4. Remove the shank (the lower part of the leg and foot). Cut through the hock joint from the inside surface.
Eviscerating the Bird
Evisceration — or removal of the animal’s internal organs — takes practice, so take your time when you’re learning to do it. If you accidentally cut through the intestines and release their contents onto the meat, you have contaminated it and should dispose of it. There are two methods for beginning the process. The first is appropriate for small birds that won’t be trussed for roasting; the second should be used with large roasting birds such as turkeys.
1. For small birds:
— Starting just below the point of the breastbone, insert the thin boning knife just enough to penetrate the skin and muscle.
— Cut down toward the vent (anus), and then cut all the way around it. When cutting around the vent, keep the knife pressed as close as possible to the back and tail.
— Pull the vent, and a small section of the large intestine out of the way.
2. For large birds:
— Make a half-moon cut around the vent, pressing closely to the tail and backbone.
— Insert your index finger into the cut and up and over the intestines.
— Pulling the intestines down and out of the way, continue to cut around the vent until you have completed the circle.
— Pull the vent and a short section of the intestines out of the way. — Pull the skin back toward the breastbone, then make a side-to-side cut about 3 inches (7.6 cm) wide and 2 inches (5 cm) below the breastbone.
— Pull the bar of skin that remains backward and over the piece of vent and intestines.
3. Break all attachments and remove the organs. Insert your hand into the abdominal opening and gently work your way up and around, loosening the organs from the body cavity as you go. When all attachments are broken, scoop the insides out.
4. Remove the gizzard. Cut away the gizzard from stomach and intestines. Peel away the fat, split it open, and rinse well; add to the ice water.
5. Remove the heart. Trim off the heart sac and heavy vessels from around the heart, rinse, and add to the ice water.
6. Remove the liver. Pinch the gallbladder off the liver, rinse the liver, and add it to the ice water.
7. Remove the lining from the gizzard. Retrieve the gizzard from the ice water and peel its lining away by inserting a fingernail under the lining at the cut edge and pulling away. Return the gizzard to the ice water.
8. Check along the backbone for remaining organs and remove. Use your hands to check along the backbone for any remaining organs (the lungs and sexual organs are often still in the bird). Remove any that you find.
9. Rinse well inside and out, and chill. Rinse the bird well under running water, inside the body cavity and on the outside of the carcass. When the carcass is clean, place it in the ice-water bucket to chill. Chilling time varies depending on the size of the bird and the temperature of the water, but it may take several hours. The goal is to get the carcass temperature down to about 40°F (4° to 5°C), as quickly as possible.
10. Hang and drain the carcass. Once the carcass is adequately chilled, hang it to drain for about 10 minutes.
11. Wrap the organs. While the carcass is draining, wrap the heart, liver, and gizzard in plastic wrap. The neck and the wrapped organs can be inserted into the carcass.
12. Bag the bird and label. We find that extra-large, zip-seal freezer bags are convenient and work well. Label bags with the weight and date you butchered. Remember, if you plan to sell the birds, the label should also include your farm name and address.
Whether you plan to sell meat or just keep it for your own use, proper handling after butchering is important, both from a safety standpoint and for maintaining meat quality. Though some smoked meats can be kept for long periods without freezing, most of your meat will be frozen.
All meat should be chilled before freezing. Meat freezes faster and better if the freezer isn’t packed too fully. The ideal long-term freezer temperature is 0°F ( 18°C). To help prevent freezer burn, force out as much air as possible before sealing packages, and make sure packaging is secure. If you opt to use freezer paper to wrap meat, a double layer of wrapping greatly improves “keepability” in the freezer.
FARMER PROFILE
Cyd Osborne and Dave and Debbie Turunjian
In 1991 Cyd Osborne, who was raised on a farm, decided to try her hand at farming. She began raising free-roaming laying hens and marketing her eggs. Free-roaming birds, unlike free-range birds, are allowed to move around in a large area, but they are still inside a henhouse. By 1993, Cyd’s brand — Nest Fresh Eggs! — was building a respectable market share in a few of the large grocery chains in the Front Range and mountain resort communities of Colorado.
Cyd’s story is typical of what can happen to someone who develops a good market for a niche product: “The business quickly outgrew my ability to produce all the eggs and deal with the marketing. I decided I was good at the marketing, so what I needed to do was recruit some other farmers to help produce eggs. I knew if I just tried expanding by hiring help, they would never take as good care of my hens as I wanted, but by partnering with other producers I would get people who had a vested interest in the birds under their care.”
Finding partners wasn’t terribly hard. The poultry industry is one of the most vertically integrated segments of the food economy, and egg production is no exception; it had moved into the hands of one or two major producers, effectively closing the market to small and medium operations. Some of the smaller producers were still around, their barns now empty. Cyd contracted with three farmers. Her agreement stipulated conditions the birds had to be raised in — like no more cages and no more subtherapeutic antibiotics — and stipulted that the growers would “not compete.” In return, Cyd agreed to purchase all their eggs and at a higher price than they would have received had they still been able to market their eggs through conventional channels.
