Pasture Raised and Grass Fed on Stony Brook Farm

“Mortalities” are the “industry” euphemism for dead animals. To compost “mortalities” is to compost animals that have died on the farm. So far, 2009 has been a big year for dead animals on this farm and I hope I don’t have another year like it for a long time. In late winter, my favorite goat Izzy died due to a management mistake, then the ewe The Old Girl died of OPP (I think), then two feeder pigs died from a vicious bacterial infection. All four animals went into a compost windrow, although, in retrospect, I probably should have burned the pigs to ensure that I killed the bacteria.

For the past couple of months I have been putting off turning the compost windrows because I was worried about what I would find. I finally did it yesterday. As I came down the windrow, the first animal I encountered was Izzy, who has been in the windrow the longest. When I put her in, however, it was cold and the windrow was not cooking well. Left of Izzy were bits of bone and fur and a strong unpleasant odor that unfortunately continuously blew into my face because I was facing into the breeze. To increase the rate of composting, I mixed a couple bucket fulls of nearly finished compost in with what remained of Izzy’s body and then covered it back up.

About twenty feet further down the line I found The Old Girl. Her body has been in the pile since May 17. There was nothing left of her but a mat of wool and a hunk of malodorous pink slime. When I had originally placed The Old Girl’s body in the windrow, I had surrounded her with a couple buckets full of nearly finished compost, which I believe explains the difference in the rate of composting between her body and that of Izzy. I mixed in some more nearly finished compost.

A bit further down the line I came across the first feeder pig, which has been in the windrow since about the first of June. Bits of bone and that malodorous pink slime. The next feeder pig was in about the same condition.

I didn’t have my compost thermometer with me, but the compost in the area around the pigs was really cooking. When I opened the windrow up quite a bit of steam billowed out.

Basically what I discovered yesterday is that in two to three months — in a static pile — a 150 pound animal will be nearly completely composted. What I have read about composting larger animals like cows and horses is that it takes three to four months is a windrow that is cooking well.

Composting is by far the best option for getting rid of animal carcasses, as long as it is done correctly. If it is not done correctly, it is a foul putrid mess. More and more agricultural experts are counseling large animal farmers to compost bodies rather than bury them, burn them, or drop them out on the back forty for the buzzards. Composting binds up and then makes available the nutrients contained in the animal tissues, and a pile that is cooking well enough will kill off most pathogens. Basically you end up with a more or less inert soil amendment.

The year before Jen and I left Philadelphia for Schoharie Jennifer took over managing a stable in Fairmount Park. One day before they left, Jen and I were talking to the previous managers and one of them, the male of the male-female couple told us about being a jouster at renaissance fairs. He said, “It’s about the closest thing to being a rock star.” Jen and I got a huge kick out his saying that then and we still get a kick out of it every now and then. Yesterday a funny thing happened at the farmers market that made me think immediately of that jousting rock star.

Last week I was on a panel to discuss the film Eating Alaska, which was very good. The film was about the challenges of a former vegetarian to eat locally in Alaska, dealing primarily with the struggle over eating game, which is the principle source of nutrition for Alaskans. I think there might have been about thirty people there. In the discussion, we shifted the context from Alaska to here, and so shifted our focus from the meat of wild game to the meat of livestock. There were two other people on the panel, another farmer and a person who works in multiculturalism. Unfortunately, the multiculturalist got short shrift I think because most people were interested in talking about things more directly related to farming. I did my best to find ways to relate the discussion to culture — multi- or otherwise –  because that is one of my own areas of interest, but the multiculturalist only had an opportunity to participate a few times.

Yesterday while at the farmers market I was interacting with two customers at my booth and one of the women suddenly realized that I was one of the panelists from the other night and she told me how great she thought the discussion had been. We spoke about it for a minute or two and then her friend bought something and they left. Then about fifteen minutes later the woman that had recognized me came back and as she was looking over the tables for what she wanted she joked that she “had been so star struck that she forgot to do her shopping.” Suddenly I felt the weight of the jousting lance tucked under my arm as I rode steady in my saddle above the thundering hooves of my most trusted horse as he galloped down the field….

The farmer as rock star has been a recurring theme over the past few years, in the media especially. While I think it is wonderful that so much attention is being paid to farmers and farming, I find elevating farmers to celebrity status highly problematic, primarily as it relates to the gathering steam of the local-regional farm and food systems movement, for a couple of reasons. First there are very few rock stars in the world, and their lights blot out the work of the masses of people just as talented and important as they. Second, as our lenses become more and more narrowly focused on just a few rock stars, the horizon of ideas also becomes ever narrower. For example, Joel Salatin, who is currently the rock star farmer, really is something of a treasure when it comes to focusing our attention on the ecology and ethics of grass farming. However, as it relates to creating farm and food systems, I find his anarcho-capitalist agenda highly problematic (his libertarianism is so extreme that I do not think the anarcho- is an exaggeration), but because he is such a grass farming rock star, his ideas about farm and food systems are prioritized as well. The idea of food justice is not even a roadie on the Salatin farm rock tour.

