The Chicken Equivalent
The broiler’s version of the steer’s CAFO is the factory-like warehouse in which birds have less than half a square foot of space in which to live their lives. According to the Humane Society of the United States’ Report: The Welfare of Animals in the Broiler Chicken Industry, “Stocking density, the number of birds per unit of floor space, indicates the level at which the animals are crowded together in a grower house. For a chicken nearing market weight (5 pounds or 2.27 kg), the average industry stocking density is slightly larger than the area of a single sheet of letter-sized paper, 97.3–118.1 inches squared (628–762 cm squared) per bird.”
The broilers in this production model have also been genetically bred for rapid growth and large breasts (we eaters choose white meat over dark meat) with a fast feed-to-growth conversion (six weeks to slaughter), and any natural activity could slow production growth and schedules. Many birds die due to overcrowding, disease, overheating, and a range of health issues — thanks to heavy body size relative to skeletal structure and internal organs that cannot support life as these animals know it.
Scoring the Broilers
The poultry industry as a whole is one of the most difficult areas of livestock welfare to regulate, according to Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human, Humane Livestock Handling, and other books. For producers, the more densely packed the birds are, especially with laying hens, the more economical it is to raise them. Dr. Grandin gives “market-ready broilers” one of three scores:
1: Not able to walk 10 paces
2: Able to walk 10 paces crooked and lame
3: Able to walk 10 paces normally
Commodity chicken — chicken that is raised in a thoroughly vertically integrated economic model from egg-to-chick-to-feed-to-farmer-to-slaughter-to-marketing-to-product — is at an industrial-strength scale that very purposefully reduces the animal to a cog, a protein unit, in the assembly line, and a sadly efficient one at that. According to the National Chicken Council, which represents the broiler industry in Washington, DC:
“In the 1930s, the hatching of broiler chicks was spread among some 11,000 independent facilities with an average capacity of 24,000 eggs. By 2001, the number of hatcheries had declined by 97 percent — to only 323 — but with an average incubator capacity of 2.7 million eggs.”
Vertical integration at this scale has the potential to reduce the farmer and the workers in slaughter and processing plants to just another variable.
Witnessing and Reporting
An entire genre of books has emerged focusing on this destructive system. In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a fictionalized muckraking of Chicago’s stockyards and meatpacking lines, which Henry Ford studied to hone his revolutionary method of assembly-line car manufacturing. The book inspired others far and wide to decry the indecencies occurring in these difficult, marginalized, shielded places where we are told, “Don’t look. We’ll take care of it so you don’t have to.” Recent tapings of inhumane treatment of animals, and drives to make video recordings inside slaughterhouses illegal, show how divisive, dangerous, and empowering, depending on which side you’re on, witness can be.
Many books, websites, and movie documentaries have chronicled the rise of CAFOs and their destructive forces, disease- and pollution-spreading outcomes, and impacts on people, animals, the environment, and food. That story is beyond the scope of this book, but you can find information at your library, movie theater, or independent bookseller — no matter from what angle you approach the meat bird. Whether you want to learn about the true costs of cheap food, industrial agriculture, backyard farming, the environment, food justice, history, the kitchen, or federal policy and the Farm Bill, there is a book, a film, a website to delight, enrage, enlighten, and edify — to spur your action, from flint to spark to fire.
Chapter 3
Nuts, Bolts, and Values
What scale is appropriate? It depends on what we are trying to do.
— E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
This chapter focuses on setting up the slaughtering unit, including the why and some of the how. First, however, an introduction to our system, which is serving as a model.
The Mobile Poultry Processing Trailer (MPPT) is the sum collection of equipment needed to humanely slaughter and process poultry on-farm. (For the complete list, see What You Will Need, starting on page 42.) For readers’ ease, it will also be referred to in this book as a mobile slaughterhouse.
The Chicken Crew consists of private contractors, hired by the farmer to do the work of the MPPT and trained by Island Grown Initiative (IGI; see page 1). The manager is paid a stipend by IGI to manage, maintain, and schedule the unit with farmers and interface with regulatory agents.
This MPPT was not a privately developed, owned, and operated piece of equipment, and it was not funded by any government agency. Area individuals and businesses made private donations to IGI to build, train the Crew, and implement the unit for the farming community. Once the MPPT was in practice, IGI did receive grant money for educational support from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Resource and Education program, part of a larger USDA initiative. (See chapter 2.)
Community Processing Days
To lower the cost of processing, say, 25 custom-killed birds, consider organizing a community processing day. Backyard growers come together to a neutral location (not on an active farm) to work with the Chicken Crew to have their birds humanely slaughtered and processed in sequence, flock by flock. The IGI piloted this on the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society’s land where no active animal farming was taking place. Author Michael Pollan even dropped by to see what was going on. (See Resources.)
