I know it's been a while since I've updated.  A good six months, in fact.  It just goes to show you how fast life moves around here.  The boy and I both have self-employed day jobs, which means we're continually on the go.  But that's not what I'm here to talk about.Today, I am extremely disillusioned about the whole local food movement.  Fuck it, I say, fuck it right in the ear.

Cue gasps of horror.  And y'know what, that's okay.

Those of you who are gasping are, I'm sure, the same people who feel good spending their money at Whole Foods, Vitamin Cottage, and the like.  You're the people who buy the Safeway O Organics (when you shop there) and support fair trade coffee.  You may have a little garden--container or no--and understand the benefits of raw milk versus pasteurized.

In short, you are exactly the sort of people that Portlandia mocks. But you're okay with that.

I want to know, though, how many of you have plucked a chicken (or turkey, or duck, or goose) by hand.  How many of you have cut that bird's throat and watched its blood drip into the bucket beneath its neck stump?  I want to know how many of you have spent the money to feed your goats alfalfa hay at $7-12/bale and milk them twice a day, calling out the vet for a multi-$hundred bill when one of them gets mastitis.  I want to know how many of you have spent sleepless clear nights when your livestock guardian dog has spent the entire goddamn night howling--whether at coyotes or traffic--only to STFU at 9 am the next morning.  I want to know how many of you have hauled 5-gallon buckets of water (all hail the 5 gallon bucket!) to your stock through multiple feet of snow.  How many of you, I wonder, have had to run the heat lamp out to the half-assed pen in the middle of winter to keep your stock from freezing?  Who else has funky buckets of hides in their living room, planters in front of their wood fireplace, electric fencing buried underneath snow and frozen into the ground, poultry shit building up on their decks, rabbit shit mounding up underneath (and in!) hutches, baby whatevers freezing to death in the middle of the night so you have to feed them to the dog instead of anticipating any sort of sustainable profit, hay stuck in your bra and fingers freezing off even though it's only late October oh my god and I have to keep butchering every weekend for the next two months, when your entire.fucking.kitchen smells like turkey guts, when you pay $50 for a large roll of freezer paper and $3.99-$4.99 for a goddamn roll of freezer tape that doesn't last nearly as long?  How many of you have ordered feed by the pallet or driven nearly an hour round trip to the local feed store (if you manage not to get sucked into conversation!)?  How m should bany of you have butchered so many animals that the skin of your hands grows soft with the absorbed fat?

I'll tell you, my skin is like buttah.

I've spent the last hour and a half bent over out kitchen sink with a pair of flat-nosed pliers, yanking pinfeathers out of one of our ducks.  We butchered 5 turkeys and 3 ducks today, bringing our total to 8 goats, 20 turkeys, and 3 ducks.  We still have 5 rabbits to go.

People ask us if we sell our birds.  The past three years, I've said yes.  From here on out, I have a feeling that the answer will be: a) no, unless you are willing to pay an exorbitant price, or b) unless you're willing to assist/butcher them yourselves.

I feed my turkeys organic feed, because I like eating food that has no GMOs or unnecessary antibiotics designed to help a bird survive in counter-intuitive circumstances.  Even being free-range and having their diet supplemented with kitchen scraps, each bird consumed roughly $50 worth of feed.  Things being as they are, the turkeys averaged out as follows:  8 lb/hen, 12 lb/tom.  I sold them at $8/lb.  None of this takes into account the cost of the poults, getting up at 4 am to drive into Steamboat to fetch them; the cost of the heat lamps and trough for 2 weeks; the cost of the 10' x 10' coop they stayed in until big enough to reasonably fend off predators like hawks, owls, and foxes; the cost of feeding Ben, our giant livestock guardian dog (a year-round expense, don't forget!); supplies such as the feeders, waterers, syringes, electrolyte solution, specialized bird feeders (before I realized that 3 gallon buckets would do the trick just dandy); the tin needed to make the killing cone; time and effort involved in butchering, and so forth.

$8/lb was a steal of a deal, and barely covered our costs.  Even so, most of the hens butchered out at 8/lb, as mentioned.  A whopping $14/bird does not cover the amount of effort needed to raise these babies and take care of them; putting in the $10/poult fee, that leave $4/bird for watering, electricity, general labor, and butchering time and supplies.

In short, fuck that shit.  No one is gladly going to pay for the amount of time put into these birds (or any other animals on our wee farm); one woman who bought a T-day turkey this year described it as "decadent, but more than we should probably pay."  Another called me up on Thanksgiving Day, concerned about the pinfeathers present in the skin; this, after I had sent out an email stating that all the birds would be home-butchered.  I get her concern, I really do, but I have a hard time when someone tells me, "I don't think they're supposed to be like that."  Y'know what?  Come over and butcher for a day.  It's not the most pleasant of experiences, I won't lie, but you learn a fuckton of information, stuff that you might never learn otherwise.

