Chicken CSA, 2012

So today I'm going to roll out a new (to us) marketing idea, a new way to get our products onto your tables.

For 2012, I'm going to start a CSA.

Yeah, that's pretty confusing. CSA stands for "Community Supported Agriculture", (not Confederate States of America, for all of you Civil War buffs out there..) That's not much help either.

Basically, a CSA is an arrangement between a farmer (me) and a group of members or shareholders (hopefully some of you) where the farmer grows products for the members, and there is no middleman or other steps in the distribution chain. Other terms to describe it are Buyers Clubs, or Food Co-ops, or Subscription Services. The concept is pretty much the same.

Members go to a central location on a regular basis to pick up their "share" of the farm's bounty. Pretty simple. The payment for the food occurs in the beginning of the season, and then the group shares in the success of the crops or products that the farm produces over the growing season. No money changes hands at the time of sale--it has already occurred long before the delivery of the product.

Typically, CSA's are vegetable or fruit based. I don't grow fruit or vegetables, other than grass or livestock food, mainly because my thumbs are NOT green. They're black. I grow meat.

Soooo....my thought was to form a meat CSA, specifically chickens. And since we don't really like the nebulous phrase "Community Supported Agriculture", let's change it up and personalize it. From now on, on my farm, CSA stands for "Chicken Subscription Arrangement". Cool? Good.

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

2. How does it work? Each "share" in the CSA will entitle the member to 1 pastured broiler chicken each week, usually unfrozen, usually whole, and packaged in a manner to be determined. We will also offer the option of adding 1 dozen eggs from pastured hens, also available for pick up weekly at the same time as the chicken. Each share will have a total cost for the year, and will be prepaid before the foods are produced.

3. What are the specifics on the products? 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, with occasional heritage breed chickens provided as available for variety. 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.

The optional egg share will be made up of one dozen typically brown eggs from pastured laying hens. The eggs will be ungraded, but egg size is typically large or greater, and will not be smaller than Medium.

4. When will the CSA begin? End? The CSA will provide fresh food to the members every week from about May 15, run for about 30 weeks through the summer and end around late November or early December.

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, usually Saturday. (However, if we have a concentration of people interested in becoming CSA members that live in other areas, we may have other pick up points--please ask if you think this is you, especially if you are from the Baltimore, Frederick, or Washington DC areas.) Our pickup hours will closely match the Adams County Farmers Market hours at the Gettysburg Outlets, which is only about 2 miles from the farm. That way, you can pick up your CSA share and then stop at the market for other great Adams County products, all in one trip!

6. What is the cost? The cost for 1 share in the CSA for 2012 will be $14 per week for a period of 30 weeks, for a total cost of $420. An optional egg share can be added for an additional cost of $4.00 per week. The total cost of the share will be paid by April 15, 2012, with a minimum 50% deposit due by March 1, 2012. (There may be a few limited opportunities for individuals to exchange labor doing light farm tasks in exchange for a CSA share. If you would prefer to exchange labor for a share instead of cash, please contact me.)

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.

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??

OK, team. I think I've thrown enough info at you for one sitting. Mull it over with your families this weekend. Decide if it's right for you and yours. Feel free to contact me with questions in the comment section--chances are, if you have the question, someone else does too.

If you decide you'd like to go ahead and join the inaugaral Rettland Farm Chicken Subscription Arrangement, send me an email at farmer@rettlandfarm.com . We'll work out the specifics from there.

Thanks for your consideration. This is gonna be fun.
　
　
　
　
　

Has it really been that long??

Has it really been that long since I posted? June? Wow.

So my poor blog has been neglected for awhile, I know. I've been just a little busy with farm stuff, and family stuff, and any other kind of stuff that has come along that kept me from keeping you loyal blog readers up to date.

To be honest, I've also been lured into the ease and simplicity of Facebook and Twitter. It seems much easier to fire off some quick update and a picture to one of these sites than to sit down and write more than 140 characters to create a coherent post on the blog.

That's not really right, so I've made a few changes to keep the blog updated, and to make it easier to follow the blog, too.

First, you'll notice my Twitter feed in the left column. Now you can read what I'm posting to Twitter without subscribing to it yourself. You'd thank me if you knew how dumb Twitter really was. Really. You're not missing anything.

