Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
Yesterday we vacuum-sealed 156 pounds of ground turkey in two-pound packages. We deboned and ground 13 turkeys, saving some of the breasts for roasting this winter. The packages are tucked away in the freezer where we’ll draw from them for the team lunches Pops makes each week. It was a great day of teamwork, and I’m glad to be done with it for another year. Killing is never easy, done with care and gratitude for the lives we take that they may sustain our own in the months to come.
We slaughtered on Wednesday, letting the birds chill in totes in cold storage until rigor mortis released and the meat softened up. The whole process is a serious undertaking, as big as any other task we do in a year, so it always feels good to check it off the list, one more step towards the end of a long season. We still have 12 turkeys on pasture, the smaller hens from the heritage breed that still need time to size up to serve as family meals for friends and neighbors this fall.
Each of the last two years we’ve had serious trouble with predation, knocking down our turkey numbers right before they were big enough for slaughter. It’s hard losing birds when they’re small to the various ways that poultry can die young, but it’s so much worse after feeding and caring for them for several months to have them snatched right at the end. This year we had some upgrades including a much bigger fence charger run off a marine battery, along with two livestock guardian dogs often at the ranch.
The coyotes have been coming in close of late, but our dog Floof has decided that the ranch is part of his range, so he’s been up there helping provide Booboo with backup. I’m still trepidatious about the remaining birds on pasture, but am also hopeful that the very hot electric fence along with the dogs will keep them safe. There’s an irony present in trying to keep things alive until we slaughter them, but such is the dichotomy of many forms of livestock work.
To debone and grind the turkey meat took a team of seven, Pops leading the charge by cutting up the carcasses into pieces with his big kitchen knife. Breasts are easy to slice into grindable chunks, thighs mostly as well, but getting the bonelike sinew out of the leg meat takes time and care. Wings and the main body carcass also take caution, a sharp knife and delicate fingers.
One of the best parts of farming is the refinement of process, and I’m excited next year to add in some of our pig fat and spices with the grind to make turkey sausage instead of the plain ground meat we’ve made for so long. I would have done it this year, but didn’t quite have it together, especially with the size of the task since the most birds we’ve ever done was eight, and the carcass size on this batch was bigger than usual. At the end of the day we had the two-pound packages along with the packaged breast meat and 16 shrink-wrapped packs of bones and scraps for making turkey bone broth in the months to come.
I’m back on my bone broth kick, sipping a big mug of hot chicken broth as I write. One of my key personal barometers for how I’m doing is if I’m making time to prepare and drink bone broth each day. It takes consistency, simmering the giant pot of broth with bones, onion, salt and herbs for a full day once every ten days or so. Then I cool the pot, strain the broth into jars for refrigerating and vacuum bags for freezing. I heat it up each morning for me and Amber, adding a scoop of creatine into mine for a superfood beverage that goes along with my coffee and herbal tea made from herbs we grow or wildcraft.
As we deepen into fall, our thoughts turn to the upcoming cannabis harvest, walking the gardens to check on the progress of the different strains in the lineup. With the recent rains and then a followup batch of compost tea, the earlier strains are flowering heavily, and we have just a few short weeks before the harvest begins in earnest. I’m nervous about what the weather will bring but hopeful nonetheless, which pretty much sums up farming in a nutshell.
As the nights grow longer with earlier sunsets and later dawns, my body is ready for the downturn of the season. I’m starting to eye declining summer crops, coveting the bed space for the cool weather brassica that are straining their three-inch pots in the propagation house. Soon the summer squash beds will come out, replaced by hardy winter cooking greens while the hoophouse salad mix beds continue their constant stream of successions. Forward we go! As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!