A couple of suggestions: Begin by talking with your local board of health. Seek out your extension agent and/or your department of agriculture for biosecurity issues and flock inspections. Take time to organize and sort out logistics. The community day would be terrific as a regularly scheduled offering.
Coming to Terms: A Vocabulary of Values
IGI’s mobile poultry processing trailer is a modular, size-appropriate, accessible, affordable, clean, safe, fair-wage, permitted, humane slaughter and processing option for people who raise poultry for sale. Let’s break down all of those descriptors.
Mobile. The trailer moves from place to place. Antonym: brick-and-mortar facility — a building.
Modular. Each piece of equipment stands alone, independent of the others and unattached to the trailer. The trailer is the base on which everything is affixed for transport. It is not designed nor is it meant to be used as a subsurface like a floor, for the Crew to work on.
Size-appropriate. In the spirit of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (see page 39), this is a technology that takes people into account and reflects the context while fulfilling the need. (It’s true. Small really is beautiful.)
Accessible. The trailer is available to the community that needs it: the farmers and the backyard growers. This will mean different things to these different groups depending on scale, such as processing 3,000 chickens raised to sell in a season versus a family’s flock of 25 for the freezer.
Affordable. The unit is affordable to build and maintain, and affordable for farmers to rent.
Safe. The site of the MPPT must be safe for the people (Crew, farmers, visitors), the animals, the environment, and the food itself.
Permitted. Without clearance by the regulatory agency in your state you are limited in how, where, and in what form (whole bird or parts) chicken can be sold. If it’s not permitted, and you sell it, you’re flying under the radar, which isn’t good for anyone or any food system. In fact, it detracts from and damages small food systems — something Big Ag might love. Do it right even if your state doesn’t yet know how to permit it, as was the case in Massachusetts. Work transparently within the system to change it. Smart, size-appropriate regulations are part of a safe and resilient food system and they are what we need to work toward in order
to change our current food system.
Clean. This quality has a double meaning covering both equipment and food. Clean equipment and impeccable hygiene standards (see chapter 7) make for clean, as in safe, food. In the local-food vernacular, though, clean food is food that’s been raised without the additives or antibiotics given to commodity factory-farmed chicken. Generally speaking, clean food is the opposite of commodity and/or processed food.
Fair wage. A fair wage is a paid wage commensurate with the work. The work of the Crew is skilled labor, not unskilled.
Humane. The program must meet the highest standards of animal handling and welfare and provide the quickest death and least suffering to every animal. Humane keeps us human.
Slaughter. Slaughter is killing an animal for food. Please don’t diminish this act with euphemisms. Slaughtering is not a harvest or a collection. Use the word. Butchering is what happens to the carcass, the raw meat. Butchery should never happen to a live animal.
Processing. After the slaughter comes the processing. This is a transformative sequence of events starting after the death of the animal that turns it into raw food.
Map Your Own Island
You can picture your own area as an island in which you try to supply as many food needs as possible. What area will you delineate as your community? Consider the current resources, including farmers, restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets, and food advocacy groups.
How far away or how close to home do you want to operate your MPPT? One suggestion: School systems may be your guide. Or factor in the price of gasoline. Once you spreadsheet-out the costs and distances to travel to farms, and how many birds the MPPT needs to work with, it will become apparent what geographical area you can effectively and financially service.
If there’s a community that wants to use the trailer but is too far away, perhaps they would be better served by starting their own program. Give them a copy of this book!
A map can help you envision your own food community. Where are the farms raising chickens (and if they aren’t, why not)? Where do they slaughter their birds? How are the health boards organized — by town, county, or state? What is the market — restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets? Are there food advocacy groups in the area?
Small Really Is Beautiful
It was a summer day in 2010 when Walter Robb, the co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, made it out to see what the fuss over the MPPT was all about. We met at Richard Andre’s Cleveland Farm in West Tisbury where the Crew was in the process of . . . the process.
Jefferson Munroe was on kill duty. Calmly holding each bird tucked under his arm, he extended the neck, slit its throat, placed the bird in the cone, held it through its death throes, and moved on to the next. Blood coagulated into the color of stale pudding on the stainless steel. The routine spraying of cooking oil over and in the cones prior to the slaughtering would make the cleanup easy at the end of the day.
One at a time, the birds went from hands to cone to scalder.
One Small Book
So dog-eared, underlined, starred, checkmarked, and coffee-stained was my library copy of Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher that I had to send the West Tisbury Free Library a clean new book to replace it. Its spine was even broken, most notably where the chapter titled “The Proper Use of Land” opened to this passage:
The fundamental ‘principle’ of modern industry, on the other hand, is that it deals with man-devised processes which work reliably only when applied to man-devised, non-living materials. The ideal of industry is the elimination of living substances. Man-made materials are preferable to nature materials, because we can make them to measure and apply perfect quality control. Man-made machines work more reliably and more predictably than do such living substance as men. The ideal of industry is to eliminate the living factor, even including the human factor, and to turn the productive process over to machines. As Alfred North Whitehead defined life as ‘an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe,’ so we may define modern industry as ‘an offensive against the unpredictability, unpunctuality, general waywardness and cussedness of living nature, including man.’
