Organic advocates ask USDA to make egg farmers give hens time in pasture, not just enclosures

A lot of leeway is given to the definition of free-range and pastured poultry.  One interpretation is that if a bird has access to the outdoors they can be labeled as free-range, or pastured.  Even though the outdoors may be a fenced enclosure on concrete.  Here is a link to the article:

Organic advocates ask USDA to make egg farmers give hens more time in pastures.

This is still better than this.

But still not as good as this.

This is why it is so important to research and know where your food comes from.  I used to feel good about purchasing chicken that was free-range only to find our later that they were raised in the same commercial chicken houses with a concrete yard to wander into.

All of our chickens are raised outdoors and go into coops at night.   Our chickens have the option to go anywhere they want to and express their true chickeness.  Don't really know if that's a word, but it should be.  They return to their coop at night and we close the door to protect them from predators.  The next morning we go back out and let them out.  Do they look happier?  Yes.  For most chickens this is as good as it gets...unless you're a mascot.

Chateau Elan, a great place to pick up a bottle of wine and....CHICKENS!

It was time to expand our chicken flock, and we found a great deal on craigslist for organic egg laying chickens.  The Spring is coming and we really want to hit a lot of the Farmer's Markets in the area so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of eggs for them and our CSA members.  The problem was that the eggs were in Moreland, Georgia.  No, I had never heard of it either but I soon found out it was on the other side of Atlanta.  We were able to get in touch with the guys and found out that they also manage a horse farm.  They said for $25 dollars they would meet us halfway.

So, Danielle loaded up the truck and headed down towards Atlanta to meet the guys at Chateau Elan.
That is where halfway was--not your typical place to see agriculture purchases take place.   Please, if you have never heard of it look it up on the internet.

That is one clean chicken!

We finally found our chicken processing pictures!  It was one of the things we were the least enthused about doing with our pastured poultry operation.  We did not know what to expect and we used this past Fall to perform our test run before we built our area to process.  Both of us work off of the farm so we know we will never be processing thousands of birds like Polyface or Nature's Harmony Farm, but we still want to process birds in a humane way and be as efficient as possible.  Experience is the best teacher so here we went!

The birds were taken off feed 12 hours before we began processing to allow the digestive tracts to clear and make evisceration easier.  The birds are placed head first in cones where the head extends below the bottom of the cone.  A sharp knife is used to cut the jugular vein without cutting the esophagus or the windpipe.   This allows the bird to bleed out.  If done properly the bird does not thrash about and seems to just go to sleep.

We had cutting boards, folding tables and had a large pot of water over a burner to scald the birds.  Sounds like a pretty fancy operation doesn't it!  The water has to be around 140 degrees to get a good scald.  This allows the plucker to remove all of the feathers, including the small pin feathers.

The birds were then placed in the scald pot for 30-40 seconds and placed into the plucker.  We built a Whizbang poultry plucker from plans that were purchased off the internet.  We searched for used equipment, but were unable to find something in our price range so we decided to build our own.  A featherplate in the bottom of the plucker spins the birds and rubber "fingers" remove the feathers from the birds.  It looks WILD, but it really works well.  If anyone is interested we have rented the plucker to folks that are close.  Just e-mail us for more information.

Here I am taking one of the birds out of the plucker and taking it to the evisceration table.  We will save you all from pictures of the evisceration process!!!  I will share one bloody, gory picture with you...

OUCH!  Processing chickens is full of perils!  The knife slipped and sliced my finger so I spent the rest of the time processing with a rubber glove on.

David killed the birds, scalded and plucked them and I did the evisceration.  After the birds are eviscerated they were placed in a cooler full of ice water to allow the remainder of the blood to evacuate the carcass.

It was a slow and tedious process, but as we did more birds we both got more adept at it.  Outdoor processing has some difficulties and helped us to make a lot of decisions on how to improve the process.
The end result were beautiful, pasture raised broilers for our family and CSA members.  After we finished, the birds were placed in doubled ziploc bags and placed in one of our upright freezers.

We learned a LOT during this afternoon.  The need for more killing cones and a larger scalding pot is going to be a necessity.  Also, we decided that working on concrete would be a lot easier since the area where we processed got pretty muddy by the time we were finished.  We have visited several other farms who processed on open ground at first and they all had improved their facilities to include a concrete pad.  It didn't take us long to see why they did!  We also learned that we REALLY need more freezer space and a better way to package birds!  We found a company that sells poultry bags that shrink around the carcass in quantities for small producers.  We plan on using these in the future.  They are from Cornerstone Farm Ventures and they stated that birds are kept in the freezer for a year and a half with little to no freezer burn.  This adds cost, but considering how much much work and money is involved in producing them it only seems right to protect them as well as we can.  We think our customers will appreciate it.

