ACORN

This week we went to the ACORN conference [http://www.acornorganic.org/index.html] for new farmers in Moncton. It was interesting. Very interesting. Those who know me will be surprised to hear that my one complaint was that we didn't have the opportunity to mix socially more. Not the Conference's fault as they have a brunch and mixer etc but we had arrive just in time and leave right away because our animals need looking after.

Anyway I found all the speakers to be engaging and informative and most of them applied to us. The other thing that was intriguing to me was that most of the participants seems serious about farming. I contrast that to the Farmstart courses I did in Ontario where most people seemed like dreamers and hadn't taken any more steps towards farming than paying the course fee. I don't blame Farmstart for that mind you.

I have been thinking about it since the conference and think this is it: In Ontario small scale organic farming is just a dream for the most part. The capital expense of land is just too high to really have a chance unless you inherit. The serious people (like us?) move to places like New Brunswick where and old house and some land are more affordable and therefore a young farmer doesn't start off with a hopeless amount of crippling debt.

Yes we met several other people from Ontario and Western Canada who came here for the reduced start-up costs.

Killing Time

I killed 36 more chickens this week. all our meat chickens. I'll have 19 turkey's to do in a couple of months.

I don't know if 36 sounds like a lot of a little to you but I found it to be a real chore and I didn't even like those birds. All they did was eat, grow, poop and sit. They were a chore to feed and water and a chore to kill, a chore to pluck and a chore to eviscerate. They do taste good and we might even break even on the costs and have a few left over to eat ourselves for "free" but there wasn't much "fun" to them. I think next year we might try another breed just to increase the entertainment value of the actual raising process. Of course that might depend on what it's like to kill the turkeys - who are a highly entertaining bunch.

It took three days to kill and process the birds, 8 the first day, 10 the second then a day off and with some help from the Boss' Dad we did the last 18 in one day. The real time consuming part is the plucking so I ordered a feather plucking drill attachment. For real, here's the link:

http://stores.powerplucker.com/StoreFront.bok

I'll let you know how that works out after the turkeys are done.

I'll spare you any photos of the processing and just give you a quick summary. The killing is the most tiring and unpleasant part. I think that it's because there is a lot of stress leading up to the killing stroke as you really don't want to mess up and try to give every animal as quick and clean a death as possible. Plucking is not bad just tedious and time consuming, and I'm not very good at it (fingers too big). Evisceration is what you expect but stinkier and it takes practice, practice, practice to become efficient at it. Eating is, well you probably already know that part.

Working out the kinks

It seems crazy but our meat king chickens are ready for slaughter. These freaky birds grow so fast that they are ready to process at 9-12 weeks of age and it being 9 weeks we selected two to work out the kinks in our processing plans before we start the main slaughter.

To start I need a better chopping block for beheading the chickens. Or a bigger cone. We made kill cones to use to cut off their heads but the birds were too big to fit in the cones! So I hauled out an old stump and put a couple of nails in it and sharpened a hatchet. I prefer a hatchet because it's more accurate than a full sized axe and even only half sharpened it was a quick clean chop. But I'd like to have a more stable stump and sharper hatchet to do a bunch of birds.

We dipped them in hot water and began the laborious process of plucking. That went fairly well. The hot water loosens the feathers so they come out pretty easy but still I will be looking into an automatic plucker if we decide to keep doing meat birds.

The evisceration was not bad. A bit of stink from the internal gasses and we were reminded that you're not supposed to feed an animal the day before slaughter but not as bad as one might think. At least not in my opinion.

For processing we have decided we'll do it assembly line stile with J doing the feathers and me the guts and we've had to accept me probably won't get it all done in one or two days.

And this was the end result: