Pluckers, Freezers, Valentine's...

Amy’s parents came up to the farm last weekend. We upgraded to a bigger plucker that runs off a 220 instead of a 110 outlet, so Amy’s dad spent Saturday running conduit and pulling wires to get the new plucker ready to go. We got a bigger scalder a couple years back. Now we finally got the bigger plucker to match it. Over the years, our on-farm processing crew has grown in number and in efficiency. I’m typically on the killing, scalding, and plucking end of the process. A couple years ago, the evisceraters were telling me to slow down due to their falling behind. Last year, on the other hand, they were often waiting on chickens telling me to pick up the pace. I couldn’t go any faster. The plucker was the bottleneck. With the bigger plucker, we’re hoping to harvest an additional 25 birds per hour or so this season. 

I took a load of cows to the processor on Monday. We try to take full loads when we go to make the most of our time and fuel. Instead of our usual 8 cows and 8 hogs, with no hogs ready to harvest, our processor let us bring 4 more cows to fill up the load. With our beef inventory getting low, it was a good month to take more beef as we are again out of ground beef and other beef cuts. 

Amy and I spent a lot of time in and out of the freezers this week. A lot. With no hogs to harvest for the next few months, we filled the next few months of pork shares and then sorted the remaining inventory to see what all we have available to sell. We filled orders for this month’s deliveries and tried to get Amy’s coolers ready for the Abingdon market tomorrow. 

Selling beef, pork, and chicken locally requires us to have a lot of freezer space. Not only are these freezers costly to invest in, but they are becoming increasingly costly to keep running. With the power company’s increase in rates, our power bill at the barn to just keep our freezers and lights on was almost $1000 last month. I’m afraid to think of what it’ll be in the hot summer months ahead. Again, these costs must be factored into our pricing in order to keep the lights and freezers on. 

There is some forgeable stockpiled grass left for the cows but continually less and less. Which means I’m feeding them hay more and more. 

With the kids staying the night at my parents’ house last night, Amy and I turned yesterday’s meat delivery into a date. The time together was good for both of us. On Wednesday we had a “fancy” Valentine’s Day dinner at home with the kids, feasting on our family favorite “Mississippi Pot Roast”,  chicken broth rice, and veggies. The kids enjoyed getting dressed up and lighting candles at the table to make this meal special. 

Still listening to Wendell Berry short stories. A couple quotes from “A Jonquil for Mary Penn”

“She and Elton simply drove down to Hargrave one late October night, awakened a preacher and got married. Hoping that their marriage would be accepted as an accomplished fact, they were wrong. It was not acceptable, and it was never going to be. She no longer belonged in that house, her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that family. To them, it would be as if she never lived.”

“He worked for wages to buy groceries, but the times were hard and he could not always find work. Sometimes their meals consisted of biscuits and a gravy made of lard and flour, and yet they were often happy. Often the world afforded them something to laugh about. Elton stayed alert for anything that was funny and brought the stories home.”

“He did not want to be bested by anybody. One thing Mary would never have to do was wonder which way he was. She knew he would rather die than be beaten. It was maybe not the best way to be, she thought, but it was the way he was and she loved him. It was both a trouble and a comfort to her to know that he would always require the most of himself. And he was beautiful, the way he moved in his work. It stirred her. She could feel ambition constantly pressing in him. He could do more than he had done, and he was always looking for the way.”

“At his best, Elton was a man in love, with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times, she lived in his love as in a spacious house. Walter Cotton had always spoke of Mary as Elton’s better half…That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times, she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him, and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half. When had their ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole.”

Have a good week.

Will