly not laying anymore, and one that had such a terrible impacted crop I thought she must have been suffering.
They were hard to pluck, so it took a bit for us to get going. And then we, veteran eviscerators all, each got our first bird... and every single one of us was like "wait what the fuck", because they're shaped just differently enough, their skin is tougher, their bones too close together, their vents strangely shaped-- I cut into mine, with great difficulty, and got my fingers in and pulled my hand out and was holding an egg yolk, and it was so strange and unexpected I literally shrieked and threw the thing.
VM cut into his and was like "why is this... hard... hang on... this is an egg" and sure enough there was an egg about to be laid in the vent of his chicken, and he had to cut it out and there it was, a perfectly good big egg.
We all had some trouble, and they never got particularly easy to handle. We got a bucket and collected the eggs as we found them and wound up with over two dozen. And we got a baggie and collected the unformed eggs. So they form first as yolks, and gradually size up as they travel through the chicken's reproductive tract, and only in the last day or so do they get a shell and then get popped out. They're just yolks before that, but they have a strong enough membrane that they mostly stay together. So we collected all of those. The last hen I did, I counted-- there was one egg in the shell, and then NINE MORE yolks large enough to be collected. !!! It was messed-up.
The last one I did was a rooster and it was so annoying. I got my hand in there, which was difficult, and then I closed my hand around the stomach to pull it out, and with my hand closed, my fist was now too large to pass through the animal's pelvis. I had this thing stuck on my hand like Edward Chickenhands, and I could not for love or money get the fucking thing's organs out.
I eventually managed, but there had been some hilarity.
After that, the 147 broiler chickens were an absolute cakewalk.
We had enough staff that we were crammed in, but it meant we could keep up with the slaughter room, so we flew through and were done by 11. Then 45 minutes of cleanup, as usual, and lunch.
After dinner Farmkid was running around being a weirdo, and I noticed that Veg Manager was just... walking around outside, no shoes on, glass of wine in his hand, looking at stuff in the picking garden. I thought for a bit that he was weeding, or planning, but after a while I looked out and he was just sitting in one of the pathways, petting Reno the cat, looking at the garden as the sun moved toward setting, in its lovely golden hour. I went out and took some pictures of the cat, the plants, and he was happy enough to chat with me, but I almost felt like I was intruding; he'd clearly just been enjoying the evening, enjoying the garden that's largely the work of his hands-- I mean, my sister's done a ton of it, and the other workers on the farm have done a lot of the actual planting and such, but probably if you measured out the hours, a slim majority would be the work of his hands and his planning, and just a little ways up the hill it slides over into being over 90% his labor and 100% his planning. He ought to enjoy it, and it's wonderful that he does. He's just such a good dude, I like him so much.
I was on my way out to the yurt when Dude's mom called me with a computer question. She was under the impression that I was home and could pop over to look at it, but I was not. I gave her advice anyway, and then walked out to the yurt even though it was still quite early. I saw the cattle on the hillside-- there are five young steers, I think they are, and I tried to go look at them with Farmkid but they have such a big pasture area it's hard to tell where they are. But there they were, in the sunset, grazing happily.
I swung past my flax patch and weeded a bit by hand, since the weather was nice and the mosquitoes not so bad. I'm exhausted and my whole body hurts but like... weeding sucks and since I already hurt I might as well just do it? IDK, it felt like the thing to do. I've done like, a third of one of the five rows, so it's better than nothing.
Supposed to be 49 tonight, but not stormy, or windy, so I'll take it. I'm so tired I just want to sleep.
We had a huge crew-- everyone was present, including the entire Overqualified Moms crew.
I guess I should go into some detail about the Overqualified Mom Squad because they are possibly the most charming part of Chicken Days.
