The Mobile Poultry Slaughterhouse Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to all creatures great and small, and especially feathered.

  Cast of Characters

  Here are the key people who played pivotal roles in establishing our mobile poultry-processing trailer. I'll refer to them often in this book. They are listed alphabetically by last name.

  Richard Andre: Farmer/owner, Cleveland Farm, West Tisbury, Mass.; Poultry/Meat Coordinator for Island Grown Initiative (IGI)

  Steve Bernier: Owner, Cronig’s Market, Vineyard Haven, Mass., where Permit #417 locally grown and humanely slaughtered chickens were first sold to the general public

  Robert Booz: Chef, hunter, food writer, and farm-food activist

  Gordon Hamersley: Chef/owner, Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston’s South End; cookbook author

  Marina Lent: Chilmark, Mass., Board of Health agent

  Jim McLaughlin: Owner, Cornerstone Farm, Norwich, New York; consultant, processing equipment distributor

  Jefferson Munroe: Poultry farmer, The GOOD Farm, Tisbury, Mass.; head of IGI’s first Chicken Crew

  Frequently Used Acronyms

  BOH: Board of Health

  CAFO: Confined animal feeding operation

  IGI: Island Grown Initiative

  MPPT, MPPU: Mobile poultry-processing trailer or unit

  USDA: United States Department of Agriculture

  Contents

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Foreword

  Preface

  Thank You

  Introduction

  1: Start Here, Get Organized

  2: Money In and Money Out

  3: Nuts, Bolts, and Values

  4: Training the Chicken Crew

  5: Education, Marketing, and Outreach

  6: The Path to a Permit

  7: The Big Day Of

  8: Now Cook Up That Lovely Bird

  Appendix

  Resources

  Other Storey Titles You Will Enjoy

  Copyright

  Share Your Experience!

  I got chickens in my front yard, what they do is scratch and peck.

  Come supper time I’ll go out there gonna find me one and wring its neck.

  It ain’t meanness ya’ll it’s just hungry’s what I am.

  There ain’t nothin’ in this world better than fried chicken yes ma’am.

  Chorus to “Chickens,” as sung by Hayes Carll. Written by Ray Wylie Hubbard and Hayes Carll. Used by permission

  Foreword

  by Temple Grandin

  I get asked all the time: How can you care about animals when you are a designer of slaughterhouses? People forget that in nature, every living thing eventually dies. That is the cycle of life. Many people today are totally separated from the natural world, and don’t know it is harsh as well as beautiful. They visit national parks to see the beauty and do not experience the harsh reality of a predator killing its prey. Death in a well-run slaughter plant is much kinder than death in the wild. In the HBO movie about my life there is this line: “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.”

  The animals that we raise for food deserve to have a life worth living. This is the definition of animal welfare by Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) in England, and I completely agree with it. Our cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens would never have been born if we had not raised them. It is our responsibility to give them a good life and a quick, low-stress death.

  I had the opportunity to travel with Ali Berlow to a small beef plant that was doing everything right. I worked with them to make a few modifications on their chute to provide a nonslip floor, which may be a minor issue for people, but for cattle, it is essential. Cattle panic when they slip. Details that people fail to notice are important for animals. The cattle remained peaceful and calm, and that is the way slaughter should be done.

  Today many people in urban areas want to get back in touch with where their food comes from, and this desire to reconnect with what we eat drives many local and sustainable agriculture programs. I recently visited a Mother Earth News Fair where people could learn how to raise animals, grow crops and vegetable gardens, and process meat. I am amazed at how many people attend this type of conference.

  Ali has been working to develop sustainable local poultry programs where neighbors can process their own chickens. Her book on mobile poultry slaughter facilities provides step-by-step instructions on how to start and run a local small-scale chicken-processing enterprise. Her emphasis on getting a community of producers to work together is key to success.