So, we did our "test run" to see what we needed to do to make a system that worked well for us.  We really felt that spending the money on a processing facility needed to be done after we learned for ourselves what we needed for our farm.  Our plan is to break ground on our open air processing barn this Spring.  We are really excited about this step and look forward to keeping everyone updated with our progress!

Got Eggs? Give us your favorite egg recipe.

Egg production has really slowed this winter.  We are all excited about the changes in the season and the chill in the air that winter brings, but the chickens are another story.  As the days shorten and the temperatures drop, egg production decreases drastically.  On commercial farms all of the birds are in climate controlled environments with one square foot each and where the light is manipulated to give optimum production.  In a free range model you are at the mercy of the elements, so we have peak production times and these lulls during the year.

This makes it extra tricky to have enough eggs during certain times of the year for our CSA members and an overload during other times.  During the Spring I know we are going to have eggs, or something with eggs in it at least once during the day!  We plan on increasing our production with the increase in our number of CSA members and use an old cotton wagon to produce another mobile house about twice the size of the one we currently have.  If anybody has any great recipes using eggs please send them to us!  We will post our favorites on our blog.

On to Greener Pastures

It is the time of the year when most of the grass at the house has played out and it is time to move the cows to new pasture.  Luckily, that pasture is about 1 mile down the road.  I had some great help from our neighbor's son to get the cows loaded on the trailer and over to the rented pasture.  We started at about 3:30 on afternoon and moved 6 trailer loads by dark!  By the time night caught up with us we only had two cows left.   The next afternoon we loaded the last two and we couldn't find the other 60 cows we had turned out.  They had busted through some of the electric fencing and were nowhere to be seen.  We walked for miles trying to find them.  They were all bedded down over the top of a hill and we had went past them twice.  I have lost a cow or two in my life, but I was kind of embarrassed about losing 60!  We called them back to the trailer to turn out the other cows.

It was nice to see those last two cows join the rest of the herd.  There is nothing better than watching cows graze on new pasture!

SNOW

We love it when it snows!  

The cows were starving when it came time to feed hay that afternoon.  They ran across the creek and swarmed around the hay David was putting out.  Good quality hay is a necessity during these winter months as our pastures start to slow down their growth.  We will feed hay for about another week and then move the entire herd to their winter grazing grounds down the road to about 200 acres of stockpiled fescue.  Hay is great, but nothing beats pasture.  The calves will be moved to wheat, oat and rye grazing on our other farm about 20 minutes away.  

Wow!  I just realized that our cows get to travel more than we do!

First Litter of Pigs Born at Clear Creek Farm

Our Heritage Spot pigs are one of our favorite animals on the farm.  Yes, their breed is really called Spots because....well, they have spots!  Lots of folks that have toured the farm think we are pulling their leg when we tell them that.  After our eventful experience bringing them to the farm (read "This Little Piggy Went to...Clear Creek Farm) we have learned a lot about pigs raised outside of the traditional means.  When pigs have babies on the commercial hog farm they are placed in farrowing crates where they are allowed to stand, lay down, drink and eat.  This is done in an attempt to stop the pig from rolling over and crushing any of the piglets.  All of the breeding that has taken place to produce the pigs we have today in our grocery stores was done at the expense of the maternal instict of the sow.

When allowed to free range, like the pigs do at Clear Creek Farm, they are allowed to act the way nature intended.  It is very important that we chose a heritage breed like our Spots that still carried some of their maternal instinct.  As our sows pregnancy progressed we noticed that she was spending a lot of time in one particular area of the lot we went to that area one day while she was eating.  This is what we found.

She had actually cut down trees with her jaws and pushed up cedar boughs and leaves to produce a nice, soft, warm nest.  As she got closer to having her litter she stayed closer and closer to her nest.

So, on one of the coldest nights with the impending 6 to 8 inches of snow headed our way Hamlet decided to bring 7 new baby piglets into the world.  A few are very healthy and hearty looking! We debated on what to do for her, but with the placement of her nest under a huge cedar tree that was out of the wind we decided that she knew best what her litter needed.  We let her rest and nurse her new family.

As her new litter nursed hungrily I was able to pick one of the babies up and take a look.  We have trouble keeping up with Sarah Katherine, so I wonder how she's gonna handle keeping up with 7!