I'm not sure how it started, but there's a woman and her father-in-law that have been coming for years; this woman has a daughter who went to the school Farmkid goes to now, and she herself is an architect who is taking a few years off to raise her daughter. Then there's another woman who has a PhD in classics, and two young daughters, who she's been homeschooling but she did send the younger one to the Montessori pre-K that Farmkid's been going to, and she's quite fast friends with Farmkid now. And then the neighbor of the first woman has been coming as well, and I know less about her but she is a fantastic worker and the kind of person who can manage an entire line just by being cheerful and noticing what's going on and doing what needs to be done.
Then we've got an older fellow who has run the plucker for maybe a decade or so, an old friend of the previous owners who is just a sweet and gentle person who believes sincerely in doing the right thing, and also likes all of us, and even as his health is failing, he's determined to keep showing up for as long as he still can, because he likes the work and likes us. (BIL told him today, "If you ever decide you've got to retire, we'll still send you a chicken every other week.")
Two of the Overqualified Moms mostly get paid in chicken feet, though we also give them a chicken too. We only recently talked the third one into taking a chicken home with her. The dad-in-law always takes two fat chickens and four dozen eggs, which is perfectly reasonable, as well as all the chicken hearts we have going spare; sometimes that's all of them, sometimes other helpers want some too. (I don't, no thanks!)
And we've also got a young woman who's been coming for years, and she's moved out of town but at the moment is between jobs so she's been happy to come. Her thing is that she loves to take damaged chickens, or parts that no one else wants, things she thinks might go to waste. Livers, hearts, feet if no one else is taking them. And she doesn't always take a chicken home-- only if there's a damaged one she thinks no one else wants! It's quite funny. We're glad she finds things she wants.
Then there's the rotating cast of the farm's paid help-- a young man whose cousin just won a Tony for directing Hadestown, for one-- he comes two or three mornings a week? We like him, but he's a bit eccentric-- I mean, so is everyone else, so-- and then the two apprentices, who this year are two young women, one twenty and the other in her thirties. The young one is a grown up farmkid from a dairy family in central NY, while the older one is from Pittsburgh and has a more varied background that doesn't include much experience with livestock. Both are fairly agreeable sorts.
After we were done, BIL proposed we get pizza and invite-- I thought he said "the princesses" and it took me a moment to sort out that with the faint hint of having lived in literally half a dozen states across the midwest and South that sometimes shapes his vowels, he'd really said "apprentices" with his narrow e's, "apprintices", which sounds just like "the princesses" in the local accent which I do have and don't realize I do-- so now the apprentices are called The Princesses which is hilarious because neither of them is in the slightest bit princess-like in any way at all. (It's not that he has an accent, notably, nor that I do, but I can't hear a difference in the way he pronounces Is and Es in the middles of words. I literally can't tell whether he's saying "pin" or "pen", ever, which mostly doesn't matter but occasionally really does.
Anyhow-- we started off our processing this morning by doing the culls from the laying flock, about 70 hens from last year's flock whose time had come. They were in a gross bit of over-used pasture closed in to the barn that's meant to be shut up for the summer, and last year we sold off the culls but this year we figured, you know, we should just process them and sell them as stew hens. So we did, and we also figured we better do them first, because they're much harder to process and if we save them for last we'll be really miserable.
And it was difficult. See, the broiler chickens we do, they're a commercial hybrid called "cornish cross" that are just meat blobs on semi-functional legs, designed solely to size up as efficiently as possible. They're so stupid they can't keep themselves alive on pasture and have to be kept in these pens called "tractors", bottomless to give them access to grass, roofed so hawks and owls don't just eat them like popcorn. They size up so fast they've barely got feathers and some of them genuinely can't walk and just sort of flop themselves across the pasture when forced to move, and from egg to freezer bag, they're about 8 weeks in age.
