post-processing

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/33E8eqf

Today was a chicken processing day, the sixth out of twelve for the season, so we’re halfway there, whoa-oh etcetera.

The very first thing that happened is that as I came out to the barn, my brother-in-law was just inside the door setting up, and I heard him make an awful strangled yelp. I ran over, thinking he’d hurt himself– lots of potential hazards there, so– and I said, “What’s wrong??!” and he was standing not far inside the screen door giving it a very, very unhappy look.

“Huge spider,” he said grimly. He’s horribly arachnophobic, his dad thoughtlessly conditioned him into it when he was a kid, and he’s suffered with it his whole life, and he works on a fucking farm and there are spiders everywhere and he’s actually a reasonably tough dude who isn’t squeamish about much (i mean, he does the killing on chicken day) and he really really has worked hard not to pass the phobia along to his daughter, in vain, as she’s lately decided it’s funny to be scared of spiders, but. Anyway. I do know his fear of them is severe and not really something he can help, though he does pretty well with it most of the time.

I looked, and sure enough, there right next to the door was a truly enormous barn spider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/barn_spider, either an araneus cavaticus or a neoscona crucifera, I can’t tell them apart. I’m not… super into spiders, but as a coping mechanism with the yurt I researched them and learned all their Latin names and such and at this point I won’t touch one but I’m not violently afraid of them either. “I’ll get it,” I said, and looked around. I eventually settled upon a bucket and a sheet of metal, since those were objects to hand, and I gently pried it away from the door into the bucket and took it outside and set the bucket down on its side so the rain wouldn’t pour in and it could make its choices about what to do in the Big Outdoors at its leisure.

I felt very heroic. BIL felt much better with the spider gone.

We were down a couple of people for processing, so I wound up stationed by myself on one side of the counter, which meant that I was the only eviscerator collecting hearts and livers in my set of containers. (Those are the only two organs we save– people sometimes ask us for gizzards but not enough to justify the huge pain in the ass they are to save and clean.)

So I had the opportunity to count the hearts at the end, since every chicken I processed had a heart, and I knew I’d discarded two– one because I just didn’t find it among the tangle of organs (how do you lose a heart? listen sometimes they’re just. in there. IDK), and a second because it had an unattractive pericardial sac or whatever that’s called– I just didn’t like the look of it, so I tossed it. So, at the end of the day, I had 66 hearts, so I’d eviscerated 68 chickens. Our total number for the day was 247, so we each should’ve done about 61 birds, so I did slightly more than my share, which makes sense because of the other 3 eviscerators, one of them was actually a succession of 2 people with a slight gap between, and one of them was also managing the distribution of the birds from the bucket, and the last was carrying the second-lasts’s finished birds over to the delunging station for her because the second-last eviscerator is a pregnant lady so her energy levels have been a bit low. Anyhow… we managed.

We were super behind at one point but BIL decided to stop for a break, which meant the kill side of the line had time to clean up a bit, and go drink coffee, and we worked straight through until our backlog was cleared up and then had time to let the pregnant lady go pee and the rest of us get a little swig of coffee before diving back in.

It was mostly a good pleasant day, but I’m quite tired.

We’re getting the tail end of a hurricane apparently, so it’s pouring buckets and we’ve got another tornado watch. Hm!

Mm the cat just threw up almost on my foot. I’m waiting for the dog to come back inside to let her clean it up… I’ll probably forget and step in it, in a minute, so prepare to laugh at me for that bit of laziness.

Comments

[heartofoshun]

Congrats on finishing the chickens!

We had heavy rain and wind off and on in Brooklyn and some power outages. I heard those tornado reports also but couldn't really follow the explanations--was not trying very hard I must admit.

[dragonlady7]

What I heard of it was that it was a tornado watch, which means the conditions were correct to cause one but there wasn't one on the radar yet. so it was fine.
we had some observable straight-line winds, concerning enough that my sister went out to make sure none of the pasture pens for the chickens had blown away-- they can, and have in the past, but they were fine this time.