This has been a really hard year, and I think I'm done with raising turkeys for anyone other than those folks who are willing to do/pitch in on the butchering.  I know what my time--and these birds--are worth, and if no one else agrees with that, then fuck 'em.  I'm happy to put everything in the deep freezer myself (and let's not talk about how much those cost to purchase, and run, nor the price for the saran wrap, butcher paper, and freezer tape needed to wrap those suckers).

Seriously.  I'm done with this.  I'm taking the year off turkeys next year, and anyone who wants a turkey from here on out will need some hands-on practice to understand the rates we charge.  If they don't want to pay that, fine, I'm done.

So. Fucking. Done.

I've been cleaning since, um, 9 am or so this morning.  The last couple of hours have involved me peeling, coring, and cutting apples with The Violator, via Darling Nikki.  I have something like 7 trays of apple slices drying, one crock-pot full of apple butter-to-be (amaretto, creme de cacoa, cinnamon, ginger, orange, and a wee bit of vanilla).

There are still a distressingly large amount of apples left in the box.  *SIGH*  Next, I think, will be an apple butter with cranberry, ginger, and Chinese 5-spice.  If the ginger-cranberry sauce is still good, of course.

You know what sucks?

Spilling half a bucket of water all over yourself in below-zero weather. While post-holing up to your knees in snow.  While it goes down your already-damp boots.

You know what really sucks?

Having all that happen at the beginning of chores, rather than the end.

>.<

However, it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing.  I'm just sayin'.

It's a gorgeous day today, bright and sunny, if a bit cold.  It's been overcast and snowy the last couple of days; indeed, our day started off that way.  When I went to take care of the turkeys, I left the coop door open, as I've done several times before.  Once again, the turkeys cautiously crept their way out, peeping and pecking at the snow.

I let them go, figuring they deserved a bit of early afternoon sun.  They weren't shivering or acting cold, so I let them creep around as I turned their bedding.  They started creeping further.  And a bit further.  Still not far, mind you, but further than they've been.

The trouble came when it was time for me to herd them back to their coop and go on to my next chore.

We've gotten quite a bit of snow.  A lot of it has packed down, but a 25-lb turkey weighs a lot less than a 165-lb woman.  I kept breaking through to my knees, and the snowshoes were in the garage.  Grumbling, I thrashed my way over to where Ben has packed down snow along one of his trails. (150-lb dog being a lot closer in weight to me than a turkey.)  I made my way up the hill, figuring that once I got around them, the turkeys would make for the safety and security of their coop.

I was wrong.

Nope, the turkeys were more interested in outpacing me, the tom (Crooked Toe) flapping his massive wings to make way in the snow.  I'd grabbed a lightweight lawn rake to head them off with, hoping they'd head back down the hill.

Nothing doing.

Finally, I resorted to grunting my way up past the turkeys, planting my butt on the snow, and using wide-spread legs to corral the turkeys.  I scooted down, bit by bit, and had to wrap one arm around Crooked Toe (who was emphatically not interested in any of this, and could he please go hang out in the trees) to keep him from bashing me in the face with his wings.  The hen, Lavender, kind of got a little run-over as I held her massive partner with one arm and tried to nudge her along before me.

This worked, albeit smoothly, until I got a few feet from the coop.  At that point, my backside took a sudden dip into the snow--not far, only a few inches--and I was unable to get any real gravity purchase.  Ever tried to gently throw a live turkey somewhere?  It's more difficult than it sounds.

Somehow, I managed to get them back to the little landing of packed snow in front of the coop and herd them in.  I'm glad I do my winter chores in snow pants, that's all I'm gonna say.

The snow has now reached the point where the wether can jump out of the pen, via the top of the trash can used to hold sweet feed.

This does not spell Good Things.  Particularly since Ben sleeps in the hay shed, and the open dutch-door bottom means that while he can get in and out, so can the goats.

*sigh*  I really don't want to be dealing with this right now.

Tuesday was Greg's first day off in . . . well, I don't know how long, but at least a month.  I'd talked with him about dealing with all the individual water bowls for the rabbits was becoming a horrific chore (frozen solid, and we have no hot water with which to warm them).  We knew that we needed to drastically reduce our livestock inventory, so he took it upon himself to do the killing and butchering.  He managed to get three rabbits done--the hard part, as I knew it would be, was the actual killing.  The first and third, apparently, did not want to go so gentle into that good night.

