Labor Day Reflections

In honor of Labor Day, Jeremy and I slaughtered the last two of our meat birds. We may have some roosters that we hatched ourselves lurking in our flock, ready to crow at dawn on some unsuspecting Saturday, but for now, the meat bird raising project is officially done.

With my hand deep in the warm innards of a newly-dead rooster, and on this holiday that celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers, I thought for a moment about the men and women working in the often unbearable conditions of our meat factories. Think Tyson, Jimmy Dean, a big packet of ground beef that you bought for tacos. When you kill your own chicken, you understand the sad, smelly, and complicated work harvesting meat is. Imagining doing that 8-hours a day (or more), in deplorable working conditions, and with little compensation make me realize how cheaply we get the meat that we eat (in America, daily or every other day).

It is often immigrant or refugee communities that take these types of jobs. When I was working with Sudanese refugees, many were moving to the midwest, towns that had big meat-packing factories, because there was steady and available work.

Thankfully, we are caring more about the way that our meat is raised... free-range, grass-fed, hormone and pesticide free. This no doubt affects the working conditions of the people that harvest and package our meat as well. But let us continue to care about and figure out ways to advocate even more fiercely for the humane working conditions of our meat as well. And collectively, let's say a prayer of thanks and protection for the workers that are doing the hard job of providing us all with the meat we love to eat.

If you'd like a more hands-on experience of how hard it is, I can call you when the next rooster crows...

More information on the meat packing industry.

Way too many chickens

Did we mention in a previous blog that we got about 30 meat chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery? (and yes, that really is their name).  Well that was about 3 months ago and know those cute chicks are big and in my opinion, eating us out of house and home.  Literally, they eat non-stop.  I guess that's what happens when you get meat birds, they are bred to pack on the pounds. 

We also hatched out eggs from our late rooster, Doodle-do, about 10 or so.  And if that wasn't enough, just last week we bought 14 fertilized Maran eggs to put under another hen. So in about 2 more weeks we will have 14 more.  Which means by the end of July we will have approx. 60+ chickens, of which about half are roosters and just learning to crow. 

To complicate matters, I just saw a moving truck at our neighbors. Uh-oh....Maybe we should bring them a chicken dinner....

What we husbands will do....

For all you married men, you know what I'm (BJ) talking about. Now imagine you live on an Urban Farm and there is always another project to do. Jeremy and I thought we were being great husbands this Friday afternoon by taking care of some projects around the farm.

For the last month we had a rooster our friends gave us when they found out he wasn't planning on laying eggs and started crowing instead. We affectionately named him "DoodleDoo", he was a great rooster until about a week ago when he started crowing too much. Now he is chilling in our fridge and will be dinner tomorrow. Along with all the crowing we also got fertilized eggs which we had a broody hen sit on and hatched out 10 chicks (as Sarah mentioned in her last blog).

They were super adorable for about a week. We put them in a dog crate on top of our dryer in the basement, where their cuteness quickly devolved into a stinky and annoying mess. So Jeremy and I constructed a small hen house and a fenced off area in our existing chicken coop to keep them separate from the older hens.

We finished the project this afternoon and were so excited we moved Mama Hen and her chicks into it this evening...Then, the wives got home....

Apparently it's too cold for chicks outside. Which begs the question, "What did hens do before we domesticated them?" Not to mention the fact a cold night in San Diego means it dips a couple degrees below 50'F. I will admit it is raining and chilly tonight, but they have a roof, shelter and nice straw bedding. Plus, Mama Hen is still sitting on them to keep them warm. But the wives were concerned...

Alas, as the good husbands we are, we went outside in the rain with flashlight, tarp and umbrella in hand to tuck them in. If you keep chickens you know how muddy a coop gets when it rains. So as I was stepping over their little fence I slipped. Now when you are carrying a flashlight, tarp and umbrella and slip in mud and chicken sh**t a lot can go wrong. I ended up doing the splits, tearing the fence down and face planting in poopy mud. And all I hear is Jeremy chuckling behind me.

All this to reassure our wives that some chickens, which evolved with all the necessary instincts to stay warm and dry in a rainstorm, would make it through this harsh winters night. Oh, what we husbands will do.

The roo

I wrote this a while back, when the initial slaughtering of my first rooster was still pretty fresh in my head. We didn't have the blog up and running then, but I thought that writing about it at the time would be good for me. Here is the cut-and-paste from my journal. Remember that this was during the time that we were still fully in the old house and escrow had not yet closed on the farm:

"It all started about two weeks ago when my husband and I awoke to the cute, gurgly sound of one of our newer chicks trying to be a rooster. That half-crow was such a sweet sound at the time and I think it really made us feel like we would officially be changing our lives around. A few mornings later I confessed to Jeremy that I really loved the sound of that call waking me up in the morning and he sheepishly agreed that he loved it too. We both grew up in the city, far away from the likes of cock-a-doodling. That sorry little excuse for a roo crow tickled our heart strings and made us giddy with excitement of thoughts on our future farming project.