If we were able to suspend our cultural inclination to elevating just a few of our community members to rock star status, the horizon of ideas would be much broader, and the base of the movement would be firmer, more sound, and so less susceptible to being made a tool for the promotion of a narrowly held agenda. I, of course, want people to hear the ideas and thoughts that I am attracted to, and I hope, given the opportunity, to be able to present those ideas in a way that entices people to be similarly attracted to them. However, what I want is for those ideas to be the faceless ideas of a movement, to seem to have come from out of the depths of the movement itself. I want those ideas to be out there, appearing unsourced and infinite, just zipping around available for people to adopt and cherish, defending and promoting them as an integral part of their worldviews.

Movements move not by the light of a few rock stars, but by the weight of the masses. Rock stars are a mistake.

This batch of Red Broiler meat chickens that I am raising is flighty as hell. Ordinarily when you touch a meat bird it squawks a bit and a tremor shoots through its body, and that’s about it. When you touch a good percentage of this batch of Red Broilers, they go off screeching and flapping like they were shot out of a cannon.

None of the batches of meat chickens that I have raised have had a terribly good homing instinct, so they get close to the shelter at night, but not all of them get in it. This means that it is always necessary to round up a few of them and get them into the shelter. When I get out there well into dusk but before dark the round up is pretty easy. I just herd them with my feet. However, after dark, a chicken is pretty blind, so they don’t like to move. After dark, I need to pick the birds up and walk them to the shelter. As I mentioned above, this is usually pretty simple, just reach down and pick the bird up. With this group, however, you have to snatch them with two hands around both wings and hope you get a good grip before the cannon fires.

Last night my neighbor came over to buy some pork and another neighbor came to pick up a few pigs I piggy sat for him for a week, so we didn’t have dinner until about 8:30, which meant that I didn’t get out to the coop until well after dark.  One bird had squirmed its way in between two of the hay bales that I placed up against the shelter for added warmth because the nights have been so cool. Its head was “inside” but its butt was sticking out into the paddock, so I wanted to pick it up and bring it around to the front of the shelter and place it inside. Because there were still other birds to round up, I hadn’t closed the front of the shelter yet. When I touched that bird to try to grab it, it exploded forward, screeching and squawking, and slammed right into the back of the shelter. There was a huge boom inside the shelter as all seventy-five or so birds that had been inside frantically flapped their wings and came rocketing out, dashing in all directions once they cleared the door, screaming their heads off.

“Son of a bitch!” I thought to myself and shook my head as the commotion died down.  I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them peeping to each other and from the sound of it they were all over the place. I could hear that at least a few of them had gone through the fence. What should have been a simple little job had become a real chore.

I started at the fence line first. I swept my flashlight a couple feet inside the fence and a couple feet outside. Even with a flashlight a two pound red broiler hunkered down in the grass is hard to see. I was worried about stepping on them, so I had to walk very slowly and carefully. There were only two or three outside the fenceline and about five or six just inside it. I quickly snatched them up one by one and placed them inside the shelter.

After that I did a sweep of the whole paddock. While I had been walking the fenceline, about half of the chicks had peeped each other into a couple of big groups, while about half were spread out and too far from the peeping to move towards it. The latter half just lay low in the grass. I went around picking up the stragglers. A couple of them were flighty explosive types and one of them made such a commotion that one of the big groups nearly exploded apart when the flighty bird started flapping its wings (I missed them and only grabbed around its body) and screeching, but other than a big collective squawk and shudder, the group held together.

Once I had the stragglers in the shelter, I moved onto the big groups. Rather than reach down and pick them up one by one, I ushered them along with my foot. When I held the flashlight light out in front of them, they kind of moved into it, so I just kept the light out in front and pushed them along with the inside of my boot. As they moved away from my boot, the group got pretty spread out, but they stayed more or less together and moved along. Once at the shelter, only a few walked inside it, most just lay down in front of it, which was fine with me for the time being. I went back for the second big group, and about ten minutes later, the two groups were all in front of the shelter door. Then I reached down and pushed them one by one into the shelter. At that point they were pretty well desensitized to being handled, so there was no cannon fire.

A detailed ten minute sweep of the paddock uncovered five more birds laying low in the grass. After getting them in the shelter, I did one more quick sweep then closed the shelter door and called it a night. The paddock is up by the road and not too far from the house, so I think that any birds that might have still been out that I didn’t see probably made it through the night because the predator pressure is pretty low, although it did rain.

The flightiness should really be bred out of this strain of red broilers. Ranginess is a desirable trait in a pastured meat bird, but not flightiness, and you can have ranginess without flightiness.