In other words, there can be no doubt that the fundamental ‘principles’ of agriculture and of industry, far from being compatible with each other, are in opposition.
Emerging wet they next went into the plucker. Walter and I stood by and out of the way, walking around and talking, as did some of Richard’s free-range laying hens.
Walter is a thoughtful guy with the boyish good looks of Opie from Mayberry. He took it all in and talked with the Crew as the pile of feathers grew slowly into wet white dunes beneath the plucker. Only the intermittent rasp of the knife sharpener broke the natural calm that permeated the work of the day. The Crew and Walter took a quick break to have their picture taken out from under the tents and returned to the jobs at hand after turning up WVVY-FM on the radio.
“Appropriate technology,” Walter said to me. “You’ve read Schumacher, haven’t you? Small Is Beautiful?” No, I hadn’t, although the title rang a bell. But once I got my hands on the library’s copy, little lights went on in my head. Then I understood what Walter was talking about, how the MPPT connects land to people to animals to economics. How this pint-sized slaughterhouse on wheels stands in shining opposition to the agricultural industrialization of meat and poultry. And that is why I had to get the library a new copy.
Mobile Units across the Continent
Many mobile and humane slaughter and processing systems are springing up around North America. Here are a few examples. For a more complete list including four-legged, as well as updates on slaughter programs, discussions about the nitty gritty, and informative webinars regarding mobile slaughter units, check out the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network (see Resources).
Asking Why
In terms of equipment requirements from your state, remember that no one really knows how to sign off on mobile units. They remain outside of the neat and tidy box of regulations. They make people nervous.
Here’s one lesson we learned from looking at the few programs that exist across the country. When the regulators see your mobile unit and then tell you to go back to the drawing room to recast the equipment or the layout in some way, costing you more money, ask them politely, “Why?” How will their suggestion or new requirement, this new hoop you have to jump through, make the mobile slaughterhouse any better? It is just a pile of stainless steel and PVC piping, after all. It will be only as good, safe, or clean as the people running it make it.
Asking why makes everyone stop, listen, and discuss. Asking why may save your program thousands of dollars that would otherwise be ill-spent on refurbishments that really won’t change the overall outcome of a mobile slaughterhouse’s functionality or even its ability to become permitted. Only people can do that. Come together over the why to make it work for everyone.
Kentucky
One of the first mobile slaughterhouses was built in Kentucky in 2001, four years after its inception in 1997, in a collaboration among Heifer International, Kentucky State University, and Partners for Family Farms (a nonprofit). It is also state-approved for aquaculture — caviar, paddle fish, and prawns. Since 2005 the MPU has operated smoothly and is considered a model for other communities, employing a docking station strategy. The farmers themselves are trained every two years to use it. The cost to plan and build was $70,000. SARE provided $15,000 in seed money, and the balance was raised by Partners for Family Farms and others. The MPU coordinator is an employee of Kentucky State University. All other operating expenses are covered by user fees.
Massachusetts
There are two other mobile units in Massachusetts: one open-air, one enclosed. Funded primarily by government dollars, they are projects of the New England Small Farm Institute (NESFI) and New Entry Sustainable Farming. The farmer/producer is trained to use the unit and pays the state permit fee to become a licensed processor. This is in contrast to IGI’s mo
del: training a separate Crew and holding an umbrella permit for all commercial farmers/producers. NESFI and New Entry contributed greatly to negotiating DPH requirements in the state.
Montana
“Not in my county,” a state regulator reportedly said about mobile slaughter. The barriers the Montana Poultry Growers Co-op faced seem mostly due to wildly disparate interpretations of the regulations from county to county. And due to the distances the unit had to travel, the initial equipment took a beating from the road and weather. Though the farmer training manual was signed off on by regulators, the farmers themselves did not always know or comply with requisite training, basic cleaning of equipment, and/or keeping their local regulators informed. Hence some regulators were caught off guard.
Takeaway: start early to educate people and pave the way for the mobile slaughterhouse. They’re doing it. Go Montana Poultry Growers Co-op!
Vermont
In 2008 the Vermont Legislature and the Castanea Foundation spent $93,000 for an enclosed unit to be operated by the state of Vermont so farmers could do on-farm processing of their poultry under state inspection. The original operator of the MPPU decided to pass on renewing his lease. The MPPU went to auction in January of 2012 and was sold to a local farm operation in Vermont for $61,000.
The Mobile Poultry Slaughterhouse Page 5