"A few short days passed with that cute gurgle manifesting into a full fledged crow. Boy, was I surprised with the speed at which those vocal cords matured! Considering the rate that a fertile egg turns into something you roast in the oven, I suppose I shouldn't have been so impressed. Within 4 to 5 months a hatchling starts to lay eggs and has breasts and thighs worthy of the dinner table. It was around this time that Billy called us with the news on their end- one of the chicks at their house had also started to crow.
Roosters are not legal in the city. We all knew that from day 1, but we also all knew that you won't really get into trouble unless someone complains. We all live in pretty close proximity to our neighbors at this point, but I think we all thought that we could just stick it out until that darn coop was built and once we could move those chickens to the bigger property no one would care. At least we were wishfully thinking that. As the mornings continued to pass, the "cute" inevitably turned to obnoxious. The makeshift coop is about 15 feet from our bedroom window, and that rooster was beginning to crow from about 4:30 am on. He had definitely found his voice and instinct told him that he was supposed to use it to protect his flock! I felt sorry for the poor folks, friends and neighbors, who would wander into our backyard unsuspectingly only to be greeted with the surprising call of a defensive rooster.

"As I was beginning to wear thin and count the days until the chickens could leave my cramped yard, Billy and Sarah came by and mentioned how they didn't think it would be a very good idea to take the roosters with us to the new property. Even though the feel is a lot more rural out there, it is still city limits and we really didn't want to start off on the wrong foot with our new neighbors. They had a good point. Considering that we would be starting a hippy-commune-farming project in their neighborhood that might have the potential of irking a few, we probably should try to keep our noses clean and our neighbors happy. But then what? What should be the fate of these beautiful, crowing, hand raised roosters? The way I saw it, we had three options. A) We could give them away on craigslist to someone who would probably eat them, B) we could "donate" them to the buddhist temple up the street so that they could make a meal out of them, or C) we could enjoy the fresh, homegrown meat ourselves. I opted for C.

"I don't know what the difference is between me and everyone else. I was vegan for a little while, and vegetarian for many years after that. It was never the thought of harming an animal that made me choose that lifestyle. I was always an environmentalist and interested in the ramifications of feed lots and hormones in our food. I became more of a health nut with the birth of our children and was alway averse to feeding them hormone or pesticide laden foods. The thought of meat never really grossed me out or disgusted me - quite the contrary! I just thought if I was going to eat it, I shouldn't have a problem putting it's blood on my hands and that feed lots shouldn't exist the way they do today. We should live in better harmony with the earth, especially as our population keeps booming and more strain is created for resources. My (judgmental, I'll admit) pet peeve has always been people who say they'd never be able to slaughter an animal, yet they eat it on their dinner plate everyday without a thought. I didn't think it was necessary for my children to be raised vegetarian, but I always thought it was extremely important for them to understand the proper place where their food came from and to understand the sacrifice that comes with eating meat. It is not something that just is born into square packages in the supermarket. I wanted them to understand the life that was lost and what it meant to have it on your plate, as well as the dirt that the carrots are pulled from and the water that goes into the lettuce. I am a food junkie, in the purest sense! Thoroughly obsessed with food from top to bottom, or dirt to table as it may seem.

"So on this fateful Monday morning in May I decided that it was time. I called our counterparts and told them to bring over their roo and I collected ours. They left, I was alone with our kids to do the dirty work. I was unsure of everyones reaction, so I made sure the kids were inside and preoccupied with some games. I pulled out my ipad and googled "how to process a chicken". I kept that thing by my side the whole time! Step by step, I followed the first blog I stumbled upon. I wish I had the site, I'll try to find it and post it in our links when I get time to search. I started with the roo they brought over, I couldn't bear to begin with the little guy we had hand raised. I hung him up by his feet and slit his throat, and watched his eyes ask me what I had done. I watched the life drain out of him and I won't lie, I cried like a baby. It took me a couple of hours to pluck and dress that first one and I dreaded moving on to number two. I lured the other rooster over, the one that trusted me and came to my hand when I stuck it in the coop. I gently picked him up, stroked and soothed him and then strung him up by his feet and whispered to him that I was so sorry. I repeated the entire process, and this time I cried even more. I stuck them in the fridge and couldn't imagine eating chicken anytime in the near future.