He skinned them, removed heads and feet, and parted out most of the internal organs.  Greg did ask that I go through the remaining gut bucket and harvest whatever other organs I wanted, but I was too whupped that night to deal with it.  I've been putting it off for the last few days, but even with our garage as cold as it is, leaving organs to sit is not the best of ideas.

I bagged the pelts, tossed three of the feet into Ben's dish with his breakfast, and brought the two covered bowls up into the kitchen to sort.

The first bowl, of course, was the "keeper" bowl.  Three rabbit heads, along with some livers and assorted bits, stared back at me out of the bowl.  One of the heads still had its eyes open and mouth parted slightly, showing the front teeth.  The rich smell of blood hit me, strong and earthy, and I tried to breathe through my mouth.

I grabbed the second bowl, the gut bucket.  Barehanded, I sorted through with kitchen shears and trimmed gall bladders and excess fat (rabbits keep their fat around their internal organs, rather than in the muscle tissue; there is no "marbling" when it comes to rabbits).  Formed pellets in the lower guts were visible.  A snip through the organ wall confirmed the identity of the stomach.  The smell of feces combined with the blood smell as I combed through, removing hearts and/or kidneys.  Even with my strong bio background, I didn't look closely enough to identify either, nor the lungs and trachea.

I thought about taking a picture of the "save" bowl, but figured that most people would be a bit oogy about the heads.  I do find it astounding how much essence is reduced, though, so I took a slightly more obscure photo of the results.  The bag on the left is the heads (feet to be added shortly); the right-hand ziplock is the valuable internal organs.  The discarded guts I didn't figure anyone would want to see.

I need to leave soon to see a client.  Although I've washed up, I can smell the faintest hint of blood on my hands.  I doubt anyone else will notice, but I will know.

Turns out, of the three rabbits left in the double-decker cage, one was a female.

I was greeted this morning by the sight of a bunch of rabbit fur and several dead wee ones.  They were good-sized, but cold and stiff.  Unfortunately, mother rabbits don't sit on their young like hens.

She'd plucked a good-sized bald patch on one of her hindquarters.  I'm temped to keep her, because I know she'll at least be a prolific breeder.

So sorry, mamacita. :(

I have decided that this should be our business motto.

Unfortunately, the goats seem to agree.

I still have three goats awaiting their final home in the freezer, along with two turkeys and seven or so rabbits.  Nary a word has been heard from Uncle Mark. *sigh*

The goats are all in the lower pen, as the heads, feet, entrails, and various other kibbles 'n' bits have been covered by the snow in the upper pen.  Over the last several weeks, the gate has gotten further . . . and further . . . and further away from the linking post.

Yesterday afternoon, it seems that that distance finally reached critical mass.  I came home to find the goats climbing up the hill behind my parked car.  There was much yelling.  There was much clambering around whilst wearing my work uniform from the fancy-schmancy spa.  (*sigh*)  There was, unsurprisingly, a fair amount of swearing. 

Yet!  I managed to get them all corralled back in the pen, closed it and blocked off the opening with an elaborate spider's web of chain, rubber bungee cord, and baling twine (don't laugh!  MacGuyver would wet himself to get this shit when he needed it!).

. . . a spider's web that failed within 30 seconds of being confronted by an inquisitive, cabin-fevered goat.*

*facepalm*

So, yeah.  This morning involved a garden shovel, some yelling, and a small amount of swearing.

Letting the goats run around would be less of an issue if it weren't for Ben.  Ben, although he is an Outdoor Dog, needs a little shelter, especially on those -20 nights.  There were Plans to build him a dog house, but no time or money for supplies. 

A week or so ago, I realized that if I opened the bottom part of the Dutch door to the hay shed, Ben could make his way in there and sleep!  Rather than a small hole dug in the side of the ground, he could have a shed to himself, partially insulated with hay bales and with loose hay for him to make a bed upon.

Yay!  A winning solution for all, right?

Well . . . the goats know where their food comes from.  Free-roaming goats means, in very short order, a hay shed eviscerated and torn to shit.

*sigh*  Cue lots more work with the shovel this morning.  At least the gate shuts now, and that they waited until I had enough Cope to deal with them.

_________________________________________________________________

* Want to know what a cabin-feverish goat looks like?  In this case, literally bouncing off the walls.  Plus, the goat in question would put his front feet up on the wall, stand on his hind legs, and do a sort of backbend until he was looking at you upside down.  He'd eyeball you with one eye, then the other, then both.  And let's just say that rectangular goat pupils are creepy enough without the goat attempting mind control.

Saw my first fox today in ages.  Ben has apparently been doing a good job at keeping them away, but it always delights me to see that rusty red ghosting over the snow.