#chicken processing

Over the winter they hired somebody to be in charge of the kitchen, which is awesome. What's been happening is that BIL is in charge of the kitchen and I show up to do the work in it, and then he gets called away to do various projects, and I'm left working alone in there unless Farmsister can abandon the veggie crew and come bail me out. Which she had to do frequently, because a lot of the jobs in there aren't one-person-doable jobs.

The reason for the change is not that that wasn't working, because it sort of was even though it was exhausting and stressful. But BIL has started doing off-farm work, first as a consultant and then more regularly. So he's had to replace himself in as many of those projects as possible. And he never really enjoyed the kitchen stuff anyway (and absolutely had no head for the details of it, and there were so many things he forgot about every time that were suddenly emergencies I had to solve every time, etc.), so. Hiring somebody there was obvious. And they lucked out; an Overqualified Mom who'd been part-time helping them on the veggie crew when her kid was tiny was now at liberty again now that her kid is in school, and so she already knows the farm, knows them, has a past in kitchen work, also has a past in office logistics work. So she's there, and she's an Overqualified Bitch With A Clipboard, and I am delighted even if in the moment she keeps doing things Differently and I get stressed out. Fortunately we're both spectrum-ish enough that we had an immediate frank conversation (she was like "sometimes I don't want to talk so if I don't it's not because I'm mad" and I was like "sometimes I get agitated and don't know how to fix my face or regulate my voice but I'm not mad either" and so we've been coexisting pretty happily ever since, and thank God, she seems to absolutely read my Overstimulated And Distressed About It state pretty spot-on-- BIL would always always read it as aggression/anger, which it never was, so then I had to manage him about it, and he was great at communicating this but I still had to talk him through it, which was exhausting).

It did occur to me to realize that I was being phased out. But at one point, of course in the middle of everything, my sister said, "My ambition this year was to use you less. I don't want you to feel bad about that. But these last couple of years I keep realizing that you're in pain and exhausted and I've wanted more than anything to be able to tell you to go sit down and that you've done enough, and I couldn't afford to. So i'm trying to get more helpers to come in, so I can tell you to go sit down, because you've done enough, and you've done enough for years, and we couldn't have done this but I don't want to keep using you so much."

Which was very sweet and I almost cried, though in the moment what I said was, "oh I'm not mad! I'm excited about it!" because, with explanation, I am.

Mostly right now I think I'm in a lot of pain because i really really underdid things this winter, because I was so tired and my brain was shutting down, so I'm basically veal trying to do the work of beef. My cartilage tear is completely healed to the point I can't even tell which hip it was, but I can tell which hip it was because the muscles there are so weak from underuse, and now I'm having to tense up all sorts of things that can't take that strain. So I'm having sciatic nerve pain like never before. But I know what it is at least, and I know I just have to generally improve my conditioning, and I don't know how but I'll have to figure it out.

This week was a lot of work but it was manageable. We processed about 400 chickens and cut up about 240 of them, and the new kitchen manager was very chipper about it until she realized just how much chicken that is. But we had enough help, for once, and the fact that BIL was only available for about 15 hours of the week didn't fuck us over, and we finished everything in good time and have set ourselves up for only small tasks next week.

Which is good, because Dude scheduled a routine medical procedure and needs me home to drive him, and I had to agree to it without knowing the farm schedule because he was supposed to get it done over the winter and somehow didn't realize that the "first chicken processing day" on the calendar he can see in fact means the season has begun.

I need to be able to spend more time in Buffalo this summer than in previous years. I started doing this part time at the farm lark partly because I wasn't enjoying the dynamic in Buffalo, but a lot of things have changed. Dude's work is very well-paid by now, but it's also extremely absorbing, and he is winding up so burnt out he can't even really make conversation in the evenings. I think I need to resign myself to housewifing at least a little. I wasn't willing to in previous years because I was working as many hours as he was. But if I cut down my hours I don't mind so much being leaned on for housework, as long as it's acknowledged. I'm not actually capable of running a household, mind, but that's a separate issue I can work on.

So anyway. I'll still be going back and forth a lot but I think I won't be doing the insane three weeks at a stretch kinda shit anymore, or not so much. I'm definitely going to miss at least two processing dates, one because of the trip to Europe in July that I need to get onto the calendar posthaste.

Anyway.

