dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with animal husbandry

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Before I get into a gross animal slaughter thing: Farmsister’s email inbox. At the top of one of her inbox sections she’s got this starred email saved; her husband put it there because he knew it would make her laugh. One of the farms down the river sent out a post to a listserv they’re on advertising a position she was trying to hire someone to fill, but she worded it sort of… funny… and so the subject line of the email is Flower Farm Hand Job and Sister laughs uncontrollably whenever she sees it.

So, here’s the gross animal slaughter thing I feel compelled to write down, for some reason, so I’ll put it behind a cut, but it’s sort of really about how horrible the breed of chickens we’ve come to accept as the standard eatin’ bird in the US is– they’re called the Cornish Cross and they’re an f1 hybrid because they can’t, themselves, reproduce? anyway they’re awful creatures, and BIL really wants to start keeping a more heritage-style bird but the fastest-growing of those need 10-12 weeks to size up instead of the 8 weeks the CCs do, and that winds up being something like 30 cents more per pound, which is a lot when you already have to charge $5/lb for whole birds.

anyway. so think on that; your chicken was eight weeks old when it died. And Cornish Game Hens? Those are just the same bird, the same Cornish Cross, processed at four to six weeks instead. Probably didn’t have feathers yet. Which, like, whatever; the horrible thing is that if you let a CC live longer than that it’ll probably die spontaneously anyway. At 8 weeks we always find some of them that already couldn’t walk from their mutant muscle growth. Hideous stunted little lives, awful birds.

Anyway my gross thing was that I was eviscerating one and got my hand in there and got fucking stabbed, because their ribs are so fragile that the trip through the plucking machine had separated several of this one’s ribs from the breastbone internally. The plucking machine is not particularly violent, it’s like going through the spin cycle on a washing machine. Anyway.

I managed not to break the skin on my hand, and passed it along to my sister for de-lunging, and was like, “don’t put yr hand in there”, and she was like “??” and I was like “ribs” and she was like “ah” because THIS IS A COMMON PROBLEM

anyway the upside is that it’s easier to butterfly these chickens for cooking because their ribs are fucking toothpicks. You can use kitchen shears or just like, put your hand on them and crack them and then cut the meat with a knife, it’s so gross. They’re so gross.

But they’re so cheap to raise and they make so much meat. Sigh.

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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.)

First 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.
( mostly dirt )

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.)

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working with Farmsister in the patch of the garden that’s going to be flowers this coming year. tw gross animal husbandry vulgarity to follow, jsyk.

the scene and setting: the “garden” is the level-ish field at the bottom of the hill between the two creeks, with the barn and barnyard on one side, and the steep rise that goes up to the old cattle pasture on the other; it’s a rectangle and has uhhh like an acre (wild guess) of area, and is where they have grown most of the vegetables for most of this farm’s existence. The greenhouse is along one edge, and then the farm road goes along it and the yurt is just on the other side of the farm road.

Past the farm road and the little chunk of ground where the yurt is, is the creek, and then on the other side of the creek is the new barn, where the hogs and chickens currently are. Arthur the boar is now barred from entering the barn, because it’s given over to the sows and the babies; he doesn’t particularly care to go indoors anyway, and now that it’s warm, probably never would have anyway. His water and food are under the eaves of the barn, and he’s happy enough out there. Soon he’ll be moved farther out onto pasture so he’ll get fresh stuff to dig up, and he’ll have a lovely summer ahead of him, and when the piglets are weaned, the ladies will rejoin him and he’ll be even happier. Bro lives a good life, y’know?

In the meantime.

Sister and I were laying out the garden beds by staking down landscape fabric to define the walkways between beds.

Suddenly, a strong scent hit me, and I stood up frowning. It smelled like– nasty weed, like someone was smoking absolutely the dankest, nastiest, garbage weed. But definitely weed.

“What the fuck,” I said, “that is the grossest weed I’ve ever smelled.”

Farmsister looked up laughing from where she was dealing with a bent ground staple. “That’s not weed,” she said.

I sniffed deeper, grossed-out. “That’s absolutely weed,” I said.

“That’s Arthur,” she said. “The boar.”

“Smoking weed?” I asked, because I could not understand what on earth she meant.

“That’s what boar semen smells like,” she said. “He just ejaculated on something.” (There’s my Did U Kno PSA for the day: boars jack off on anything they can manage to, all the time, sometimes involving a sow but often not. We know of one prized pedigree breeding boar who had to eventually be retired to sausage because he exclusively liked to hump the wrong ends of sows. How does one jack off without hands? You just fuck things, that’s what you do. Boars: they just Fuck Things. It’s repulsive and also hilarious.)

“Oh my god,” I said.

“I’m glad you agree with me,” she said. “[BIL] and [VegMan] think I’m crazy for thinking it smells like weed.”

