One word? When seven would do…

because this seems to be a rather perfect place for us!

Up this morning and in the house for breakfast at 8am. A bit of background on the people here: Emma and Pete, married couple, together for 11 years. This is Pete’s in-the-family-for-four-generations farm land, but the original farmhouse went to his older brother who is not a farmer, so Pete has the land and has just got planning permission after about 6 years of farming here for a farmhouse to be built. Currently they live in a collection of portakabins, statics and farm buildings. Pete did leave farming and is a builder, but came back to it when he married Emma. Emma is a hairdresser by trade, very horsey family and is now a farmers wife / baker. Emma’s 3 kids all also live here – son aged 21 lives in a static with his girlfriend – he breeds ducks and rare breed chickens and is a carpenter. Other son aged 20 lives here and is a trainee brickie, daughter aged 19 usually lives here but is currently in Ireland working in horse racing with family. Very close family. Also here at the moment is a friend, Amanda, with her two daughters; Gemma aged 17 and Zoe aged 8. They are planning on moving down here from East Sussex and are having a working holiday helping out with various stuff here with a long term aim of selling up in Sussex and moving here to work for Emma and Pete. They are here til the weekend.

This morning Emma took one of her sons to the doctors as he has bad toothache. Ady, Davies, Scarlett and I helped Pete (and Zoe and Jess the sheepdog) move sheep and lambs from the field into a shed. This was harder than it sounds and we lost two down the road. Once all the others were in we had to track them down and the kids had to stop traffic while we chased them. I commented to Pete that I now knew why you don’t see fat sheep farmers! Me, running, before 9am!!!

We then followed Pete in his tractor delivering it to a nearby farm which meant driving a farm truck for Ady and riding in the back of it for the rest of us.

Next we chose 2 sheep and a calf for the abbatoir. This involved chasing various sheep, catching and turning them over to see if they were still feeding lambs by squeezing them to see if they gave milk. By 930am I had been dragged over by a ram and squirted with ewes milk so I had sheep shit and milk all over my top. Sheep and calf in the trailer we went for a cup of tea and learnt how to fill out the Defra paperwork for moving lifestock before heading off to the abbatoir.

It’s a really small abbatoir, based in a farm where one of the sons worked at an abbatoir and another at a butchers before bringing it home and setting up at the farm small scale. So they rear their own meat to slaughter and sell direct to the public from a small farm shop, take in animals to kill for local farmers and will either slaughter and store ready to be collected or do butchering for people too. They do pigs, cattle and sheep. The skins of the cows and the fleeces of the sheep are all kept and salted to be used for leather / sheepskin rugs and sold on.

We hung around for quite a while because the vet who is always on site at an abbatoir had been in an accident earlier in the day (car, nothing to do with animal killing!) and so all of the work had been delayed waiting for him. While we waited we looked round at the butchering area, the cold meat storage where animals are hung, the skins drying in the sun and then helped catch some runaway sheep making a last bid for freedom. We then watched some pigs being slaughtered – stunned, hung up and throats slit and helped move some more livestock about before leaving the lambs and calf there and collecting two pigs which had been dropped off last week and were now hung and ready to bring back for butchering.

It was really interesting. Pigs are squealy anyway but there was no feeling or atmosphere of fear like I was expecting there. Dispatch was calm, kind, very speedy and I personally was most reassured by it. Davies and Scarlett were really interested, dealt very well with it all, asked loads of relevant questions and had the perfect mix of compassion for animals while still being meat eaters. I was proud of them.

Then it was back for (a very late) lunch.

The kids went off to play, they have been looking after some of the lambs including one which is suffering from ill-joint, an affliction a bit like arthritis with sore and swollen joints which happens due to a naval infection at birth. The afflicted sheep has had an injection which should perk it up.

Ady worked with Pete all afternoon, labouring for him really. They are opening a field for camping so have been putting in hook up and water taps and today built a very rustic shower and toilet block which a plumber is coming to plumb in tomorrow. Ady has been doing all sorts of stuff including chainsawing, cementing, humping stuff about etc.

Meanwhile I helped out in the kitchen. Emma and Pete sell meat and produce at various different markets and farmers markets in the area with fresh cuts of meat and sausages going first and any unsold coming back to be cooked up into pies and pasties and sold at the next market. They try to barter for all the rest of their produce at markets – so the fruit, veg, bread, dairy produce, cheese etc is mostly swapped with other farmers for meat. Today we were making pie and pasty mix with pork, lamb and veal which meant chopping up and cooking veg, frying meat, making up enormous volumes of pastry and pre cooking pie filling ready for assembling and baking tomorrow for market on Thursday. I made 9kg of flour worth of pastry, peeled and chopped many, many veg and stirred lots and lots of frying meat. It felt like Christmas camp! Flour, splashes of cooking fat etc. all added to my grubby t shirt.

Then we all went out to catch cockerels which will be made into chicken pies tomorrow. There were 7 around the farm and they took some catching with involved further running, grabbing and chasing and a full body slam dive for Ady to the ground which unfortunately missed the chicken but did entertain and amuse all of us! 😉

Then it was dinner – cottage pie 🙂 and sausages :). Food is bloody good here, meat-tastic again!

After dinner we went back out to help kill and pluck chickens and turkeys. The 7 cocks we’d caught and 5 turkeys which had already been enclosed since yesterday. They have a licence to kill poultry and fowl here so we washed down the killing room and set up our assembly line. Chicken or turkey goes upside down in a cone with head hanging out the bottom and is stunned with electric prod then throat slit and hung to bleed. Once done it goes into a hot water bath to open pores and then onto a plucking machine which removes about 95% of the feathers. It is then hand plucked to remove the rest along with the head and feet.

Pete did all the actual killing, Ady did some hanging and passing live and dead birds, the kids did some plucking and passing and checking the water temperature was right for the bath and I did some hand plucking and finishing with Emma.

Scarlett did cry at one point as she struggled with the alive and then dead bit and the flapping as muscles twitched as she is understandably attached to chickens more than most other livestock (except perhaps ducks) but we all talked it through and she was fine afterwards and carried on helping. I am pleased that neither of the kids has a blase attitude to the slaughtering and that they are showing compassion and caring but at the same time I don’t want to end this year with vegetarian offspring so I am glad they are able to work it through.

I’m sure I have more to say on the subject and I know I have stuff to talk about my own feelings on it too, but that will have to wait. For now I wanted to get down what we did today as it was so full on, so filled with new stuff and so very much what we left the house to do I want to make sure I record it all while still fresh in my mind as I suspect every day will be like this here.

Back in for showers – final splattering on my t shirt was chicken and turkey blood along with lots of tiny feathers – and a glass of wine with everyone before heading back to the van for the night. Today has felt like all of our WWOOFing objectives in one day and although there is plenty here which is not what we are wanting to do and this is not our own personal goal we are going to learn and see so much here I think it will be one of our most valuable places despite not actually being an offical or even planned host!

So, a 15 hour day, bloody hard work and every chance we will be having 3 weeks worth of long days, early starts, late finishes and learning on our feet but I think it might well be the equivalent to cramming a 4 year degree into 3 weeks.