BIL and Farmsister are considering trying to restructure the farm to be more like an employee-owned co-op, partly inspired by More Trees Coop among others. When they bought the business it was very much run on the Joel Salatin model, which they gradually realized was wildly unsustainable-- it relies heavily on a continuous supply of young interested people who want to learn, who you can then abuse, pay nothing, exploit, wear out, and throw away. Salatin's model also relies pretty heavily on having independent money and making big bucks on the lecture circuit telling other people how to do what he does only without the independent capital and lecture circuit, which is sort of doomed to fail. Not wanting to do the lecture circuit, and finding the endless sourcing-then-exploitation of young people looking to learn to be exhausting and distasteful, the farm has been trying since then to build itself around finding motivated and dedicated people who enjoy working together, and a co-op really seems the way to go with that. there are drawbacks, so who knows if that idea will go anywhere, but it's really a compelling notion. (Also, two of the farm employees this season are More Trees' founder's actual real life sons, so it's not like we don't have a pretty good behind-the-scenes look there. Neither of them is an arborist, but both are pretty all-around-clever types. The younger one was only hired on for a couple of projects and has since departed to resume a course of education, but the older one seems to be on for the long haul.)

Another guiding principle is that those of the original farm team left are all in their forties now, and everybody here is interested in figuring out ways to not have to lift really heavy things over and over and over again. We're really really interested in that. Much of the occasional labor pool is that really crucial core team of overqualified parents (they're mostly moms, but not all; we lost the one really great overqualified dad who went back to work now that his kid is into elementary school, but the overqualified grandpa just keeps coming around and good for him) and they're also generally not young or dumb enough to want to lift heavy weights endlessly. So we're trying to make things better.

The big change for chicken day was that since the dark ages (we call it the Dark Ages before we built the slaughterhouse, when we worked down at the other end of the barn and the kill cones were outdoors, which sucked on rainy days) we've had this single long stainless-steel counter that we've used for eviscerating. In the slaughterhouse, it was shoved against one wall of the room, braced in place, and we all worked side by side; we were limited on how fast we could go because we simply could not fit more than seven people into the room, six eviscerators and one de-lunger.

This winter (actually, the first week of May), BIL ripped the counter out. Part of it is still there, just inside the pass-through window, propped against the wall, so the pluck table can shove chickens into the room and they wait there. but now there are two freestanding tables oriented the other direction (steel tables with a custom railing welded on and a hole sawed in the middle for guts and debris to be easily dropped through, no reason for gut tubs on the floor, no tripping hazards, plus now the tables can be moved for the floor to be cleaned and nobody ever has to crawl under the counter again to get the pesky lung chunks out of the corner by the wall where they do insist on washing up), and four people can stand around each table, and can walk past each other to go get more chickens. And then an additional up to two people can walk around, doing the de-lunging and final inspections and then carrying the finished chickens to the chill tanks, and wheeling the chill tanks in and out of the room and into the walk-in cooler. So we can go much, much faster now. That's two whole eviscerators, I can't do the math on what kind of pace increase that means but it's not insignificant.

Furthermore. The room for additional people is one big help, but the second big thing is that with the old counter, if one of the four people on the side near the window made a mess, everyone on that side had to stop and lift up their work so the table could get rinsed down. With the more square tables, each person's workstation is a bit more isolated, and you can rinse your own station without affecting someone else's. We also could share knives, in a way that wasn't possible before, and can help each other, and conversations are easier.

The other thing I'm excited about is that the longer piece of the old counter went out into what used to be a storage area, a big messy area of the barn that the new kitchen manager cleaned and reorganized. So now that counter is set up for washing eggs. Used to be that we washed eggs in the eviscerating room, and every other week i'd have to start work early Monday morning, wash all the eggs, pack the eggs, put them away, clear all of the egg-washing equipment and paraphernalia out of the room into boxes in the storage area (precarious piles, mostly), find a place for the incoming egg baskets to live out of reach of rats (difficult to impossible), then clean the room, which would be filthy because eggs are filthy and it's a lot of traffic in and out of the room to have them there, and that was hours of work. And then on the day after slaughter, I'd have to come out and spend an hour or two putting everything back to rights so eggs could be deposited in that room again.

So this has at a stroke eliminated like six to ten hours of work from my slaughter-week schedule. At least. Stupid, repetitive work that obliterates itself in the reset, but has to happen-- gone! Just gone. I'm so excited. It's not even that they've had to find someone to do that work-- now it's work nobody ever has to do again. Keeping the egg area tidy is trivial by comparison. No problem, anyone can do it, nobody has to then hunt down the paraphernalia from whatever storage situation it was left in. Oof.

Anyway. Little luxuries you didn't think were luxuries.

Also they congratulated them on the purchase of the house and said “you’ll make so many happy memories together here” and in general really super obviously assumed that what they were dealing with was a lesbian couple. Afterward my sister was like “oh i did have a pride banner hung up in the living room” which actually was my doing, i thought it was cute and had stuck it on a hook that was already there.