Second, just below the Twitter feed is a place to enter your email address, so you will receive anything I post here in your email inbox. No need to check here every day to see if I've updated the blog, a task which I would imagine was pretty fruitless over the last SEVEN MONTHS!

Finally, I'll try to be a little more diligent about posting here. I've got a few ideas rolling around in my head that might really benefit from the use of the blog.

I'll keep you posted. Honest.

**If anyone has any idea how to link my Facebook page to the blog, I'd really be grateful for the tip.

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.

Thanksgiving Turkeys, 2011

Yep, it's time to think about Thanksgiving turkeys already.

The Background:

As you may recall: Last year, Rettland Farm raised pastured turkeys for Thanksgiving on a preorder basis. We got the turkey poults on the farm in early July, and raised them until the week before Thanksgiving. We then harvested the turkeys the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and some of our loyal (and adventurous) customers even came out to the farm to help butcher their own turkeys. That day, and the entire experience as a whole, was really enjoyable for me, so I decided to do it again this year.

The Details:

1. All turkeys will be a heritage variety, most likely Bourbon Reds, but we may have a few other rare breeds mixed in for kicks, just to see how they perform, and more importantly--to see how they taste. By using these heritage breeds, we'll have birds that have different composition than commercial turkeys, i.e. more proportional bodies, with the breasts and thighs being closer in size and weight. You can also expect a deeper, richer flavor from the heritage turkeys, as compared to a commercial turkey.

2. I'm estimating the weight of the dressed turkey will be 20 lbs, give or take 5 lbs. If you order a turkey, I'll try to keep you posted of their projected finished weight as the summer goes on, so you can plan your Thanksgiving meal accordingly. If in doubt, order two turkeys--you can always freeze the second one for Christmas!

3. We WILL be doing the Turkey Butchering day again this year, because I thought it was an overwhelmingly positive experience last year. We will be doing the processing in our brand new on farm processing facility. This day will be the weekend before Thanksgiving, date TBA. Anyone who orders a turkey is welcome to attend, and bring their friends, families, etc. While this day has been a great outing and an educational experience for all who attended in the past, you do not have to participate in the butchering day if you don't want to.

4. All turkeys will need to be picked up the weekend before Thanksgiving. Again, details for the pickup will be announced later in the season.

5. The total cost for the turkeys will be about $70.00, or about $3.50/lb. The reason for the increase in price over last year is the result of a drastic increase in feed costs, the slower growth rate of the heritage breeds, combined with the increased price of the heritage breed turkey poults.

6. New this year: I am asking that if you order a turkey, that you put a deposit of $35.00 down on the turkey. You may mail your deposit, payable to Rettland Farm LLC to: 920 Barlow Two Taverns Road, Gettysburg, PA 17325.

7. The number of turkeys will be limited, so orders will be taken on a first come, first served basis. If you are interested, please don't delay in placing your order.

So, if you'd like to have one of these great turkeys on your Thanksgiving table this year, please respond with your order no later than this Friday, June 10, 2011. Email your order to farmer@rettlandfarm.com . I will confirm all orders within a day or two of receiving them. Please contact me by phone or email to place your order first--we can then get your deposit in the mail in the following days.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Introducing...Cheese!

So, are you ready for a whole new product line from Rettland Farm?

CHEESE, BABY!

The Background:

Some of you may know that I have pretty extensive experience in the dairy industry. My dad has been a dairy farmer for almost 40 years, and I have been milking cows on his farm since I was twelve years old. After spending my childhood on the farm, I took the next step and acquired a degree in Dairy Science from Penn State. Finally, I decided to make dairy farming a career after I graduated. I have worked full time on the dairy since then.

The Milk:

The milk for the cheese comes from my family's dairy farm, which is operated by my dad, my brother, and myself. We milk about 75 cows twice per day. During the grazing season, from April until December, we graze the cows on grass pastures. Through the winter, we feed them stored feed, harvested off the farm during the summer.

Our milk is not "Organic", but we don't use antibiotics on any animal unless it is sick. Every load of milk that leaves the farm is tested for the presence of antibiotics in the milk, and for high levels of bacteria. If either would be found, the milk would be rejected.

Most importantly, our cows have NEVER been treated with the artificial hormone known as rBST, and they NEVER will be.

