by Paula Manalo
Learning to farm with horses is a huge catch-22: You shouldn’t own a horse unless you’re experienced, but you’re never going to get that experience until you have your own horse.
My second go at buying horses, I was more deliberate. This time I decided I wanted just one horse. In my mind, one horse would be more manageable than two. (As it turns out, it’s not. It’s just different. I happen to like it better.) And I wanted an old horse, well past the piss-and-vinegar years. I didn’t care what breed, what gender, what conformation; I just wanted a horse with a lot more experience than I had. I got lucky. Some farmer friends decided to sell me an older, very experienced mare. And they generously decided to give me a number of one-on-one lessons with the horse before I hauled her the four hundred miles home.
It’s been seven months since I got Ray, and I’m still taking it slow. I’ve finally gotten it through my head that I don’t have to learn to plow, disk, rake, mow, cultivate, harrow, and log all in one season. It takes time to build a working relationship, and it’s always more important to make sure that every experience Ray has is positive and safe than it is to accomplish the task I set out to do.
I’ve been around a handful of other beginning teamsters, and I think most of us suffer, initially, from mild to severe cases of ignorant bliss. We think horses are lovely, docile animals; we hatch elaborate plans for all the things we’ll do with them; and we simply don’t understand how wrong things can go or just how much attention has to be paid at all times. On top of that, we tend to be an especially ambitious, passionate, and pig-headed lot. I’ll be the first to admit that I invariably bite off more than I can chew; I don’t always take advice well; and I usually think I can figure things out on my own.
Learning to work with horses is, first and foremost, a lesson in humility. I’ve had to learn to ask for help and to admit when I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve had to learn that it’s not up to me to determine what gets accomplished in a working day or in a farming season, but that it depends on the relationship I’ve created with my horse and the time I’ve taken to build her trust and to demand her respect and compliance.
And I’ve had to learn to focus. When I’m working with Ray, I can’t be thinking about the salad bed that needs weeding, the drip tape that needs patching, the chef who needs an invoice. I must be completely present. I have to be hyperaware of what’s going on around me, and yet focused on reading Ray’s body language. Are there any animals — dogs, horses, people, other livestock — that are going to distract or become a nuisance? Are there any dips in the topography that are going to make the implement lurch forward? Is there anything we might snag on? Is the angle of draft correct or do I need to adjust the length of the traces? Is anything going to come loose on the tool? Is the harness rubbing anywhere? Is Ray paying attention to me or do her ears indicate that her attention is elsewhere? Is her neck raised, showing general concern, or is her neck lowered, indicating that she’s comfortable and at ease? Am I clear of the implement if it hits a rock and swings sideways? Is Ray panting; should I let her catch her breath? Is she trying to rush through a particular section of field or through a turn? Why?
And at the same time, I have to breathe deeply, relax my shoulders, speak steadily, and project calm and confidence. I’ve never had to do anything more challenging. And I’ve never loved any challenge more.
Moral Clarity through Chicken-Killing
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BY SAMUEL ANDERSON
Samuel Anderson is the livestock coordinator at the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, a Massachusetts-based farmer-training nonprofit. He grew up on a sheep farm in Ohio and has worked as an agricultural journalist and a magazine editor. Sam graduated from Kenyon College and received his master’s degree in urban and environmental policy and planning from Tufts University.
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Standing under a stainless-steel tangle of shackles and blades, I began to see my chicken-killing experiences in a different light. I was at the International Poultry Expo in Atlanta, an immense gathering of representatives from every corner of the poultry industry, perusing the exhibits set up by various poultry-processing-equipment manufacturers, trying to cover the word sustainable on my name tag so the company reps wouldn’t brush me off.
More specifically, my nametag read NEW ENTRY SUSTAINABLE FARMING PROJECT, the Massachusetts nonprofit where, in the course of less than two years as livestock coordinator, I had gone from bright-eyed farm kid and local-foods enthusiast to practiced chicken killer and an authority of sorts on mobile poultry-processing units. At New Entry, we have been trying to fix a ubiquitous problem in the US food system: the glaring lack of local, small-scale slaughterhouses and meat-processing facilities. Our solution: a mobile poultry-processing unit that we trained farmers to use, so they could kill and process their own birds for sale to local markets.
I trekked down to the poultry expo because, as part of a regional poultry science training project, my name had been drawn out of a hat to get an all-expenses-paid trip to the world’s largest poultry-industry event.
My first thought upon arrival: We’re not in Massachusetts anymore.
Working with small-scale poultry farmers in the Northeast and having raised my own poultry growing up, I was used to small, pasture-based, independent chicken production — the kind you can refer to with a straight face as “farming.” At the International Poultry Expo, “farming” has a different look. In the big poultry industry, a chicken farmer is someone raising thousands of broilers on contract in a huge poultry house. When the birds are mature, a crew trucks them off to the giant, centralized processing plant — owned by the same company that holds the contract, such as Tyson or Perdue — and by the time the farmer has fired up the tractor to start cleaning out his empty poultry house, his chickens are already being shuttled down the highly mechanized (dis)assembly line that will speedily convert his live birds into uniform carcasses to be shrink-wrapped and sold all over the country.