Dave and Debbie Turunjian own and operate one of the partner farms. Dave and Debbie wanted to farm and bought out an existing egg farm. “Debbie is a true animal lover,” Dave says, “and when she first walked into the old barn, with 30,000 hens in little cages, she cried.” When they purchased their farm in Longmont, Colorado, they were selling to one of the middlemen farmers, but he went out of business, and they had nowhere to sell their eggs.
“We had already been talking to Cyd, because we wanted to change the operation, but it took some time. Our henhouse was empty for half a year as we remodeled. Then we put up a second house.”
Each one of the Turunjian’s henhouses is 14,000 square feet and accommodates about 13,000 hens. But the cost of remodeling and adding the second barn was steep. “We both have good off-farm jobs, or we couldn’t have done it at this point in time. But we did want to farm, and we did want to do it differently, so we decided it was worth the expense.”
PART IV
PLANNING
CHAPTER 12
Farm Planning
I have always rejected the idea that profit is the sole purpose of dairying or any other occupation. It is not the ultimate goal. Profit is rather something that, while giving satisfaction in itself, should be used to achieve a further aim. This further aim is good living.
Wilbur J. Fraser, Profitable Farming and Life Management (1948)
Anybody can buy a farm; but that is not enough. The farm to buy is the one that fits the already formulated general plan — no other! It must be positively favorable to the crop or animal to be raised. . . . To buy a place simply because it is “a farm” and then to attempt to find out what, if anything, it is good for, or to try to produce crops or animals experimentally until the right ones are discovered, is a costly way to gain experience. . . .
M. G. Kains, Five Acres and Independence (1935)
SMALL-SCALE FARMERS FALL more or less into two classes: those who were born and raised on the farm and have known little else, and those who come to the farm from �
��town” with little or no experience in agriculture. And the sad fact is that both classes fail regularly. Many born farmers are locked into a paradigm that is now dated — they do things the way their dads did, which worked well in the 1950s and 1960s when gas cost 25 cents per gallon, but those same approaches are breaking them now. And the townies are burdened with a false vision of country living that comes from the glossy pages of a magazine: the easy life of a gentleman farmer.
Farming is hard physical work, and it can be economically stressful. Although I’ve always hated the term agribusiness, because it implies corporations and large-scale farming operations, farming is a business nonetheless. Even on a small scale, it should be treated as a business if making a profit is one of your goals — and for Ken and me profit, not for itself but for our “good life,” is definitely a goal. To be successful, all businesses — large and small are well advised to spend time on planning.
As I said earlier, there are various whole-farm planning models available for farmers and ranchers. These models are designed for various purposes; some, like Farm*A*Syst (a cooperative program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency), are designed to help farmers cope with a wide variety of regulatory programs; others are single-dimension tools, such as the plans designed to help a farmer receive organic certification.
In our minds, the holistic management planning process is the most effective: It provides a process for making decisions based on what is important to us as individuals — our values and our vision for the future. It can bring other people into the process, and in fact encourages us to do so, but it is not predicated on an outsider’s demands or views. The planning process that I describe in the remainder of this book is thus based largely on the holistic management model, though as I explained in part I, it is a slightly modified version for easier use.
Again, if you live in a brittle environment, manage many acres of land, have to cope with a high debt ratio, or have other significant management concerns, this process should be viewed as a starting point. As time allows, you should study and work with the full model and planning process as outlined in the Holistic Management textbook by Allan Savory (see appendix E, Resources), either through personal study or through attending holistic management classes. However, if you’re just getting started, have a fairly small piece of land, live in a nonbrittle environment, or don’t have an extremely tight budget, the remainder of this discussion may suffice.
Planning as a Process
Planning is a process. It involves gathering information, brainstorming, and finally formulating your information and ideas into some kind of usable form or plan. Then it requires monitoring, controlling or adjusting according to what you find in your monitoring, and replanning if things go far afield, as they sometimes do. Because it’s a process, planning isn’t something done in one quick session; it may take months to develop your first complete set of plans. Once it is developed, don’t just set it in a drawer and forget about it; visit your plan often. Use it as an aid and it will help you succeed.
Planning, like goal setting, should be done with all the pertinent players involved: family, employees, and even knowledgeable and caring outsiders. You, as the ultimately responsible party, may have to make some final decisions, but your decisions will be better and receive more support from those around you if everyone is involved in them.
There are also various pieces of the planning process, though they all interrelate. In chapter 9, I discussed developing a marketing plan; this is a very specific type of plan that helps you identify possible products or services for enhancing income. Chapters 13 and 14 detail financial plans and biological plans (grazing plans and landscape plans in the full model). Chapter 15 provides monitoring information.
