In Your Kitchen: Amy's CSA Chicken



So we'll use this as a first post in a new feature here on the Blog, called In Your Kitchen. I'd love to share your pics and/or recipes of the cool creative ways you use Rettland Farm products in your kitchens. Send em my way, and I'll put em up.

Our first entry comes from Amy.  Amy is one of our Chicken CSA members, and she sends me pictures occasionally of the dishes she's prepared with our products. 

Amy sent me this picture of last week's CSA share, which was pastured chicken halves.  Amy's preparation:  "Rosemary and garlic roasted on the chicken and when it cools slightly we will pour on some balsamic vinegar. Soooo delicious!! "

No doubt.

Thanks for sharing, Amy!

Chicken CSA, 2013

It's hard to believe, but we are exactly one week away from the first day-old chicks arriving on the farm, which signals the official kick off for the 2013 Chicken crop here at Rettland Farm.

One of many jobs that has to be done to prepare for the season is to roll out and fill up our CSA 2013. You might remember that CSA means "Chicken Subscription Arrangement" here at Rettland Farm. (For the full story of our CSA, check here.) We put the CSA idea together for the 2012 season, and had a nice number of brave souls who gave it a shot. I think I can say that it was an overwhelming success, and that it was a really great experience for both the members and for me.

After getting some feedback from last year's members, I've made a few minor changes for this year. Most notable will be that we will provide the chickens in different forms this year, instead of just a whole bird every week. This should provide a nice little element of suspense, as you pull open the CSA fridge door and see just what form your bird is in this week! 

One thing that DID NOT change is the price per share. We are offering the CSA shares for the same weekly cost as last year, and guaranteeing the same minimum weight. Thought you might like to know that...

So, without further delay, here's the nitty gritty for CSA 2013:

1. Why are we offering our chickens this way? I want to operate a CSA that provides fresh chickens for my members on a weekly basis. It ensures my members a supply of fresh food, and provides me with a stable, known quantity of products that I have to grow every week. I also think that this arrangement will strenghten relationships between farmer and eater, which is something that is important to me.

2. How does it work? Each "share" in the CSA will entitle the member to 1 pastured broiler chicken each week, usually unfrozen, and packaged in plastic bags. The bird may be whole, in parts, halved, or otherwise cut to provide variety in the share. The form every week will be at my discretion, and all shares will be the same.

3. What are the specifics on the chickens? This CSA will produce pastured broiler chickens, weighing approximately 4.0 lbs or more, but not less than 3.5 lbs. These chickens will typically be commercial white broiler chickens. The diet for the chickens, besides pasture, will contain whole grains (excluding corn), oilseeds, and vitamins and minerals. All processing of the chickens will occur on the farm, and be done by the farmer and/or farm employees.

4. When will the CSA begin? End? The CSA will provide fresh food to the members every week from early to mid-May, run for 30 weeks through the summer and end sometime in November.

5. Where is the pick up location? The member will pick up their share at the farm, located outside of Gettysburg, PA once per week, every Saturday from 12pm until 7pm. We are also in discussions to have a drop location in the Baltimore metro area, specifically in or near Hampden. If you are from the Baltimore area and are interested in this location, PLEASE let me know. We will need a minimum number of members to make this location work, so let me know EARLY if you are interested!

6. What is the cost? The cost for 1 share in the CSA for 2013, with the share being picked up at the farm will be $14 per week for a period of 30 weeks, for a total cost of $420. For the Baltimore location, the cost for one share in 2013 will be $16 per week, for 30 weeks, for a grand total of $480. (The extra cost is needed to cover the cost of refrigerated transportation). The total cost of the share will be paid by April 1, 2013, with a minimum 50% deposit due by March 1, 2013. If you are interested in the CSA, but will have trouble complying with this schedule, please contact me. We will consider all offers for alternative payments and payment schedules.

7. One share not enough? So your family eats more than one chicken a week, eh? OR, you are a planner and want to stock up on chickens for the winter while we are actively growing them in the summer? Good for you. Simply order as many shares as fits your needs. If that is TOO many chickens, there will be additional chickens available for purchase at retail prices when available.

8. Other benefits? Some CSAs do cool things like share recipes for harder to cook items. I'd like to teach people how to break down chickens into pieces, as some families prefer. Share tips for making stock (a must when you have access to fresh, flavorful whole chickens). Spend an hour with us on a harvesting day. Get a personalized tour of the chicken pastures. I'd be willing to do any or all of these things, if the interest was there. Anything to build a food community around our humble little chicken enterprise, and a sense of ownership for the members. What ideas do you have??