  Preface

  I am a housewife. I am not a farmer. I have never killed a chicken, much less gutted one, nor do I intend ever to do so. However, I cook meat and I eat it, so therefore I am complicit in this cycle of life, death, and dinner.

  Slaughter happens. This practical guide is about convictions and about how to make a delicate situation better. At least, that’s my perspective in this book, The Mobile Poultry Slaughterhouse.

  Cookbook for the Journey

  What you have in your hands is like a cookbook: a guide and a how-to based on one community’s food system and its experiences as they relate to poultry. Learning about food and what you can do about it in the face of industrial-strength barriers is part of the journey. This book is not a blueprint, but it does provide practical, helpful information about how to launch a poultry program — the keystone of which is a humane mobile slaughter option, and the goal of which is to foster a latent local food, the fabulous farmyard chicken.

  Cookbooks are filled with short stories and happy endings. Recipes are interpretations. Dream big, act small, every day.

  Slaughter is such a disturbing topic of conversation that many people will actually cover their ears when you bring it up. If you ever want to clear a cocktail party or silence the stranger in the airplane seat next to you, tell them you build slaughterhouses. That’ll quiet them.

  The more clear and grounded you are about why humane and accessible slaughter is so important to you, the more effective an advocate you will be. Be gentle with the uninitiated, though. They just want to eat in peace like the rest of us.

  In my view it’s time to take back the kitchen, starting with good, clean, fair food from the source. Food you can look in the eye and not betray the incalculable, extraordinary relationships between man and animal.

  Look up from looking away and look around instead. Be smart. Start small, one step at a time. One chicken at a time. Use this book as you would a cookbook with recipes, stories, and happy endings, and build a mobile slaughterhouse for your own kitchen, for your own community. Build it with foundations of humanity and the welfare of the animals that nourish us. Build it from the strengths of respect and dignity, with persistence. Build with it conviction. Build it because we’ve got to start somewhere. The home kitchen is a powerful, creative, inviting, and inventive place. Build it because complacency is no place to cook from.

  Stand and face the stove. Then turn around and get going. Cook like you mean it. Make change happen.

  thank you

  Temple Grandin, for inspiration and a guiding light.

  Farmers: What you do fascinates and sustains me.

  Scott Soares, for not hanging up on me on that first phone call.

  Jim and Peg McLaughlin, bless your adventurous, generous souls.

  Richard Andre, Jefferson Munroe, you are the two best partners-in-crime this girl from Wisconsin could’ve wished for. May your knives be ever razor-sharp.

  Thank you, Michael Pollan, for writing the book that started it all for me, and the Vineyard community for working together to get it done.

  Holly Gleason, Walter Robb, Binky Urba
n, Maria Moreira, Fae Kontje-Gibbs, and Kathie Olsen for believing, making dreams come true, and having my back.

  Robert Booz and Gordon Hamersley for your soulful cooking.

  Lauren Dreier for creating artfully, Viki Merrick for the craft of writing, and Steve Earle for this truth: “Art is war.”

  To my husband, Sam Berlow, and our children, Max and Elijah, who are humane in all things slaughter and roast chicken now: You are the loves of my life.

  Hey look, Mom and Paul, I wrote a book! Love, your forever daughter and saucy wench, Alice

  Introduction

  “I’ll meet you at the boat,” I said to Jim.

  The day had finally arrived. Jim McLaughlin of Cornerstone Farm Ventures in New York was coming to Martha’s Vineyard to deliver Island Grown Initiative’s mobile poultry processing trailer (MPPT). It had taken almost two years to reach this point.

  “What color is your truck?” I asked.

  “Look for the red PT Cruiser,” he said, in a deep voice that came from somewhere near the center of the earth. Thrown off balance, I replied, “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, really,” he said. “A red PT Cruiser. Don’t you know that ‘PT’ stands for ‘poultry trailer’?”