For the farmer, the killing and processing of his birds is out of sight and out of mind.
It’s a foregone conclusion in the big poultry industry that, as the University of Georgia’s broiler information web page bluntly puts it, “Having an independent broiler-growing operation is no longer feasible.” In fact, according to the site, there is actually no such thing as an independent chicken farmer anymore; “approximately 99 percent of all broilers are produced under contract, with the remaining production occurring on integrator-owned farms [those that are owned by the same vertically integrated company that owns every stage of production, including the processing facility and the retail brand].” The argument is that small-scale production can’t compete with the low prices of the ultra-efficient industrial operations.
As I wandered among all the menacing machinery at the expo — chicken-gassing chambers as tall as houses; conveyor belts that drag chickens shackled upside down through an electrical stunning bath and a razor-edged gauntlet; an automated contraption that zips chicken carcasses around like a carousel to pluck out their viscera — it dawned on me that it was these very machines that had made our mobile processing unit in Massachusetts so necessary. The more consolidated and mechanized meat production becomes, the fewer small-scale, local processing facilities exist and the fewer independent farmers there are. The expensive, high-capacity equipment not only removed every ounce of intimacy from killing and processing chickens, but it also drove independent processors out of business, forcing independent poultry producers to get big or get out.
The processing bottleneck is a perennial problem for small meat producers all over the country. Here in the Northeast, processing woes are poised to overtake regulations and the weather as the favorite farmers’ griping topic. They have plenty of reason to grumble: Massachusetts has only two small USDA-certified slaughterhouses. Poultry producers — and those who would like to become poultry producers — face an even narrower bottleneck. Before the construction of three mobile poultry-processing units (
MPPUs colloquially, or “chicken-slaughter-houses-on-wheels” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing), the only legal poultry-processing option available was to build, operate, and obtain state licensure for a stationary on-farm slaughter facility. Most farmers find that too expensive.
I’ve talked to plenty of farmers who have decided against raising poultry, dismayed by the barriers to getting their birds processed. Others attempt to operate under the radar, quietly processing their own birds or taking them to a non-inspected processor, then selling directly to a trusted customer list. Even if these growers escape the notice of regulators — and they usually do — you won’t see their birds at a farmers’ market or restaurant, and certainly not at a grocery store. For lots of small producers in Massachusetts, the mobile processing units are the only legal and affordable processing option available. But there are strings attached, not least among them the fact that the farmer has to be hands-on when it comes time to kill, pluck, and eviscerate her birds.
As it turns out, it might be worth it. There are still independent chicken farmers in the world, and they’ve proved that it can pencil out. In 2010, three Massachusetts producers utilized a mobile poultry-processing unit to legally process their chickens. Each raised, hand-processed, and sold between eight hundred and twelve hundred, all grown on pasture. Through farmers’ markets, restaurants, and presales directly to consumers, these birds fetched from four dollars and fifty cents to six dollars per pound. Some of those chickens topped thirty dollars each.
* * *
You’re killing a living creature and you’re not quite sure what gives you the authority to be doing this.
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Compare that to contract chicken farmers. They get paid between 3.8 and 4.6 cents per pound of live weight. That means that a particularly efficient producer might gross a whopping twenty-five cents for each bird. During the ten to fifteen years it takes a contract producer to pay off the hundred thousand dollars in up-front cost of building and outfitting a poultry house that meets Tyson’s or Perdue’s standards, the farmer needs to grow well over a hundred thousand birds a year just to net five thousand dollars.
The savvier independent chicken farmers are making a hundred and twenty times more than the gross per-bird return of a contract broiler. One of these producers calculated her annual net return at somewhere around ten thousand dollars — raising fewer than 1 percent of the birds it would take a contract grower to get there.
The independent farmers had to kill each and every one of those birds themselves. This is no small matter — which is why when New Entry was hiring a new staff member to help with the MPPU project, Jennifer Hashley (my esteemed boss and a hugely accomplished Greenhorn), drew on her own experience as a chicken producer and MPPU user. The first qualification: “BA or BS preferred.” The second: “Must be willing to teach farmers how to process chickens.” Note the key word there: “Must be willing,” not “Must be able.”
I convinced Jennifer that I was willing, and then I convinced myself. After all, having grown up on a sheep farm, it wouldn’t be the first time I had willfully and purposefully killed an animal. I had killed a deer with a shotgun, a muskrat with a steel-jaw trap, and a groundhog with a cinder block; and though we didn’t slaughter them ourselves, by the first grade I was well aware that when I gave a newborn lamb an orange ear tag, I was sentencing it to market and an early death. The gross-out factor wouldn’t be an issue, either: I had plucked chickens; hooked and filleted fish; shoveled manure; and castrated, vaccinated, and cut the tails off sheep. I had, on more than one occasion, strapped on a pair of surgical gloves, reached into a ewe’s backside, and pulled out a slimy orange lamb.
