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well i feel like a veal calf made of bruised jell-o. turns out spending 85 days sitting around a house and occasionally riding on an exercise bike is not a good way to keep oneself in condition for farm work.
cut for discussion of yesterday’s livestock harvesting events, though there are no gory details. Oh, if you want a tour of the whole process, I made an Instagram Stories highlight (even if you’re not an IG user you can still just watch it in your browser!) about the process last year– it starts off with a tiny political rant about food systems because at the time I was a bit bruised from encountering some Ethical Vegans, so like, don’t worry, most of it is just the tour bit.
yesterday went well– we actually took A Break in the midst of the processing run, which BIL rarely lets us do. But because of The Virus, we have to wear masks the entire time, and the usual snack area in the corner of the slaughterhouse has been moved across the driveway to the farmstand, which is an open room without doors, so you’re under a roof but not really indoors– so usually, someone can step off the line for a second to wash their hands and then have a sip of water or coffee or a quick bite of coffee cake, and now that’s not possible. Stopping to take a break is kind of tricky, though, because it’s an assembly line– from a live bird to a neatly-tucked-up carcass in the chill tank takes on average around 10 minutes per bird, as there are so many stages it has to go through, so it’s always a bit of a production.
so we did the first big batch– the 185 white Cornish Cross birds– and then took a break, and then did the last 63 birds who were the fancy heritage/hybrid Rangers, and we were still done by 11:30.
I started out on the plucking table– I tend to install myself next to the pass-through window as like, the final quality-check and kind of pace-setter– I have a chance there to hold chickens on the plucking table instead of passing them through if I can see that the evisceration table is full, and then BIL, who really is setting the pace by killing, can see that we’re backed up, though often he sees the backup and is like “ah i need to pull another eviscerator to help pluck, they’re slow” and i have to be like “i’m holding chickens because the eviscerators are underwater you dink”– but anyway. None of that happened yesterday. We moved through the process at a blistering pace, and once the eviscerators got underwater I moved into the eviscerating room and did that for a while and then our spare eviscerator showed up so we clawed our way out from under the backup without having to slow down the line, and then we were done. I wound up standing right next to Vegetable Manager, and he’s a very fast eviscerator– in the two years he was away from this farm (he apprenticed here for two years, then worked on other farms, and as soon as my sister bought the farm the first thing they did was find him and hire him back) he worked at a place that slaughtered chickens every week with a tiny crew and all he ever did was eviscerate, so he’s got a ton of experience. And I managed to mostly keep up with him, so that was nice for my ego.
But wearing a mask is torture, it really is. I felt like i had a mattress on my face. I don’t breathe well anyway, and I was wearing a mask I’d made with some great deluxe features– a linen innermost layer for not being damp, and it fit me great, and the ties were super adjustable and I got them just right– behind the head, not over the ears, and one of those thick substantial coffee bag twist-ties over the nose so it didn’t fog glasses– but it also had a third layer for filtration that I Did Not Need, and it was so big it really covered my whole lower face which I Did Not Need, and the linen, while dry, is also not smooth so it kept feeling rough against my mouth.
So maybe I’ll try making another more breathable mask for situations where I’m not really trying to protect myself, I’m trying to protect other people from me and meet the letter of the law.
I also discovered for sure that this year’s farm crew is really really fun. There are three apprentices instead of the usual two, and there’s also a new livestock manager, and they’re not kids though they’re not very old either (one of them is under 21), and the new livestock manager told a story about how on election night 2016 “that’s when I met my ex-boyfriend” and i was like that is a fantastic story start, and he was like “yeah and nine months later” and we all were like !!!! where is this story going (we had just had a lengthy conversation about my sister’s Natural Homebirth experience so like) and he continued “—I dumped him via text on Yom Kippur” which is like, what a great succinct wild ride, right? Anyway.