  And damned if it didn’t. On July 11, 2007, Jim and his wife, Peg, rolled off the ferry into the heady July night air of Vineyard Haven — with the MPPT in tow. “The dock workers all thought it makes cotton candy,” he said, and we smiled in icebreaking laughter that got me breathing again.

  How and Why We Began

  The goal of Island Grown Initiative (IGI), a nonprofit organization, is to help create and support a more sustainable agricultural system on Martha’s Vineyard. Local food includes not only crops — tomatoes, greens, asparagus — but also meat from local animals. Yet the slaughter options available to island farmers had formidable challenges. IGI envisioned a solution that would allow the animals to meet their destiny in the most humane way possible and on the land on which they lived.

  From its inception in 2005, IGI asked Vineyard farmers a lot of questions, listened, sorted through the answers, raised money, and built community support for an on-island, size-appropriate, humane slaughter solution that would include both the backyard growers and the full-on farmers who want to raise local poultry.

  Seeking Creative Solutions and Strategies

  Vineyard farmers are certainly not alone in facing such obstacles; it is just that on an actual island the challenges are crystal clear. But in fact, there is an abyss within the agricultural infrastructure in our country: the virtual absence of accessible slaughterhouses for poultry. In rural communities across America, small family farmers who are still raising animals for commercial sale face onerous and complex barriers. Safe, clean, affordable, fair-wage, humane, USDA- or state-permitted poultry slaughter and processing facilities are few and far between. Local, state, and federal regulations and permit fees do not reflect the reality of diversified farms and remain “one-size-fits-all” — and that size is super-big. They are not scaled appropriately, nor do they reflect the multispecies specialty meats and diversified farming strategies that are used by many small family farmers.

  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined from about 1,200 in 1992 to about 800 in 2008, and four companies controlled 58.5 percent of the market by 2007. Meanwhile, the number of small farmers increased by 108,000 between 2005 and 2010. Following the trend of conventional agriculture, the slaughterhouse business has become consolidated and industrial-size-strength, leaving the very small-scale farmer out of luck. Accessible, small-scale, humane, USDA-inspected brick and mortar slaughter and processing plants have all but gone extinct.

  As journalist Michael Pollan and others have observed, the agricultural economy has the shape of an hourglass, and this is especially true on the local level. On top are the thousands of small farmers producing meat and poultry, or wanting to. On the bottom are the multitudes of consumers eager to eat local meat and poultry. In the middle is the bottleneck: the very few accessible slaughterhouses due to corporate consolidation.

  This lack of good and accessible processing capability stifles the small family farmer who wants to raise livestock. Building a slaughter facility is prohibitively expensive without enough animals to justify and sustain it economically. But with the right support for small-is-beautiful, size-appropriate technology — a few dedicated people, some money, and a leap of faith — this can change.

  Because there is so much uncharted territory in the world of mobile slaughter and processing, nothing is impossible if it’s done well. It’s not that anyone is strongly opposed to safe, humane, on-farm slaughter and processing that creates jobs and a good clean product for sale. It’s that no one knows quite yet how to say, “Just do it.”

  The High-Wire Act: Juggling Multiple Stakeholders

  When Jim McLaughlin landed on Martha’s Vineyard in that red PT Cruiser with the MPPT in tow, island farmers were raising about 200 birds. Five years later some 20,000 broilers have been raised, humanely slaughtered, and sold, resulting in more dollars circulating locally. Today, local farmers are selling their chicken. Six part-time jobs are firmly in place and slaughter/processing fees that would’ve been spent off-island stayed instead in our community. In the 2012 poultry season alone, approximately 9,000 broilers were raised. This is an estimated $180,000 gross revenue (averaging a $20 price per bird) that went to farmers for the sale of poultry, minus $40,000 that was paid out to the Crew.

