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...

Cheese!

Our first batch of chevre (technically fromage blanc since I don't have the chevre molds) is hanging to drain, and within the next few hours, we'll be sampling our first goat cheese.

There were a wide range of recipes that varied in complexity for this relatively simple goat cheese.  Some had you use pasteurized goat milk, or pasteurize your raw milk ahead of time, and others called for using the milk "straight from the goat" and not bothering to heat it to the culture temperature, because it was likely at the point already.  Others called for special "chevre" starter that has included rennet, and others had you use a standard mesophilic starter and liquid rennet.  

And all of this suddenly got me to thinking: people have made these "simple" cheeses before online cheese supply shops and detailed instructions.  How did they do it?

For example, I imagine there was a time when heating a cheese to 170 degrees before cooling it down quickly with ice was technologically impossible, not to mention gathering pure starter cultures.  I am enough of a microbiologist to understand the point of culturing "good" bacteria in your cheeses as a method of preservation, but we haven't always had access to these cultures.  So, how did we do it?

I do know that if you want to wildly ferment cheese, the last thing you want to do is heat it to 170 degrees and kill all the organisms in it.  I wonder if pasteurization became important only after we started mixing the milk from hundreds or thousands of animals before sending it to market.  If you just milked your own goat, and you have assessed the health of the animal and cleanliness of the facility, is it really a worry?  Or are their deadly pathogens waiting in every gram of fresh milk, waiting to kill us all.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that the recipe I used was as simple as I could make it.  Fresh milk, lightly warmed, inoculated with factory cultures...

I'd like to see about getting rid of that last part!

The New Arrivals

Just a couple of short days after returning from Seattle, S. and I took the plunge and finally decided to have a kid, and we got her mother in the deal.  Meet Kitty (the Mom) and Cleopatra (Cleo for short) the kid.  They are oberhasli/nubian crosses (hence the bay fur with the airplane ears).

S. and I both have been reading up on goats - how to house them, how to feed them, how to milk them. We visited our vet's barn to see how she does it and got some tips on milking and other issues (she also sold us the goats). However, as we have no real experience with the animals, most of our planning resulted in taking a "wait and see" approach.  We took care of their basic needs by building a milking stand and goat shed (see previous posts) and had a few options for where to pasture them.  Otherwise, we just took the plunge.  We figured "we have horses, so how much different could it be?"

Turns out, pretty different.

E. dropped them off Monday night around milking time to find that S. and I had erected a pretty nice little temporary goat paddock and shed.  The 12'x12' paddock was made of free standing hog panel.  This was certainly not an ideal pen, but we figured it would keep the goats in and the dogs out for the night until we assessed more permanent housing.

E. mentioned that Kitty might "cry a bit" and took off with a wave and a smile.  "Have fun," he said, and walked away with a spring in his step.  He only had six milkers left at the house (down from 10 or 12) so he seemed pretty pleased.  Also a little amused at us.

As soon as E. walked away, Cleo started baying a cute little "Mahhh..." that one expects from a slightly upset goat.  Then Kitty laid in.  Her cry sounded like the below you'd hear from a drunk frat boy yelling at his ex girlfriend's window at 2 AM.  "Brawwww!", "Mehhhhhew!", "Whaaoaoar".  I don't know how else to describe it, except that it was loud, prolonged, and horrible.  Also, since they were housed on the lawn on the south side of the house, her bellow ricocheted off of our house, the neighbor's house, and the ward house across the way.

During the first few minutes, Kitty managed to bend the hog wire out of shape and it became clear that a more permanent situation would not wait until morning.  We took her out to milk, and found that as long as we had both in hand, they were quiet and inquisitive and very easy to manage.  She milked fine, producing about 20 ounces after finally figuring out the new milking stand (turns out, we had it backwards - she is used to being milked from her right side).

After the milking, we brought in the horses and turned the pair out in Maisy's paddock, where the cacophony continued.  And while the volume and frequency stayed about the same, at least we had remedied the echo, a marked improvement!

Before bed, we brought the dogs out (leashed!) to see what they thought of the goats.  Both of them barked and lunged at the goats, but unlike the horses, the goats stood their ground, stomped, and snorted.  In the end, this might make all the difference for Captain, to have an animal that isn't intimidated by all his barking and circling.  We will have to see.

After the dogs, it was off to bed.  I slept fitfully given the dogs barking and Kitty braying, and S. slept not at all, but since that first night Kitty and Cleo have settled a bit, the dogs are getting accustomed to the new arrangement, and we've milked Kitty three times.  So far, so good...

And I am surprised to learn how much different the goats are from our horses.  Where horses are aloof and a bit standoff-ish, the goats are immediately curious and companionable.  If you open a gate, the goats crowd out, then stand next to you or follow you around.  Yesterday, S. and I spent some time in the back pasture with them, sitting on logs and watching them browse in the bushes.  Within a few minutes, Cleo was sitting at S.'s feet, curled into a comfortable ball chewing her cud.  That was completely unexpected.

There are horse people.  Turns out, there may also be goat people.  And I think I'm one of them.