So what do you think?

Can you dig a fresh, premium, pastured chicken in your oven every week this summer?

Yeah, thought so.

So send me an email and get yourself on the list!

Poultry Processing, Rettland Farm Style

So tell me. What do you see here?

"Well", you say, "I see a U-Haul truck that rolled off the assembly line sometime back when Milli Vanilli was a really cool music act, ole Ron Reagan was riding off into the sunset, and Freddy Kreuger was scaring the hell out of a whole generation of pre-teens. Oh yeah, and the aforementioned truck also looks like someone spent a little quality time gettin' jiggy with a DeWalt sawzall..."

Um. Okay. Correct on all counts.

But dude. Let's take a look in the box, that's what really matters. Come on, walk around back here with me...



So, whaddya think is behind the door? An ultimate party wagon complete with big screens, leather recliners, and multiple beer meisters to be used for hardcore tailgating at PSU Football games this fall, you say? No. But a damn good idea though....(stroking chin thoughtfully...)

All right, all right, enough suspense. Let's take a look. That's it, roll up the door, and feast your eyes upon the interior...

Tah. Dah.

Welcome to the Rettland Farm Mobile Poultry Processing facility, or MPU for short. This is my solution to the problem of finding local, reliable, sanitary facilities to slaughter the poultry that is raised on small farms like mine.

I wanted to build a facility that met a variety of needs. First, I needed a place that matched or exceeded any food processing facility in cleanliness. I needed to be sure that the integrity of every chicken was as high when it came out of the facility as it was when it went in. So we needed washable floors, walls and ceilings. We needed bright lights so we could see what the heck we were doing. We needed REALLY hot water. We needed LOTS of stainless steel.

Second, I wanted a facility that could be used to educate the public in general, and my loyal customers in particular, about what went on behind the closed doors of a facility that turns live animals into food. I think it's highly unlikely that the public would ever be given that opportunity to "peak behind the curtain" at a large scale, commercial slaughterhouse, and I think that's unfortunate. For my operation, I wanted to literally throw open the door, and shed light on the whole process, from the kill to the chill. To welcome and even encourage the presence of those people who are the ultimate end users of my birds.

Lastly, I wanted this facility to be a resource for other small farms like me, who may otherwise decide that the rewards of selling amazing, wholesome poultry to people and their families just wasn't worth the hassle of getting it to them. I wanted them to be able to use this facility on their own farms, using their own labor and their own quality standards to process the food to which they affixed their names. Take the abattoir to the animal instead of the other way around, so the animals died where they were raised, and didn't spend their last day (or two) crammed into a cage on a fast moving truck.

So enough background. Ready for a tour?

First stop for the birds: the kill station. The birds are placed head down in these stainless steel funnels, and their heads protrude from the bottom. One quick, small cut with a sharp knife, and they bleed to death.

Just across from the kill station are the defeathering machines. The machine on the left is a scalder. The scalder is where the dead birds are placed in scalding hot water, which they rotate through for about a minute or so. This process loosens the feathers.

The chickens then go into the machine on the right, called the picker or the plucker. This has about 1oo rubber fingers inside it, and a rotating disc on the bottom that spins the birds around for another minute or so, until the feathers are gone.

Next stop is the eviscerating (a big word for "gutting") rail. The shackles you see hanging on the rail hold the birds, so there is no surface contact that could be a source of bacterial contamination. At different points on the rail, the birds are alternately hung by the neck or the feet to allow the worker to remove the entrails and wash the carcass thoroughly. After all other unusable parts have been removed, the feet and the neck come off, and the result is a bird that looks like...well, like the raw bird that we're all accustomed to seeing.

The carcass now spends about a half hour in a cool bath of tap water to start the chilling process.

But after that...

...it's into the chill tank. This to me was a critical piece of equipment. It was very important to me to have a reliable way to chill a large quantity of chickens to a safe temperature very quickly. I think this tank serves the purpose. The tank will hold up to 500 gallons of water, at least 200 chickens, and chill it to 34 degrees F, and keep it there indefinitely.

The bird spends about an hour or so in the tank, but it is usually chilled to below 40 degrees F in a half hour. Not much chance for bacterial growth there.