  Managing the mini-mobile-slaughterhouse is a high-wire balancing act of spinning china plates atop tall skinny poles. It involves the animals, the farmers, the Chicken Crew, the eaters, and all the local, state, and federal agencies who in the end really don’t want any of those plates to come crashing down. With strategic perseverance, those of us who wanted to bring a humane slaughtering operation to Martha’s Vineyard worked with both the community and government bureaucracies to turn poultry into an economically viable option for local farmers. And it worked. One humanely slaughtered bird at a time.

  A Good How-To Includes Righteous Whys

  Eating meat used to be an exceptional event — for a celebration or a feast — rather than an expected, routine, everyday occurrence. These days, for the most part, people don’t want to remember or deduce that their chicken sandwich or bite-sized nugget came from a living, breathing, feathered bird. And once you stop wondering, wanting to know or be reminded about the live animal, it’s much easier for the cruelties of factory-farmed poultry to continue.

  “Once you know, you can’t not know,” my dearest friend Holly likes to remind me. And that can result in an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, a feeling that the problems are too vast and that one person is too inconsequential to do anything about it. You don’t want to know because if you did, you’d have to face the truth. One viewing of the movie Food, Inc. or Fast Food Nation (see Resources) will turn most people off to what they’ve already turned away from.

  Even if you don’t eat meat, slaughter is a part of life. And now factory farms are part of life too. Industrial agriculture, however, is a path to collapse. There are more sustainable, humane ways to raise animals and to feed people ethically, without wreaking such havoc on the environment.

  Personal Tipping Point

  “Ick,” my neighbor said, pointing at the whole chicken. “I don’t want to touch it.” The glaring lights of the supermarket reflected off the plastic-wrapped bird.

  “Ick?” I asked. “What’s ‘ick’?” My neighbor explained that she doesn’t want to be reminded that chicken was a chicken — that meat comes from an animal “with a head, eyes, and feathers and stuff.” Whole chickens make you recall that. She shuddered and reached instead for a package of boneless, skinless processed parts. “I like the breasts,” she said. “Besides, white meat hardly has any fat.” And flavor, I thought to myself, but didn’t dare say it. We clearly had different takes on the topic. But there was
no need to arm-wrestle food politics in front of the meat counter. Not that day, anyway.

  We’d bumped into each other for a reason. This was a wake-up call for me. Thinking about our encounter, I was reminded how removed as a culture and distant from our food we’ve become, and willingly choose to remain. And as a food writer/activist, I saw how far down my rabbit hole I live, while naively assuming that the rest of everyone is in there with me. I realized how acceptable, convenient, and even desirable it is — this most unnatural delusion that exists between animal, meat, cooking, and knowing.

  It’s not that my neighbor was stupid or even that uninformed. The food choices people make are complex and not for me to judge. Instead it was a real-time study in the systems that were put firmly into place under the Earl Butz school of agriculture: “Get big or get out.”

  Poultry farms were some of the first to grow into agribusinesses of today. Marketing and advertising trotted right alongside, encouraging us housewives not to worry over the fuss and muss of meat. Generations of cooks could look away as processed food made cooking real food a bother. It has now been nearly 60 years of forgetting — and 60 years of factory farming that raises livestock as vertically integrated protein widgets. This mechanized, assembly-line equation of cost, time, energy, and profit cares little for animals, people, or the environment.

  And my friend who said “Ick,” who didn’t want to touch, much less cook, a whole chicken, skin, bones and all: like the rest of us, she’s just doing the best she can.

  As I stood there, lulled by supermarket Muzak, fluorescent lighting, and aisle upon linoleum aisle of processed foods, I reached my own tipping point. I contemplated the array of flaccid, depressing, anonymous, boneless-skinless chicken parts — breasts, thighs, drumsticks, nuggets, and wings, wrapped in plastic and sitting on diapers and Styrofoam trays in the meat counter and frozen food section of the grocery store. How many individual birds are represented in one package, I wondered: two, four, six, or more? Was each leg from a different sentient being? And those “giblets included” — had they been repackaged separately, each organ individually, and then shoved back into the cavity of some other anonymous bird, as if they grew there in a plastic sack?