The laying hens are such a different breed they're like entirely different animals-- bred solely for maximal egg production, they're also quick-witted, ruthless, nimble, neurotic, and brutally lizard-y. (Heritage breeds have been bred for looks, for temperament, for size, for reliability, for friendliness, all kinds of things; commercial egg chickens have been bred for eggs only and so anything else just is what it is.) It makes it a little harder to kill them, morally-- the broilers are so goddamn stupid they have no idea, but the egg hens absolutely know what's going on. The only consolation is that this breed tends to crash out and burn at 2 to 3 years in age, so at going on 2 years old, a bunch of these ones were starting to have health problems and quality of life issues. I definitely processed a couple that were clearly not laying anymore, and one that had such a terrible impacted crop I thought she must have been suffering.
They were hard to pluck, so it took a bit for us to get going. And then we, veteran eviscerators all, each got our first bird... and every single one of us was like "wait what the fuck", because they're shaped just differently enough, their skin is tougher, their bones too close together, their vents strangely shaped-- I cut into mine, with great difficulty, and got my fingers in and pulled my hand out and was holding an egg yolk, and it was so strange and unexpected I literally shrieked and threw the thing.
VM cut into his and was like "why is this... hard... hang on... this is an egg" and sure enough there was an egg about to be laid in the vent of his chicken, and he had to cut it out and there it was, a perfectly good big egg.
We all had some trouble, and they never got particularly easy to handle. We got a bucket and collected the eggs as we found them and wound up with over two dozen. And we got a baggie and collected the unformed eggs. So they form first as yolks, and gradually size up as they travel through the chicken's reproductive tract, and only in the last day or so do they get a shell and then get popped out. They're just yolks before that, but they have a strong enough membrane that they mostly stay together. So we collected all of those. The last hen I did, I counted-- there was one egg in the shell, and then NINE MORE yolks large enough to be collected. !!! It was messed-up.
The last one I did was a rooster and it was so annoying. I got my hand in there, which was difficult, and then I closed my hand around the stomach to pull it out, and with my hand closed, my fist was now too large to pass through the animal's pelvis. I had this thing stuck on my hand like Edward Chickenhands, and I could not for love or money get the fucking thing's organs out.
I eventually managed, but there had been some hilarity.
After that, the 147 broiler chickens were an absolute cakewalk.
We had enough staff that we were crammed in, but it meant we could keep up with the slaughter room, so we flew through and were done by 11. Then 45 minutes of cleanup, as usual, and lunch.
After dinner Farmkid was running around being a weirdo, and I noticed that Veg Manager was just... walking around outside, no shoes on, glass of wine in his hand, looking at stuff in the picking garden. I thought for a bit that he was weeding, or planning, but after a while I looked out and he was just sitting in one of the pathways, petting Reno the cat, looking at the garden as the sun moved toward setting, in its lovely golden hour. I went out and took some pictures of the cat, the plants, and he was happy enough to chat with me, but I almost felt like I was intruding; he'd clearly just been enjoying the evening, enjoying the garden that's largely the work of his hands-- I mean, my sister's done a ton of it, and the other workers on the farm have done a lot of the actual planting and such, but probably if you measured out the hours, a slim majority would be the work of his hands and his planning, and just a little ways up the hill it slides over into being over 90% his labor and 100% his planning. He ought to enjoy it, and it's wonderful that he does. He's just such a good dude, I like him so much.
I was on my way out to the yurt when Dude's mom called me with a computer question. She was under the impression that I was home and could pop over to look at it, but I was not. I gave her advice anyway, and then walked out to the yurt even though it was still quite early. I saw the cattle on the hillside-- there are five young steers, I think they are, and I tried to go look at them with Farmkid but they have such a big pasture area it's hard to tell where they are. But there they were, in the sunset, grazing happily.
I swung past my flax patch and weeded a bit by hand, since the weather was nice and the mosquitoes not so bad. I'm exhausted and my whole body hurts but like... weeding sucks and since I already hurt I might as well just do it? IDK, it felt like the thing to do. I've done like, a third of one of the five rows, so it's better than nothing.
Supposed to be 49 tonight, but not stormy, or windy, so I'll take it. I'm so tired I just want to sleep.
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Date: 2019-06-12 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-13 07:25 pm (UTC)