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Farm life is never dull. Most of yesterday was spent washing eggs, packing eggs, putting eggs away, then putting away all the egg-washing paraphernalia so I could then clean and set up that room as the evisceration room for Tuesday’s chicken processing.
Oh yeah, I have a bunch of new followers for Witcher stuff. A brief intro into what the hell I mean by The Farm: My youngest sister owns an organic farm with a CSA , a flock of several hundred egg-laying hens, and a small livestock program focusing on chickens and pigs. (There are a handful of beef cattle this year, for the second year in a row; that’s an expansion project.) The livestock is integrated with the vegetable production by pasture rotation programs to improve soil, clear brush, and add fertility; all of the livestock is raised out on pasture except for the pigs who live over the winter in a barn with free access to the outdoors but it’s too limited to call it “pasture”.
Part of this program is that there’s a NYS-certified slaughterhouse on the premises. I come and help out during the farm season as much as I can (on unpaid leave from my retail job, and this all started because they had to cut hours and I was like get me the fuck out of here, and I wanted to see more of my niece, who’s six now, and anyway it’s complicated now but here I am!), and mostly I babysit but on chicken days, I usually help out on the line either as a finish plucker or eviscerator.
I do try to tag the posts with tw animal husbandry or tw slaughter or something like that; if I’m gonna talk about gross details I usually put it behind a cut. I’d link to past ones but Tumblr’s search function is garbage, so.
This year’s cast of characters has some regulars and some new ones– Farmsister is my baby sister [she’s uhh 35?], Farmkid is her 6-year-old daughter, BIL is my brother-in-law (Farmsister’s husband and Farmkid’s dad, to be perfectly clear), and then VegMan or Vegetable Manager is their full-time employee/partner-in-crime, who manages the vegetable side of the business and lives in an apartment attached to the main farmhouse; hiring him was the first thing they did when they were able to purchase the farm from its previous owners in 2015/2016. There are four other employees, all new this year (usually there are two or three seasonal employees)– three interns/apprentices, who live in a cabin and a camper on the farm and all of their names begin with A this year, and a young man who lives down in the city who is the new Livestock Manager. The character of the farm crew varies hugely from year to year; last year it was two young women who never spoke, and this year it’s this loud cheerful very tightly-bonded crew who go everywhere together and take on extra projects just for the fun of it and have fantastic attitudes. So that’s really a huge help, but it doesn’t make it less insanely busy around here.
Anyway the slaughterhouse is in one half of the big barn (built in 1943, it’s neither old– the “old” barn is from about 1820– nor new, as the newest barn is the livestock winter barn built in 2018.)
Most of what I do on the farm is babysitting and cleaning the slaughter room. I like cleaning the slaughter room because mostly I know where the stuff is supposed to go, and once I’ve done that, you can spray down every surface, scrub it with a big plastic scrub brush, rinse it clean, and then bleach the fuck out of it. It’s so satisfying.
I packed 67 dozen eggs yesterday, of which I’d probably washed about 45 dozen myself. So the egg fridge in the self-serve farmstand– that’s mostly new this year, having a self-serve virus-compatible farmstand with actual doors that close, and big signs that use Venmo, and a glass-fronted fridge with a light-up display in it– is restocked finally.
I also played a little with Farmkid. She’s just mostly gone feral. Every day, she gets one hour of TV, and is left unsupervised, and every day it winds up stretching to two or more, and she always insists that no she didn’t watch extra episodes she’d had to pause it to do something or other, there was something happening, yadda yadda, and like. Her mom is mad but what can she do? She can’t supervise her television time. I finished cleaning the slaughterhouse and came in during the TV time, though, and she came out looking for her mom and was like “it paused and i can’t get it to start again!” and sure enough, the TV actually was glitched, so I sat with her and read to her for a while, waiting for the thing to unglitch before I finally said wait why don’t we go back out and see if it’ll start another episode, and that worked.
So at least I could defend her to her mother, that there really *had* been a problem, though she also was full of an explanation that she’d been in there a while first because she had to stop to shoo out a wasp– the thing is, she hadn’t really gone over the allotted time yet when I came in, so. Who knows.
The thing is, she’s a much more fluent reader than Boy, who’s older than her and in the same grade, and I just spent so long struggling with him and his schoolwork, and she’d’ve been perfectly capable of doing all those assignments. I do think I’ll try to work with her on some math this week, if I get a chance; she doesn’t know money values yet, which i’d worked with him on, so. We’ll see if there’s time. And her routine isn’t set up for that so she’d be really impatient. But it does seem like a good thing to do… who knows.
OK I gotta go eat breakfast so I can go re-clean the slaughterhouse (I always have to spray it down and re-sanitize in the morning, and then set up all the final details of equipment, so I’m out there before anyone else– not true, I go out second, Brother-In-Law goes out first to fill the scalder and start it heating. He’s probably already been out and done that).
Wish me luck. 270 chickens today, which is kind of a lot but not like. A lot lot. Still. I had some awful hip pain yesterday, to the point of having to limp, and then I took two ibuprofen and it went away immediately, like before the pills would have had a chance to kick in, so I am Deeply Suspicious. (It’s that my hips are hypermobile and one isn’t staying properly in the socket, I know that, but I don’t know how to stop it doing that. When I took the pills I also punched myself and I’m slightly concerned that punching it might actually have helped? what the fuck.)