"During the process, a few things really struck me and have grown in my thoughts. I am a foodie, as aforementioned. I am Christian, yet I am interested and educated in other religions. I work at a synagogue, we tutor many Muslim refugees and I have Muslim and Buddhist friends. Food seems to be an integral part of each of these religions except for Christianity, and I don't know why. Slaughtering this chicken gave me so much respect and appreciation of what it means to be kosher and/or halal. I was given the opportunity to thank the chicken for it's life, I felt the warm blood come out of it's throat. I fully understood and received the impact of what it meant to have the blood of that animal on my hands in order for me to put it on the dinner table. For that moment, the sheer importance and reasoning of these religious rituals made perfect and clear sense. It made me sad that in this all, Christians have no blessing they must impart upon their meat during slaughter. If you are spiritual at all, you would most definitely understand the importance of this, I think. It is important to feel the remorse and the sadness and death that must take place in order for you to eat that piece of meat. It really made me feel that God gave us these amazing animals, this amazing life of this creature and it is so bitter-sweet because the meat is delicious and nourishing yet you have to take that life away in order to gain the nourishment from it. It is very post-Garden-of-Eden-esque."

So this blog is long and rambling, but I spilled out my guts during part of it and I hope that you didn't mind reading. Three days after the slaughter, we made some fantastic chicken tacos. Although the thought of eating the guys kind of turned my stomach, I thought it would be such a blatant disregard for their life if we just let them go to waste. I was kind of in a corner because there was really nothing else that could have been done. No way I could have let them go in the trash! I got over it =) I now (obviously) eat chicken, but I will not let even an ounce of it go to waste. The carcass gets picked clean and the leftovers go into stock for another meal later in the week. It seems like such an injustice to throw any of that life in the trash. I know, I am a freak. Whatever.

We have since slaughtered a few more chickens, a gaggle of ducks (also delicious) and we have 5 turkeys hanging out with the laying hens and getting fat for our Farm-tastic Thanksgiving that we hope to have this year. Maybe you can be a part of it too!

The chickens, part two.

In the last post, I miss-wrote what actually occurred after the Tragic Raccoon Attack. The chicken-lady called us to come pick up part of our chicken order, not the entire 20+ chickens. We needed to pick up the older contingent of our chicks (she could still keep the smaller ones in her garage, safe from raccoons.) So BJ and I hopped in the car, drove north to Del Mar to claim our chicks.

In our excitement, we forgot anything to actually put the chickens in, so we just stuffed them in our car. No, that's not true. She lent us a cage, and I think we put the rest in a box or something. Then we drove home with our 8 chickens... which, out of the whole 25 or so, wasn't so bad to think about housing. The main problem was that we lived in a small apartment with a "backyard" that we shared with 4 of our neighbors, definitely not the legal 30 feet away from any other houses.

But, luckily our neighbors were pretty mellow. They let us construct a makeshift chicken coop in our shared space. This consisted of laying our outside table on it's side, wrapping plastic mesh around our four post pergola thing, thus creating a 4x4 run. For the actual hen-house (where they slept), we grabbed a big moving box, flipped it upside down, and cut out a door.

The chickens seemed to like their first home. They got busy scratching around, and doing other chicken activities... like pooping everywhere. When we put them in the coop, we  watch with curiosity as most of them seemed to do a strange dance with each other... puffing out their neck feathers and doing what could only be described as a little chicken duel. We thought that was weird, but dismissed it as the girls figuring out their pecking order.

At first I was worried about something eating our chickens, as the whole coop was definitely not predator-proof. But then a much louder concern presented itself. About a week or so after we moved the chickens into their temporary home, we started to hear a strange noise coming from their coop (which happened to be right outside our bedroom window). The noise was somewhere in between a cat's meow and a gargle. We realized that we had a rooster in our midst, and he was learning to crow.

These beginning attempts weren't that problematic, as they were pretty quiet, and we could shut him up by quickly running outside and throwing some feed in the coop. But after awhile, he developed his full crow, and BJ and I would awake with dread to the racket, try to run outside and subdue him before he woke all our neighbors and they called the cops. This morning ritual caused much anxiety for us.

This rooster could not stay in our backyard. I posted him on craigslist for $15, and some nice young man came and bought him. Whether he became someone's meal, only God knows. When we got rid of him, I had my first peaceful morning sleep-in. It was glorious.

Not two days later, we awoke again to crows from the backyard.

"What the..." we groggily complained.Quickly, we ran out to the coop to see what was going on.

We looked at each other nervously, "How many roosters are in there?"

Over the next few weeks, we came to find out that all but ONE of our "girls" were actually boys, and each time we would get rid of one of them, another would start to crow.

Craigslist found homes for about half of them (one time I was in such a rush, I had to leave a rooster in a box on my front step for the person that was going to pick him up), but in the end, we had too many roosters to dispose of. And, we had paid for these birds after all. Might as well get something for our money.

We decided together that they would make some good roast chicken. It was harvest time.

Bravely, the ex-vegan among the four of us was the first to volunteer to slaughter a chicken, so I'll let her describe that in her own words.

Overall, I would not recommend chickens if you live in an apartment in one of the densest parts of your city. It just doesn't make for good sleep. What you really need is a farm...