Harvesting
Today is Monday the 19th and as I sit here writing this my body feels like it has been well beaten all over with a stout stick….
Our first chicken harvest day was yesterday and it went well. It’s hot work and it gets heavy, especially as the birds went a week longer than usual due to family commitments the weekend before. That made them rather large, 6 1/2lbs on average, which added time and effort.
As well as that, yesterday we also had our usual chores of feeding and watering the next batch of chickens that are out on the pasture. This included splitting that batch into the now empty tractor that the harvested birds came from. This was frustrating because a slight change in our procedure last year created problems and learning opportunities. You see, when we started out in beef by having only heifers (females) and made the change last fall to steers (males), innocuous enough, we didn’t know that steers behave differently. I had increased our chicken tractors by adding two more the year before, despite the fact that the material cost doubled. We overwinter the cattle in the chicken field and the tractors stay in there too. We have never had any issues with this before with the heifers, but the steers completely destroyed the two newer tractors!
Speaking of steers, yesterday we also loaded one of my in-laws that we have been custom grazing for them. A fine looking animal (#67). We walked the herd down across the pasture and into the chicken field for loading using our ancient chute, then we walked them straight back again. The steer went off bright and early to be harvested this morning. Grass fed, grass finished just as beef was intended to be! What a delight and full of goodness for your body. Let’s not forget that we are what THEY eat. It’s an immense amount of work to provide for the livestock the cleanest feed and environment to allow them to be what they were really meant to be, what Joel Salatin describes as the chickeness of chickens and the beefness of beef. It has taken us seven years just to get the grass in the pasture to be good enough to support cattle and it might take us seven more to make it GOOD grass. This is why i’m still sitting here, feeling like I’ve taken a beating with a stout stick……