Farm life is never dull. Most of yesterday was spent washing eggs, packing eggs, putting eggs away, then putting away all the egg-washing paraphernalia so I could then clean and set up that room as the evisceration room for Tuesday’s chicken processing.
Oh yeah, I have a bunch of new followers for Witcher stuff. A brief intro into what the hell I mean by The Farm: My youngest sister owns an organic farm with a CSA , a flock of several hundred egg-laying hens, and a small livestock program focusing on chickens and pigs. (There are a handful of beef cattle this year, for the second year in a row; that’s an expansion project.) The livestock is integrated with the vegetable production by pasture rotation programs to improve soil, clear brush, and add fertility; all of the livestock is raised out on pasture except for the pigs who live over the winter in a barn with free access to the outdoors but it’s too limited to call it “pasture”.
Part of this program is that there’s a NYS-certified slaughterhouse on the premises. I come and help out during the farm season as much as I can (on unpaid leave from my retail job, and this all started because they had to cut hours and I was like get me the fuck out of here, and I wanted to see more of my niece, who’s six now, and anyway it’s complicated now but here I am!), and mostly I babysit but on chicken days, I usually help out on the line either as a finish plucker or eviscerator.
I do try to tag the posts with tw animal husbandry or tw slaughter or something like that; if I’m gonna talk about gross details I usually put it behind a cut. I’d link to past ones but Tumblr’s search function is garbage, so.
This year’s cast of characters has some regulars and some new ones– Farmsister is my baby sister [she’s uhh 35?], Farmkid is her 6-year-old daughter, BIL is my brother-in-law (Farmsister’s husband and Farmkid’s dad, to be perfectly clear), and then VegMan or Vegetable Manager is their full-time employee/partner-in-crime, who manages the vegetable side of the business and lives in an apartment attached to the main farmhouse; hiring him was the first thing they did when they were able to purchase the farm from its previous owners in 2015/2016. There are four other employees, all new this year (usually there are two or three seasonal employees)– three interns/apprentices, who live in a cabin and a camper on the farm and all of their names begin with A this year, and a young man who lives down in the city who is the new Livestock Manager. The character of the farm crew varies hugely from year to year; last year it was two young women who never spoke, and this year it’s this loud cheerful very tightly-bonded crew who go everywhere together and take on extra projects just for the fun of it and have fantastic attitudes. So that’s really a huge help, but it doesn’t make it less insanely busy around here.
Anyway the slaughterhouse is in one half of the big barn (built in 1943, it’s neither old– the “old” barn is from about 1820– nor new, as the newest barn is the livestock winter barn built in 2018.)
Most of what I do on the farm is babysitting and cleaning the slaughter room. I like cleaning the slaughter room because mostly I know where the stuff is supposed to go, and once I’ve done that, you can spray down every surface, scrub it with a big plastic scrub brush, rinse it clean, and then bleach the fuck out of it. It’s so satisfying.
I packed 67 dozen eggs yesterday, of which I’d probably washed about 45 dozen myself. So the egg fridge in the self-serve farmstand– that’s mostly new this year, having a self-serve virus-compatible farmstand with actual doors that close, and big signs that use Venmo, and a glass-fronted fridge with a light-up display in it– is restocked finally.
I also played a little with Farmkid. She’s just mostly gone feral. Every day, she gets one hour of TV, and is left unsupervised, and every day it winds up stretching to two or more, and she always insists that no she didn’t watch extra episodes she’d had to pause it to do something or other, there was something happening, yadda yadda, and like. Her mom is mad but what can she do? She can’t supervise her television time. I finished cleaning the slaughterhouse and came in during the TV time, though, and she came out looking for her mom and was like “it paused and i can’t get it to start again!” and sure enough, the TV actually was glitched, so I sat with her and read to her for a while, waiting for the thing to unglitch before I finally said wait why don’t we go back out and see if it’ll start another episode, and that worked.
So at least I could defend her to her mother, that there really *had* been a problem, though she also was full of an explanation that she’d been in there a while first because she had to stop to shoo out a wasp– the thing is, she hadn’t really gone over the allotted time yet when I came in, so. Who knows.
The thing is, she’s a much more fluent reader than Boy, who’s older than her and in the same grade, and I just spent so long struggling with him and his schoolwork, and she’d’ve been perfectly capable of doing all those assignments. I do think I’ll try to work with her on some math this week, if I get a chance; she doesn’t know money values yet, which i’d worked with him on, so. We’ll see if there’s time. And her routine isn’t set up for that so she’d be really impatient. But it does seem like a good thing to do… who knows.
OK I gotta go eat breakfast so I can go re-clean the slaughterhouse (I always have to spray it down and re-sanitize in the morning, and then set up all the final details of equipment, so I’m out there before anyone else– not true, I go out second, Brother-In-Law goes out first to fill the scalder and start it heating. He’s probably already been out and done that).
Wish me luck. 270 chickens today, which is kind of a lot but not like. A lot lot. Still. I had some awful hip pain yesterday, to the point of having to limp, and then I took two ibuprofen and it went away immediately, like before the pills would have had a chance to kick in, so I am Deeply Suspicious. (It’s that my hips are hypermobile and one isn’t staying properly in the socket, I know that, but I don’t know how to stop it doing that. When I took the pills I also punched myself and I’m slightly concerned that punching it might actually have helped? what the fuck.)