ANyway. There’s still a lot of shit in my sister’s apartment but we’ve done a lot more work and there’s less and less. we’re closing in on the end, on being out by july 1st. 

There’s so much goddamned liquor, and Farmsister actually described it to our mom, who has been fretting that M-L was becoming an alcoholic-- and Mom was so reassured, because a genuine addict would not have a thousand half-empty bottles each one of a different liquor. No, an addict would have empty bottles. Clearly the problem M-L has with alcohol is just that she really likes to collect things-- and to be fair, there are no two bottles of the same thing, not even wine. She just has every single possible conceivable cocktail ingredient you could ever want, which is ridiculous, but does serve extremely well to highlight the fact that no, she does not have an actual addictive problem with alcohol. Kind of backhanded reassurance but it is genuine reassurance.

Anyway. Went and helped her pack more of her stuff Monday night, but that might be the last time I’ll be able to help her, because of Assorted Chickeny Tasks for much of the rest of this week. I’m going to throw this post in the queue which is why I’m being vague about it, because I keep picking away at writing more of it in little dribs and drabs here and there, so who knows what day it will be when it goes live.

oh monday was a day of screen doors-- I should get a reasonable blog-shorthand name for the person who is now most concisely described as my middle-little sister’s housemate, but it’s @unicornduke, who no longer has a tumblr, and it feels weird to use that as a nickname, but like, why not i guess. anyway she stopped by and helped me hang the screen door on the south door of my cabin, which was awesome and I had been wanting to do for weeks and last time I visited had been promised help with by a couple different people and then there just never was time. Anyway. Now that’s done. And then I stole the fabric magnetic-closure flappy screen door that had briefly been up at the new house but had gotten pulled down for the movers and honestly didn’t really work in that doorway very well anyway, and stuck that to the east-facing door, which isn’t getting a proper screen door because I’m planning to screen in that whole porch eventually, but I’m not going to get that porch screened in until after the siding’s done, so for the forseeable short-term future I need a temporary screen door, so. Anyway that’s all taken care of and now it’s being 50F at night but when it’s 90 again (like it was on sunday) that’ll be totally sick.

Tuesday was chickens and it went smoothly despite three regulars being missing, we just sort of figured things out on our own. Most notably, one of the part-timers who’s here three days a week and has been mildly annoying BIL by not being a fast worker including during slaughter days came in to do evisceration and absolutely shone there, he was so well-suited to it-- listened well, was great about asking questions, kept up his pace as well as could be, meshed well with us, really took to it well. So the thing about working on a line like we do with chickens is that if you’re just not a hustle-y sort of person it’s easy to get overwhelmed and fall behind and just not be good at adjusting to keep up etc., and that was the difficulty he’d had out on the plucking table. But in the evisceration room, regardless of how backed-up everything is, you’re working on one bird at a time, and it’s really obvious that’s how he does best, he gets a task and he does it until it’s done. So it was good data to have, that he’s better-used in that kind of context. He also helped us package and was quite cheerful about learning new things there too. We quite like him as a person, so it was nice to find jobs that match his skills.

I am quite tired but not as badly so as I might be, all things considered, so I’ll take it.

Oh, a sort of gross-funny-weird anecdote from processing-- we’ve currently got three cockerels wandering the barnyard, all sons of the late lamented Lil Roo (a heritage Silver-Spangled Hamburg rooster) and the broody Barred Rock Henrietta, and one of them hopped up onto the trailer full of crates of meat birds awaiting processing. He checked them all out, and when he found the coops with the 20 Freedom Ranger birds, which have striped feathers similar to his, he started doing fancy dances for them. It’s partly the markings, I think, as they look like the hens he’s used to-- his mother was a Barred Rock and so are most of the adult hens on this farm-- and partly that Rangers are slower-growing than Cornish Crosses and thus were older birds.

Anyway, we processed the Rangers first, so when he came back he was looking for them and they weren’t there and he seemed sort of depressed. “Where did the sexy chickens go,” my sister supplied, as his line.

He is getting a new home next week, though-- he and his brothers are going to get caught and thrown in with the new half-grown pullets for next year’s egg flock, who are finally old enough to come out of the brooder and go out on pasture. They’re still too young to care about a rooster for those particular duties, but the other thing roosters do is that they tend to protect a flock from predators and other dangers, and these three cockerels have been free-ranging around the barnyard for almost a year now and haven’t gotten eaten, so they very obviously know how to survive, and will likely help the new girls transition to life outdoors.