all right I gotta get my sore veal ass out of this bed. i am so out of shape. *groans*
well i feel like a veal calf made of bruised jell-o. turns out spending 85 days sitting around a house and occasionally riding on an exercise bike is not a good way to keep oneself in condition for farm work.
cut for discussion of yesterday’s livestock harvesting events, though there are no gory details. Oh, if you want a tour of the whole process, I made an Instagram Stories highlight (even if you’re not an IG user you can still just watch it in your browser!) about the process last year– it starts off with a tiny political rant about food systems because at the time I was a bit bruised from encountering some Ethical Vegans, so like, don’t worry, most of it is just the tour bit.
yesterday went well– we actually took A Break in the midst of the processing run, which BIL rarely lets us do. But because of The Virus, we have to wear masks the entire time, and the usual snack area in the corner of the slaughterhouse has been moved across the driveway to the farmstand, which is an open room without doors, so you’re under a roof but not really indoors– so usually, someone can step off the line for a second to wash their hands and then have a sip of water or coffee or a quick bite of coffee cake, and now that’s not possible. Stopping to take a break is kind of tricky, though, because it’s an assembly line– from a live bird to a neatly-tucked-up carcass in the chill tank takes on average around 10 minutes per bird, as there are so many stages it has to go through, so it’s always a bit of a production.
so we did the first big batch– the 185 white Cornish Cross birds– and then took a break, and then did the last 63 birds who were the fancy heritage/hybrid Rangers, and we were still done by 11:30.
I started out on the plucking table– I tend to install myself next to the pass-through window as like, the final quality-check and kind of pace-setter– I have a chance there to hold chickens on the plucking table instead of passing them through if I can see that the evisceration table is full, and then BIL, who really is setting the pace by killing, can see that we’re backed up, though often he sees the backup and is like “ah i need to pull another eviscerator to help pluck, they’re slow” and i have to be like “i’m holding chickens because the eviscerators are underwater you dink”– but anyway. None of that happened yesterday. We moved through the process at a blistering pace, and once the eviscerators got underwater I moved into the eviscerating room and did that for a while and then our spare eviscerator showed up so we clawed our way out from under the backup without having to slow down the line, and then we were done. I wound up standing right next to Vegetable Manager, and he’s a very fast eviscerator– in the two years he was away from this farm (he apprenticed here for two years, then worked on other farms, and as soon as my sister bought the farm the first thing they did was find him and hire him back) he worked at a place that slaughtered chickens every week with a tiny crew and all he ever did was eviscerate, so he’s got a ton of experience. And I managed to mostly keep up with him, so that was nice for my ego.
But wearing a mask is torture, it really is. I felt like i had a mattress on my face. I don’t breathe well anyway, and I was wearing a mask I’d made with some great deluxe features– a linen innermost layer for not being damp, and it fit me great, and the ties were super adjustable and I got them just right– behind the head, not over the ears, and one of those thick substantial coffee bag twist-ties over the nose so it didn’t fog glasses– but it also had a third layer for filtration that I Did Not Need, and it was so big it really covered my whole lower face which I Did Not Need, and the linen, while dry, is also not smooth so it kept feeling rough against my mouth.
So maybe I’ll try making another more breathable mask for situations where I’m not really trying to protect myself, I’m trying to protect other people from me and meet the letter of the law.
I also discovered for sure that this year’s farm crew is really really fun. There are three apprentices instead of the usual two, and there’s also a new livestock manager, and they’re not kids though they’re not very old either (one of them is under 21), and the new livestock manager told a story about how on election night 2016 “that’s when I met my ex-boyfriend” and i was like that is a fantastic story start, and he was like “yeah and nine months later” and we all were like !!!! where is this story going (we had just had a lengthy conversation about my sister’s Natural Homebirth experience so like) and he continued “—I dumped him via text on Yom Kippur” which is like, what a great succinct wild ride, right? Anyway.
all right I gotta get my sore veal ass out of this bed. i am so out of shape. *groans*
no subject
Date: 2020-06-10 12:54 pm (UTC)