Reference no: EM13373518 , Length: 2 pages
Essay #1a
Posted on Wed, Jan. 02, 2008
From friends to food
Farmer says killing animals isn't the issue, but natural lives for them is
DEAN MULLIS
Special to the Observer
MAKIN' BACON: Rooti the Pig was raised over the summer by farmer Dean Mullis at his Ritchfield farm. But alas, Rooti would soon be headed to slaughter. This photo was taken in early November. JEFF SINER -- [email protected]
I am a farmer.
My wife, Jenifer, and I pull our food from the ground and butcher chickens and turkeys, and sell it all to you. We are humbled by what it takes to grow real food for ourselves and our customers but make no apologies for what we do.
A lot of you ask: How can I raise animals, come to know them, and then kill them for food?
I find that an odd question. A better question all of us should be asking ourselves is: Where does our food come from? How was it grown? What was sprayed on it or fed to it before it ended up on our plates?
We do what we do to provide, for ourselves and others, vegetables grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers. We raise and come to know our animals to ensure they have what we deem as natural lives with plenty of grass and sunshine.
You are what you eat.
In my weekly e-mail newsletter about life at Laughing Owl Farm here in Stanly County, I wrote frequently about Rooti, the pig we raised this past year. He had a good life, and then I took him to slaughter and he was processed into meat.
Readers wondered how we could do this.
How we raise chickens
This past year, along with our 120-130 laying hens producing 6-9 dozen eggs a day, we also raised 325 broiler chickens, 64 turkeys and Rooti.We get the broiler chickens in as day-old chicks, 100 at a time, via the U.S. Postal Service. Yep, our chicks come in the mail; so do our day-old turkey poults.
On the days the new chicks come in, one of the first things my kids Ellie and Levi do after they get off the school bus is get in the brooder. They sit in there holding and talking to them and letting them hop and peck around. This goes on for a few days until the chicks grow out of the cute fuzzball stage.
For the first few days, the chicks need a environment of around 90 degrees, which we provide with heat lamps. At 2-3 weeks, we move them to a penned-in pasture where they're free to roam. We move the pen and fencing to a new chunk of pasture about once a week.
It's just a few hundred chickens out on grass pecking around, scratching in the soil and chasing bugs.
None of this nonsense of large-scale commercial "free-range" systems. Those birds are raised for six weeks and then given access to pasture but are too scared to walk out the door because they have never seen pasture or been exposed to unfiltered sunlight.
We don't have rows of vast chicken houses holding 10,000 birds each. Our chickens live real chicken lives. They know what hawks are.
Ellie, 9, and Levi, 7, are old enough now to get it. They understand it's our responsibility to give these chickens the best lives possible with the realization that they will be food.
We raise a couple of varieties of chickens for broilers. The Cornish Rock crosses have been bred for decades to be fast growers and are ready to butcher in about eight weeks. The Rangers were developed from flocks of truly free-range chicken flocks in France. The Rangers are slower growing, taking 10-12 weeks to mature, and do not get as big. But they make a really nice chicken.
Butchering is just a task
For us, butchering is a task that must be done. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
The first thing I do is heat water in a 25-gallon tank. Then I go catch the chickens and bring them to the processing area. Jenifer picks up 160 pounds of ice on her way home from taking the kids to school. I sharpen the knives and Jenifer sanitizes the stainless steel work tables as we wait for the water to reach 160 degrees.
I get asked quite often how we kill chickens.
Most people want to know if we chop their heads off with an ax. We don't, but that is the way my mom did it. As a boy, I remember thinking it was great fun to chase headless chickens down through the woods with my brothers.
My mom was quite thankful when the local grocery store started carrying chickens already dead and plucked and she could just go buy one.
Before we begin butchering, we say a short blessing of thanks and give some thought to what we are about to do.
I process four at a time. We use inverted traffic cones with the tips cut off to hold the chickens. The cones keep them from flopping around and bruising the meat. The birds are placed upside down in the cones so their heads stick out the narrow end and I cut the jugular vein.
I then dunk two chickens at a time in the 160-degree water for about 20 seconds to loosen the feathers and then I place them in the plucker. It's a stainless steel tub with rubber fingers on the side walls and bottom. The bottom spins around and the birds are picked clean in 12 to 15 seconds. It's pretty amazing.
We then eviscerate the chickens, place them in cold water to chill down before being placed in coolers and iced down. They stay on ice overnight before going in the freezer.
Rooti the Pig
We don't usually raise pigs. I have my brother to thank for bringing Rooti to the farm last spring.Rick, who is a photographer, bought him from a local confinement hog farm. He trained Rooti to lie on a bench and had kids come in around Easter last year to have their pictures made. I guess using rabbits would have been too conventional.
Rooti was starting to outgrow my brother's basement and my sister-in-law's sense of humor, so he brought him here.
He was a friendly and curious pig, weighing about 50 pounds when he arrived in April. Rooti was destined for a gray life on concrete until Rick bought him and started feeding him pancakes and corn.
Once Rooti got here, he had fresh air, sunshine, grass, and the ability to wallow out in a mud hole under his waterer. We moved him to new pasture frequently.
He ate kitchen scraps, extra tomatoes, watermelons and just about anything else we threw his way. His pen was on the way to the barn, so we talked to him daily.
People asked: How can you eat Rooti?
"How can you kill and eat an animal you have been so intimate with?"
Once again, my question: How can you not know where your food comes from?
By November, Rooti weighed over 400 pounds when we decided to have him made into pork chops and sausage. He was a friendly pig that had a good life. My brother had named him, but Rooti was not a pet. He was a farm animal that was getting bigger by the day.
Rooti the pig left the farm on a Sunday in November; I hauled him an hour and a half to the Grateful Growers farm in Denver and loaded him on the trailer with their seven hogs they were taking to be processed on Tuesday. It was not a sad day, as some may think.
Rooti is back on the farm now, in the freezer rather than a pen on pasture.
Levi, our 7-year-old, probably summed it up best.
I asked him if he understood what was going to happen to Rooti. He said yes.
Then he said that Rooti would always be with us in two different ways, in our hearts and in our stomachs ... I could not agree more.
Local farmers markets
The local food movement in America is growing fast as consumers pay more attention to where their food comes from. If you're interested in buying locally produced food, farmers markets are a good bet. While most of the markets are closed for the season, there are a few still open. The Observer will run a full list in early summer.