Another slaughter day

Today we decided to slaughter the remaining nine birds from the elder flock to make room for the new hens in the coop.  It has gotten urgent, since the smaller coop is far too tight for 12 mature hens (at least by our standards), and the old flock has been slowly reducing its egg output.  We were down to about three eggs per day, and falling.  The time had come.

Last weekend, we killed one bird as a test.  We built the killing cone, stuck her in head first, slit her throat, poked her brain, and snap - like a switch - she was elsewhere and we had a chicken to pluck.  The feathers sloughed off like a jacket and the bird was eviscerated and in the pot before the bread was out of the oven.  Simple.

Today, not so simple.  First, slaughtering nine birds is not just nine times more work than one.  You need an assembly line and a system, which we had.  We put all nine birds in a box, and planned to kill them all, then I'd pluck them as S. eviscerated and packed for them in the freezer.  This was a good system, but more involved than the solitary reverence we bestowed on our first kill.

Second, during the kill, for some reason I could not severe the spinal cord on a single bird.  What had been so simple a week ago turned out to be devilishly tricky this time around.  Maybe it was the pressure of so many birds, or maybe it was over-confidence from last week, but it made the slaughter take a lot longer.  The birds still bled out and did not suffer, but the key to an easy pluck is to sever that brain stem.  After three hours shelling reluctant feathers from nine birds, lesson learned.

Still, in a bit under three hours S. and I killed, plucked, cleaned, and stored nine birds.  We did so humanely, and with little mess.  (Ok, there was a little mess - I took my clothes off right away, threw them in the washing machine, and immediately took a shower).  The goal was to cull the flock, but we took what would have been wasted and put it up for later, for soups and stews this winter.  It would have been easy to skip this step, and, at hour two covered in feather goo, I was temped.  But we stuck it out.

While we did this, I was struck by the work I expect others to do on my behalf.  When I buy chicken from the store, somewhere a worker is doing this dirty job for eight to ten hours per day, everyday, for little pay and less recognition.  It suddenly seems so strange that we should take this necessary but unpleasant task of slaughtering animals for our food, burden one person with the responsibility, and then hide them behind closed doors while we enjoy our meals. (I know, we should all be vegan, but read this or this).

For what it's worth, we took that responsibility ourselves today.  It was a bit unpleasant and we clearly have a lot to learn.  But it was humbling to participate in the death of those birds, and to make room for our new flock to thrive and enjoy their chicken-y existence until their time comes.  I won't relish that time, but I will participate and take responsibility for the life we bring to this farm.

As Joel Salatin says: "Our animals have a good life and one really bad day".

We should all be so lucky.

Waxed the cheese today...

Here is the final product from pioneer day - the cheese.  Now it just needs to age for 30 days!

Photos from Pioneer Day

Here are just a few photos from our new annual Pioneer Day celebration:

The chicken we caught, killed, plucked, eviscerated, and then ate on Pioneer Day.

Stacy, cooking the chicken we caught, killed, plucked, eviscerated, and then ate on Pioneer Day.

The bread we made while we caught, killed, etc. the chicken we ate on Pioneer Day.

The cheese (both farmhouse cheddar and whey ricotta) that we made from fresh goat's milk on Pioneer Day.

The farmhouse cheddar, drying in the pantry awaiting waxing in a couple of days.

In honor of the mormon pioneers who settled Utah on Pioneer Day, we'll leave out the photos of the cream ale we racked as well.

All in all, a successful Pioneer Day!

Pioneer Day

Tomorrow is Pioneer Day here in Utah, the day locals celebrate the first Mormon settlers to this part of the country.  In fact, this holiday holds special sway, surpassing even Independence Day in importance, with July 4th commemorated as more of a practice holiday for Pioneer Day, provided it doesn't fall on a Sunday.

One of the great things about Northern Utah, though, is that it was settled as a mostly isolated agrarian society.  Unlike much of the Rocky Mountain West, the folks who moved here came to stay and attempted to be largely self sufficient.  Examples of this exist today, such as the fact that the Salt Lake valley and surrounding metropolitan areas still get all of their water from local sources in the Wasatch Range.  What other western city can make that claim?  If the West is ever required to rely mostly on it's own resources, the Wasatch Front could make a fair go of it (again, a difficult task for places like Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and others).

Since we have moved to Utah and embraced this pioneering self-sufficiency, it seems fitting that tomorrow we will slaughter our first chicken.  S. has been studying the killing and evisceration, and today I made the killing cone, and hung it next to the compost heap:
With those preparations made, tomorrow morning, after we milk the goats and care for the horses, we plan to pull one broody hen from the hen house and try our hand at this.  With luck, we'll kill the bird and celebrate one small measure of self sufficiency with chicken soup in the afternoon.

Passing...

Conway Leovy     July 16, 1934 - July 9, 2011

Thank you for being my advisor and my friend. And thank you for supporting me in all that I do. I'll never forget some of our last words together, when you told me, after showing me your poetry, photography, and art that there is 'life after science'. You are so right...