“He’s like… two hundred feet away,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Boars are disgusting.”
(Your picture was not posted)

After morning chores this morning BIL came in and said "well, either [young sow] Merlot is in heat or in labor and I can't tell which," and Farmsister said "well if it's the latter we'll know soon enough".
But the level of care hogs need during / immediately following birth is mostly "leave them alone", so we'll check in but mostly let that be.

(This is why we don't raise sheep, because lambing is waaaaaaay more involved.)

I'm like... how can... you not... tell but honestly have you ever really looked at a pig? there is really no way of knowing how many pigs she is. which is the most unsettling perspective i can think of adopting on that concept but it's the truth.

also all bets are off because of the extradimensional Piglet Portal on that hillside of late, so.

(For anyone who's new around here, I spend my winters working retail but in the summers I split my time between the retail job-- it's online retail, so they don't need me every day, I mostly do product photography for the online listings so I can do a bunch of work and then not show up for a while and then come back and do a bunch more, it's shitty pay but ideal schedule-wise-- and my sister's organic farm, which is a 300-mile drive straight east of my house. On the farm, I live in a yurt but it's not set up yet, so at the moment I'm in the guest bedroom; the farm only has the one guest-bedroom tho and Brother In Law's from the Midwest so there's frequently family staying there. My folks live like 10 miles away and I got tired of that commute on top of the 300 mile drive, so I got a lil yurt and store it in the barn attic over the winters. Might set it up this visit, might wait for the next one. General TWs in farm-related posts for discussion of livestock farming and such, I'll try to tag them as such but if that's something you're not into, I may not always be super up on realizing what's gonna be jarring or gross to you so y'all might want to give these entries a pass, I'm not trying to freak anybody out but sausage comes from somewhere, y'know, and I'm gonna be frank about it, har har get it? frank? ok no.)

Got up this morning intending to immediately pack up and drive, but I had stopped writing last night at an exciting part in the bit I was working on, and I wanted to continue, so I let myself sit for an hour and keep writing. (Sex scene, it was a sex scene. listen sometimes they take forever to write and sometimes they just go, and this one was ready to just go. i had choreographed it weeks ago, as it happens, and it just took this long to get to it. these things have to ferment a little sometimes. hard to describe, idk if that's the right word, but there it is.)

But I did get myself together and out the door, and got on the highway. my personal observation is that if I bring a cup of coffee with me, I have to stop and pee somewhere along the route; I weighed my options, and since I had a full tank of gas I wouldn't otherwise have to stop, and I thought about it but decided I wanted coffee, so I brought some with me. and then didn't have to stop. so, go Bladder Of Steel, I guess.

Hit some snow by Syracuse, but it wasn't sticking. Just meant my car got entirely crusted with salt. blech. Traffic was fine except at one point there was a plow and literally nobody handled it well. Like, every single person on the road in front of me dealt poorly with it, especially the giant pickup truck pulling a truck with what looked like a howitzer on it, who cut me off and then I couldn't see what was going on or why everyone was suddenly driving like a dumbfuck. Spoiler alert: a snowplow, fuckin' imagine that, get over you idiots there's only a giant blinky yellow arrow on the back to show you where to fucking go! Argh. Jeez you'd think it was the first snow of the season or something, what month is it again?

Arrived at the farm just as Farmsister, BIL, and Veg Manager were finishing up their Monthly Management Meeting. There's an apprentice, now, so they're not the entire staff of the farm anymore, but all winter long it's kind of funny because they're it, they're the whole staff, and yet they still have these meetings. I mean, it's justified, it's important, the different areas of the farm can get pretty segregated and it's easy to lose track of the overarching stuff, and there's so goddamn much going on all the time that it's impossible to keep up without regular meetings and whatnot. But still.

So I got there just as they were done, and just in time to accompany Sister over to the granary to make more bouquets. She'd actually been procrastinating them, hoping I'd show up, so she was gratifyingly delighted to see me.
I asked what the deal was with the piglets-- a while back she'd posted a photo of one of the sows with piglets, then nothing, then another post with another sow-- and it's sort of weird, but not dire. (I'd worried something had happened to the first one.) The thing is, they got the new boar only about three months ago, and he went in with these sows then. ... Sows gestate for 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days.
The old boar has to have sired Red's piglets. Their coloring, too-- they're his. They had to get rid of him because none of the sows farrowed and so the common factor has to have been him, and yet-- these have to have been sired, like, his last day of life, given the timing. Which is weird. Just-- weird. Super weird. (Maybe he'd sustained an injury he only recovered from right at the end? but? or maybe there was something in their pasturage that made the sows all not able to conceive or something and it wasn't his fault anyway??? IDK! It's fine, he was too big for the younger sows, he wouldn't have lived a lot longer anyway-- but-- weird. Super goddamn weird.) Also, Red usually farrows 7-10 pigs, and this farrowing was... three. So. Also weird. But they're fine! It was just super odd. The new sow, the pigs have to be the new boar's because she was absolutely never pastured anywhere near the old boar (also he was her sire, and apparently in animal husbandry you can do that for one generation but we have... not, it's a little icky), it's just... how... could she have... had them so quickly. We don't know! They're perfectly fine and normal piglets, they're just sort of impossible.
Maybe that new barn has some sort of weird time dilation situation going on, or like, an extra piglet dimension, or something. We're really not sure.
Rocky's ready to pop probably, and Merlot should be along soon enough. That leaves Pepper, but we don't know her that well so it's hard to tell what's normal for her. (It is darn difficult to tell when a hog is pregnant, they're sort of... hog-shaped at all times, and how many piglets are inside a hog is a thing of mystery.) We actually had the vet come today to look at Merlot, who had a wound that might have abscessed-- turned out it was fine, mostly we wanted to meet the vet. Hard to find large animal vets; she mostly works with dogs and cats but is trying to build up a large animal client base, so we were glad to meet her. BIL felt really good that she was willing to work partly for trade-- she took some pork products as payment, which is like, extra good testimony, that she'd just worked on the pigs and was still willing to eat them. Made him feel proud of his facilities and standard of care, and such. She told him he should be proud, which was sweet.
They were going to have her come back to, uhh, fix the new piglets but she herself is about nine months pregnant at the moment and will be not wanting to hang around in barns dealing with that sort of nonsense. But it's good to know her, for future reference.