We did process 310 chickens or so, which is as many as we ever do. We were short one or two people from our maximum, and while normally there winds up being a big backlog for the eviscerators, there wasn’t this time; several times I washed my hands and went out to the plucking table to hurry them along, because we could see a dozen carcasses on that table sitting there but nothing for us to do in our room. I think it’s that the person we were missing usually quietly does much of the work on that table, and also that Assistant Livestock Manager is injured.

Oh, IDK if I mentioned that-- Assistant Livestock Manager, who I was calling This Big Boy for a while because it was funny (I will never find the entry where I wrote about it on here but some months back the former assistant livestock manager came back to help with slaughter and admiringly was exclaiming over a table or something just as the new ALM was wandering by; she said “oooh look at this big boy” and he said “why thank you” and did a little curtsey and it remains the funniest thing ever to have happened in that slaughterhouse)-- anyway, TBB, as he’s now called by me, fell off the water wagon on Thursday and dislocated his shoulder, and had to go to the emergency room, and it was in the midst of the power being out region-wide, and it was all very dramatic and terrible. He’s back to work, and was going nuts with boredom at home, but he really can’t use the affected arm at all. He was running the plucker one-handed, and did not complain, but was clearly subdued, and we kept asking if he was overdoing it. Despite being a man in his early twenties, he is reasonably sensible about most things, so.

Anyway-- we were done by noon, and then packaging was all afternoon and was exhausting and we did send TBB home from that, but only after hours of work.

We didn’t finish everything until 5:30. But everyone was excited for the evening because we did a big experiment:

The Great Pumpkin Pie Experiment

There were five pies to be made. Three kinds of pumpkin grown on the farm, plus butternut squash, and the control was canned pumpkin from the store. Everyone followed the same King Arthur Flour recipe, which Veg Manager had previously tested and knew to be good. And, to remove that as a variable, Farmsister made all five crusts, so they were all the same recipe and same ingredients. (She has distinctive flour in her kitchen, among other things.) So, Veg Man made one, Farmsister made one, each of the two apprentices made one, and then TBB made one. (He had to have his roommate put the pie into the oven for him, since he couldn’t do it one-handed.)

Then after chicken day, we ordered pizza as per usual, and then had the five pies for dessert. (We invited Farmkid’s BFF’s family over too, to be impartial judges, but when it transpired that there was lard in the crust, her dad wouldn’t eat it because he’s vegetarian, so he really was very impartial as a judge and mostly provided color commentary, and was fed coffee cake instead which my mother had made with regular old vegetable oil because that’s how she rolls.)

VM anonymized the pies and brought them out to us in random order, and we scored them by number on a ballot sheet. Hang on, I have a photo, I have to attach it. It’s amazing.

[image description: a slip of paper with a grid on it, with five rows and five columns: the rows are numbered one through five and the columns are labeled “texture”, “sweetness”, “essence of pumpkin”, “color”, and are left blank for comments. I’ve scrawled some notes on two of the rows.]

The clear loser was the canned pumpkin; it tasted of nothing in particular, though it did have a good and very uniform texture. The fourth place finisher was the butternut squash; it was included because often that’s what’s actually in “canned pumpkin”, which is legally allowed because there’s very little actual difference between a pumpkin and a squash.

There was a clear favorite, but VM was dissatisfied with the trial; he felt there were still too many variables. One pumpkin (the New England Pie) had been processed in a food procesor, which had left too much graininess and had caused it to get poorer marks from the tasters, while the others had been processed with an immersion blender or standard blender. And the winner, which was the Long Island Cheese pumpkin, had been left overnight to rest in the custard form before baking, while the runner-up, the Long Pie, had not been given the same time to rest because the baker had not had the time.

But, the results were clear enough-- Long Island Cheese was the winner, Long Pie the runner-up, New England Pie a solid third but some didn’t like the texture, and then the butternut squash was a fine pie but a bit lacking in pumpkiny flavor, for reasons obvious once you knew why. The canned pumpkin, even in a blind taste test, scored way lower; it just had no joy to it at all. So we were glad to realize that it does make a difference.

Worth mentioning-- all of them were good pies, worthwhile to eat, and not in any way inadequate.

We have a lot of leftover pie...

Notably, we did not make an attempt using a non-pie pumpkin. Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins aren’t really worth trying to bake with.

For the record, New England Pie has the best-tasting seeds if you want to make your own pepitas, but Long Island Cheese has by far the most seeds per pumpkin, so if you want to go for volume you can’t beat that one.

anyway. today i spent the morning putting the slaughterhouse back together, washing eggs, washing more eggs, washing eggs, and then I made lunch, and then I spent the whole afternoon making more dried arrangements, to bring it back around in a circle.