After the bird comes out of the chill tank, it hits the table. Here it can simply be bagged whole, ready for delivery to the customer, or it can be broken down into breasts, wings, leg quarters, whatever we have a need for. This is a new service that we couldn't provide before, and based on the way these parts are snatched up, it is definitely nice to have this ability. I also don't use any machines, other than the knives you see here, to break the birds down into parts--we don't need them. How do you break down a chicken with just a knife, you ask? Come see us sometime. We'll show you.

Sooo, this concludes your nickel tour of the Rettland Farm MPU. If you'd like the chance to see the facility in operation, please contact me--we'd love to have you come out and look over our shoulders for awhile. If you're a small farmer who is looking for a way to process your poultry in a safe, reliable way, I'd like to hear from you too. This old U-Haul truck holds a lot of opportunity for everyone.

Now, about that PSU tailgate mo-sheen...

Note: I owe an incredible amount of gratitude to my cousin, Marc Barron, who is a skilled electrician, and who generously gave me many of his Saturdays off this winter and spring to help me wire this baby. I am many things, but an electrician isn't one of them, I discovered. If it weren't for him, I'd be in the fetal position in the corner of a padded room right now, muttering incoherently about wire gauges and full load ampacity, with my vision for this MPU laying in tatters with the rest of my sanity. Thanks Ned. You rock.

Extreme Makeover, Rettland Edition

"We're a-movin' on up! (Movin' on up!)
To the top! (Movin' on up!)
Of a De-Luxe apaht-ment, in the sky-hy-hy!"

Yup, that's what my broilers are singing this week. Yes, I know it's hard to believe that my chickens are singing the theme songs of sitcoms from thirty years ago, but when they caught a glimpse of their new digs, they just couldn't help but channel old George and Weezy...

For two years now, I've been raising pastured broilers in what has become the "standard" housing model for pastured poultry, most commonly known as a "Salatin Style" pen, named after the Godfather of pastured poultry, Joel Salatin. And as much as I admire the beautiful simplicity of Joel's portable pens, I saw room for some improvements. So I redesigned it a little. Ok, I redesigned it a lot. But you're still the man, Joel!

Raisin' the Roof...


I needed to add height to the Salatin pen (which are only about 2 feet high), for a few reasons. Most important was air circulation. During the summer heat, especially when the birds were fully grown, the air inside seemed stale and stagnant. Since the goal here is to provide a better environment than a typical confinement house, I needed to improve air flow.
Another issue with the low height occurred when it was time to catch the birds on slaughter day. Picture me, army crawling inside the pen, among 100 freaked out chickens, at 6 am, on dew covered grass, trying to catch birds. Yeah, not a day at the beach for me, but even worse--it was VERY stressful on the birds. It seemed really dumb to spend 8 weeks trying to keep stress to negligible levels in these birds, and then blowing it by having them go completely nuts during the last hour of their lives.



So, I went with the hoop house idea that I saw on the web, and outfitted it for broilers. The almost-6 foot ceiling allows me to walk in almost upright (which the chickens are used to by slaughter day since I walk in every day before that to feed them) and calmly corral the birds in a corner. To solve the ventilation issue, the high ceiling, coupled with the open end and sides, draws fresh air into the house by a sort of natural chimney effect.





Unsafe at any Speed...

The other big issue was moving the old pen. The problem was that occasionally a chicken wouldn't move along fast enough, and would get pinched between the pen and the ground. I couldn't always see to be sure that the birds were out of the way, again as a result of the low height.

Well, the "Rettland Pen" is high enough off the ground that a slowpoke chicken won't get mushed by the pen--it will just pass over him. Rubber skirts keep the chickens in and the predators out while the pen is stationary, but floats over the lazy chicken while the pen's in motion. Even though the chicken is now out, and needs to be caught, at least he's not hurt.


Wet Weather Equipped

Lastly, I needed to be able to deal with wet weather, since Pennsylvania's new climate seems to include at least 2 monsoon seasons per year. When we have so much rain that the ground is saturated, the results are disastrous for the chickens. In the Salatin pen, they have nowhere to go. My choices at that point are to either let them wallow in the mud, or catch all of them and move them indoors somewhere. I usually opt for the latter. You can imagine how that goes...and the language involved.

So I added a perch that can fold down in wet weather, so the birds have somewhere to get out of the mud. When the ground is dry, it folds up out of the way, so the birds can graze as usual.


Time will tell if the "Rettland Pen" is a vast improvement over the Salatin Pen. I'm sure there will be bugs that need to be worked out, but this guy seems to be satisfied. For now.