Dinner was pizza with mom and dad and middle-little sister and the new apprentice, along with the usual occupants of the house, and it was lovely-- also we got to test out a bunch of cakes from

unicornduke, which was really fantastic, and we had long serious discussions about the merits of the various cakes. I think the new apprentice might think we're all insane but she's hard to read, so far; she did seem to be enjoying some of the conversation, anyway.
And then Sister and i stayed up late to carton eggs for the farmer's market tomorrow. Cartoning eggs is one of those jobs... like, I never really thought about how eggs get into cartons before, but someone's gotta put 'em there. Think on that, folks. I'm going to bed.

I was inspired by yesterday's farrowing news to dig for my photos of past farrowings on the farm.

( more discussion and some photos of pigs under the cut )

REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, THERE ARE PIGLETS
Visit the farm's instagram to see: Red And Baby
there are PIGLETS
ok, ok, there's just one in that photo, but there are five sows and if that boar's any good there'll be a bunch more pigs soon
(last time Red farrowed she produced 10; Rocky's last farrowing was 14, so. We'll see. Listen there's a reason pigs hold the place they do in world agriculture.)

so

OK you can resume whatever it was you were doing that was important, just understand it's not more important than this. :D

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I am back home and Chita has decided my lap is a suitable port in a storm. (Normally, she won’t bother with my lap, only Dude’s, but he was napping on the couch so his lap wasn’t available.)

I took the picture with my laptop’s webcam though so she was not amused by me waving a literal computer at her, hence the stinky-face.

My right shoulder is fucked up from repetitive motion; turkeys are fucking heavy and you really have to go at them pretty violently with the delunging wand. Mostly I had to pry out kidneys and what I eventually realized was their reproductive system– it’s adhered really tenaciously to the spine, and is either a pair of tiny kidney-bean-sized white things that are testicles, or a little clump of tiny white spheres that are eggs in their earliest stage, all wrapped up in connective tissue and sort of.. I dunno, ducts or things. It took for-goddamn ever to get out, was always left behind by the eviscerators, and hurt my hands something fierce.

I mean, they call it delunging for a reason; I had to pry out a lot of left-over scraps of lungs too. They cling on pretty tenaciously to the ribs. But it wasn’t until toward the end of the day that I started having issues with there being a lot of lungs left. Every third bird or so, I had to switch hands; I was absently holding the birds with my left and going in with my right, using the wand and then my hand, and I kept having there be a big chunk of the right lung left that I couldn’t get my fingers under unless i went in with my left hand. I said, “I think one of the right-handed eviscerators is getting lazy.” There were three eviscerators: Jen is left-handed, and was using her right hand to go in, leaving her left to handle the knife and manipulate the bird. Aaron is right-handed, but uses his left hand to go into the bird because that hand is marginally smaller, he thinks maybe, or for some reason anyway it lets him get the gizzard out in one pull on chickens, where his right he can’t get all his fingers in. (On turkeys that doesn’t matter, but those of us who work with poultry a lot generally handle a lot more chickens than turkeys.)

That leaves Annie, my sister, who cheerfully answered, “Well, I’m being lazy because I want to give you something to do.”

Which explains why it was the right lung, and every third bird, because she’s right-handed and pulls with her right hand.

Anyway, it was amusing that she was doing it deliberately.

Turns out turkeys are really sharp on the inside. Never thought about it, but this is true of chickens too— their ribs really stick out a lot on the inside, as do vertebrae; there’s no padding once you pry out the viscera, of course. I beat the shit out of my hands. Turkeys are just so much bigger than chickens, so much harder to handle.

Anyway. The income from the turkeys is basically what sustains my sister’s little family through until vegetables start being harvested again, so— important work.