Financial planning allows you to allocate your resources — both money and labor — for their best effect in implementing your goal. But remember, implementing your goal is what you are trying to do, so even if an operation like monocropping or confinement dairy looks good financially, if it doesn’t move you toward your broad goal over the long term, then it isn’t a good deal.
Biological planning allows you to harmonize your land and your animals so that you improve your bottom line while improving the environment. It helps you implement strategies that move you toward the landscape that you desire.
Holistic Guidelines
During the planning process and during day-to-day decision making, many of the holistic guidelines come into play, particularly the testing guidelines — sustainability, weak link, cause and effect, marginal reaction, gross profit analysis, energy/money source and use, and society and culture. The testing guidelines are implemented as a series of questions, though not each one of them will be necessary in evaluating every idea, enterprise, or tool.
The questions, if you have sufficient information, should rather quickly yield yes or no answers — Yes, this action will move me closer to my goal, or No, it won’t. At times, the question may yield a “No, it won’t” answer to one or more of the tests, yet you’ll still have to take that action for some other reason (perhaps you have to do something to comply with a regulation, or you still need to use some borrowed money). The main point to remember is that the purpose of these guidelines is to make it easier for you to decide what to do, when to do it, where to spend your resources (time, money, and so on), and which tools to apply under a given set of circumstances. Let’s look at each one.
Sustainability
If I take this action, will it lead toward or away from the future resource base described in my goal? This guideline helps you evaluate the long-term social and environmental aspects of a decision. For example, if one of your goals is to have a vibrant local community, then driving 200 miles (322 km) to shop in the city probably would fail this test. If one of your goals is to have an abundance of wildlife, using a chemical that can kill birds, fish, or beneficial insects will fail.
Weak Link
Does this action improve, or address, the weakest link in my operation? If you take a chain and stretch it until it breaks, the point at which it breaks is its weakest link. Repair the chain, stretch it again, and the new point at which it breaks is now its weakest link. There may be many weak links in a chain, but there is always just one weakest link; and the best way to use your limited resources to strengthen the chain is to fix the weakest link first. Once it is repaired, there is a new weakest link, and you can set out to repair that.
The weakest link in your operation may be social (the in-laws think you’re crazy), biological (there are too many weeds, or not enough legumes), or financial (you aren’t effectively converting solar energy into paper dollars). Using this guideline helps you aim your limited resources at your weakest link.
Determining the weakest link. When trying to figure out what the weakest link is in your operation, start by considering the three main areas of a livestock operation: energy conversion, product conversion, and cash conversion. Energy conversion is the change of solar energy into forage. Signs of a weak link in energy conversion include insufficient forage, low-energy forage, poor drainage, low plant species diversity, high supplemental feed costs, and excessive amounts of bare earth. Product conversion is the change from raw plant to a marketable product. Indications of a weak link in product conversion might include unused forage, low birth rates, poor gains, lots of illness, and high mortality. Cash conversion is the ability to take your product and market it for paper dollars. Weak links in this area are indicated by low prices, excessive middlemen between you and the consumer, poor understanding of marketing mechanisms, and regulatory roadblocks.
Whenever you possibly can, use your planning to address the weakest link first! This may take time. For example, if you decide that your weakest link is in the marketing — that you want to get out of the commodity system and into direct-marketing — it’s going to take some time. You’ll have a steep learning curve, so allow yourself the time needed to work through this curve.
Cause and Effect
Does this action address the root cause of the problem? Often an action — say, spraying weeds with an herbicide — will treat the symptoms of a problem without getting down to the real cause of the problem. Why are the weeds there? That’s the problem.
It’s human nature to like simple, quick fixes to problems, but most of the time a quick fix doesn’t last long. When we moved to Minnesota, our farm had leafy spurge (a noxious weed) on it. The first spring that we were there, a crew from the township board showed up, spray cans in hand, to “control” our leafy spurge. We told them we didn’t want them to spray it, and they said they wouldn’t for now, but that we had to do something to control it. As we talked to them, we asked about the history of the infestation. They told us that it had been growing and spreading on our farm for 20 years, despite annual spraying. The first year we clipped it and dug it. After that, our sheep took care of it. The problem was that nothing that had lived on the farm in the past liked leafy spurge, so it was able to grow, and grow, and grow. Sheep do like it, though, so when we added them to our mixture, spurge no longer outcompeted the other plants in our pasture.
Marginal Reaction
Will this action provide the greatest return in terms of money or time? The marginal-reaction guideline provides a method for figuring out where you get the biggest bang for your buck. Application of the guideline basically requires you to ask yourself, with each dollar you spend (or with each unit of time you commit to a project), “Could this dollar (or hour) be spent better somewhere else?” This test is especially useful for comparing two separate actions. For example, “I can afford to spend $800 this year. Would it best be spent on fencing or on fertilizer?”
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