The Cheese:

We have been very fortunate to find a processor that uses his amazing artisanal skill to make cheese from our milk. The cheese plant is located in Eastern PA, and specializes in high quality, delicious, old style farmstead cheeses.

By using this custom processor, we are able to concentrate on producing high quality milk, and not needing to spend time, money, and labor developing and outfitting our own cheese plant. This synergy allows everyone to do what they do best, resulting in an amazing product.

Our initial varieties? How about Cheddar, Gouda, American, Muenster, Colby, and Farmer for starters? We are also considering a Feta, and maybe a Mozzarella. If you have a suggestion for a favorite cheese of yours, I'd love to hear it.

Where to Find it:

For starters, our cheeses will be offered at the Carriage House Market in Hanover. I will also have it for sale this summer at the Farmers Markets in Gettysburg. For those of you in the Harrisburg area, our cheeses can be found at Olewine's Meat and Cheese House. When our cheeses can be found in other places, we'll be sure to publicize that fact here and on the Rettland Farm Facebook page. As always, if you can't find these amazing cheeses, contact me directly and I'll FIND a way to get you some.

So, there you have it--a variety of delicious new products from Rettland Farm that can be an incredible addition to any meal. Try all the varieties, then tell me which one you like best!

Chicken Plans, Part 1

Here we are, fresh into a New Year, and things here at Rettland Farm are already shakin'. So much for winter downtime, huh? Since we have the holidays behind us, I've been busy getting the wheels turning on some pretty big changes here at the farm, changes that are going to make the RF product line bigger and better than ever.

So let's talk about the biggest change first.

Those of you who have been with me since the beginning of RF (the Littles, the Moores, the nee Sheppards) might remember the early days of the pastured broiler program when I butchered the birds right here on the farm. Every Sunday afternoon, all summer long, I would break out my knives, my feather picker, and my giant gas burner, and butcher the chickens that I needed that week.

I ended up with sore feet, aching back, sunburn, and absolutely phenomenal chicken.

Ohh, what memories!

But for several complex reasons, it became necessary for me to hire out the butchery of the chickens. For the past year and a half, a small butcher in a neighboring county has done all of the processing of the pastured broilers. I have been mostly satisfied with the performance of this butcher and the care they took in processing my chickens.

The problem is, I think that there is room for improvement in our broilers. In an effort to constantly improve the taste, texture, and quality of the chickens that we produce, I've decided to bring the butchery back home.

Here's why: Despite the relative short distance between me and the butcher, it still takes about an hour to drive there. So, my chickens are caught, placed into crates, and the crates are put on a truck. That all takes about 30 minutes. Then I drive them to the butcher as quickly as possible, (the hour, as mentioned), and then they wait their "turn" once we get to the butcher. This wait can be as much as another hour.

Reducing that two and a half hours is where I am going to improve the quality of the meat.
Crating the birds up and then driving them down the road creates stress in the birds. It is a new, unfamiliar process to them, and chickens like monotony (as do most animals). The longer they are stressed before they are killed, the less desirable the meat becomes. (Which, incidentally, is one of many reasons that commercial chicken is unpalatable.)

By eliminating the drive, and most of the wait time immediately before slaughter, you, the loyal Rettland Farm chicken lover, end up with a chicken on the table that is more flavorful, moister, and more tender.

So, how am I gonna do the butchery, now that I am producing about 10 times the birds that I did back in the good ole days? Still gonna have my little table and my little bunsen burner on steroids??

Nah...we're going state of the art, baby.

Stay tuned for the unveiling of the all new Rettland Farm slaughter facility, coming soon.

Husbandry, not Industry

Like my new catchphrase?

It just kind of stumbled into my head while I was making a point in a e-discussion group that I participate in.

It sums up, in three words, how I think modern, progressive farms should be run.

Husbandry. Not Industry.

As in--using knowledge and experience to care for animals, not electronics and shiny metal.

As in--treating farms like biological systems, not factories churning out widgets and doodads.

As in--making use of an animal's natural tendencies, instead of forcing them to change their behavior to fit a production model.

As in--understanding that there is a difference between a professional farmer, and a low paid "technician" with no stake in any part of the operation, other than a menial paycheck for his menial labor.

As in--realizing that at some point in food production, scale and quality become inversely proportional.

As in--believing that "food security" is defined by more than abundance and low price.

Husbandry. Not Industry.