All of that helps, but when you find yourself holding a knife to a chicken’s throat, you may discover that you haven’t quite covered all of your bases. Yes, you will need to have learned the actual technique — how to place the bird in the cone, how to hold the knife, how to apply the stun, how to make the cut — but in truth, the physical act of killing chickens is easy. The emotional act is more challenging. You may be able, but are you willing?
The first chicken you kill probably won’t be the most difficult. You’ll direct your nervous energy toward focusing on the technical details, making sure you’re going through the proper motions, and a moment later you’ll realize that you did it and that it wasn’t so bad after all. A wave of relief and adrenaline will carry you from there, and you might feel pretty good about yourself for pulling it off. The most difficult bird will come later, when you no longer need to keep your mind trained on the motions and it begins to wander, and you finally process what’s going on here: You’re killing a living creature, a whole crowd of them, and you’re not quite sure what gives you the authority to be doing this.
The easy thing is to brush off those thoughts, put them out of mind and keep them there; but taking on the moral and emotional questions is, I think, essential. This is what separates the independent, earthbound chicken farmer from the mainstream, impersonal-by-design broiler industry. The big broiler-supply chain goes to great lengths to get everyone off the hook — the companies, the producers, and most of all the consumers. When you process your own birds by hand, you aren’t letting yourself off the hook. As a customer, by volunteering to help out your farmer on processing day, by going to the farm and learning how it’s done, or just by the act of considering how the chicken you’re buying was processed, you aren’t letting yourself off the hook. And the next time you think about buying a nameless chicken at the grocery store, you’ll ask yourself, as I did: I’m able, but am I willing?
The Gift
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BY KATIE GODFREY
Katie’s first farming experience was on a biodynamic farm at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in Wisconsin. She wrote “The Gift” during a writing residency at the Wisconsin-based Wormfarm Institute, a nonprofit that works to integrate culture and agriculture. Katie is currently farming in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, an area historically missed by glaciers, preserving the unique topography of looming bluffs and winding rivers.
* * *
I was wearing a tent.
It was my first day of beekeeping and the bee suit that I had borrowed was almost as wide as it was tall. It was ninety-five degrees outside and humid, but I was determined not to get stung. It’s not that I have a fear of bees — it’s more a fear of being chased and stung by a lot of them at once. After reading that each hive houses an average of twenty thousand to sixty thousand bees, I wasn’t about to take any risks. In the safety of my mentor’s truck, I clumsily stuck a veil on my head and double-checked the ties around my ankles to make sure nothing could crawl up my pant legs. The borrowed elbow-length gloves had grown stiff with years of wax and honey drippings, making it impossible for me to bend my fingers. I felt like a messed-up version of a school mascot headed to get the crowd going for certain defeat.
I was enrolled in a farmer-training program in southeastern Wisconsin, where I worked with four other interns on an organic-vegetable farm. Most of us were recent college graduates — urbanites who wanted to get a taste of the local-food movement at the source. As part of the program, we worked with a new mentor farmer in the area each month. In May, I worked with a woman who keeps dairy goats. Now that it was June, I was working with Dan, the beekeeper.
I fumbled my way out of the truck and noticed that Dan was already busy working with the little critters. I also noticed he wasn’t wearing a bee suit. Or gloves. He waved me over to one of the hives and I nervously eyed his veil, which was tied loosely enough to let in a few rogue bees.
As I approached, the air grew thick with the song of a million paper-thin wings beating in unison.
“Don’t worry about getting stung,” Dan said without looking at me. “They’ll bump you first as a warning. They don’t want to sting you, because they’ll die if they do.” I felt slightly better knowing this.
Then Dan continued, “However, if you do get stung, an alarm
pheromone is released, which attracts more bees and they’ll chase you until you’re good and gone.” I shivered and took a step back.
I was grateful that Dan refrained from commenting on my absurd uniform, but he did inform me that I had put my veil on backward. He quickly spun it around and tied it to my suit.
He has a kind face, lined with wrinkles that deepen when he smiles. Dan grew up here in the town of East Troy and married his high school sweetheart before taking over his dad’s plumbing business. In the car ride over, he talked proudly about his work, but his eyes really came alive when he started talking about his true love: the bees.
“We have a lot of work to do today,” he said, surveying his miniature village.
I glanced at the gangs of bees moving in and out of their homes and meekly told him I was up to the challenge. Almost every hive was composed of two white boxes stacked on top of each other, like little white apartment buildings.
“Those are the brooders,” Dan explained. “That’s where they lay the eggs.”
We were looking at about twenty hives parked in the shade of trees at the end of a long field. Dan has hives scattered all over town, mainly on farms. I glanced beyond the field and noticed an old woman pulling weeds in her garden — it was his aunt Ruth. She had moved to the area from Germany in the 1940s and brought with her biodynamic-farming principles, a type of organic farming that treats each farm as a living system. Dan, who clearly grew up entrenched in these principles, stressed that bees are an integral part of this system.