When we got there, the slaughter was in full swing. Owen was in charge of the actual killing. By the time we got there, he had it down to a rhythm: pull 2 chickens out of a crate, turn them upside down and place them each in a killing cone, cut off their heads, repeat. I should note that the following pictures were borrowed from Awesome Farm's Facebook page. Thank you KayCee and Owen!
He let the blood drain out of each chicken and then placed them in the scalder. The scalder had water that was close to boiling and the chicken carcasses would spend a couple minutes rotating while their feathers loosened in the water. 
After their bath, they were placed in the plucker. The plucker is a crazy machine that works much like a washing machine on the spin cycle.
It's a cylindrical tube about 2.5 feet across and 3 feet deep and has a bunch of rubber "fingers" that pull the feathers off while the chickens are bounced from side to side. After the chickens had been de-feathered, they were handed to Devin who was in charge of cutting off the feet and necks. Maggie was the lucky recipient of a number of chicken feet that day. At the end of the slaughter, we found her fat and happy, sprawled out on her side, a half eaten foot next to her head. 
Next, the chickens were passed to Dana and KayCee who gutted and rinsed the chickens before placing them in a tub full of cold water to be weighed and bagged later that afternoon.
All this equipment was rented from a farmer in Massachusetts. He bolted each piece to a trailer, making a portable slaughterhouse. It's a brilliant idea, allowing small farmers like KayCee and Owen to slaughter their chickens on site without having to purchase expensive equipment or forcing them to bring their chickens to a slaughterhouse and paying someone to do it for them. It amazed me how quickly the chickens went from living, breathing, squawking, creatures to the chicken we're used to seeing in the grocery store. The difference with these chickens, however, was that they lived a free range life, eating bugs and food scraps, wandering around in the open air before they ended up on someones plate. They lived out in a field, in portable pens that were moved each day to allow the chickens access to the freshest grass and everything that comes with it. This is not only healthy for the chickens, but for the future consumers as well. You are what you eat and the healthier a life your food led, the healthier in turn you'll be.
The day after chicken slaughter was our friend Devin's day to do the Hearty Roots CSA drop in New York City. We woke up at 4:30am and drove to the farm to meet Devin. He had been there since 3am, loading the truck with all the vegetables needed to fill the 250 CSA member shares that would be picked up in various locations around Brooklyn. The first drop was at 7:30am so we hit the road at 5:00am. All the drops were done by 10:00am. The way Hearty Roots runs its CSA is that there are 5 places where they drop the veggies. At each of the 5 locations, a few members are in charge of helping to unload the truck. They set the bins of vegetables on tables and are given a list of what each member gets that week. They load up the crates from the week before and then we are on our way to the next drop. This is very unlike the farm Mark and I worked at this summer. A large portion of our time was spent washing all the veggies we harvested, to make them look pretty, packaging them in containers, bags or bundles and then filling up all the bags that were going out each day. Then, one of us would go to the drop spot and personally hand each member their bag. Though our veggies did look beautiful, were well presented and it was nice to get some face time with our members each week, a ton of time was lost to beautifying veggies, that could have been spent in the fields...Hearty roots leaves their veggies mostly unwashed and then each member picks through the crates to grab the food they have coming each week. Though it's not as pleasing to the eye, it frees up a lot of time and energy for the farm employees to spend on other areas of the farm. In the time it would have taken Mark or me to do one CSA drop, Devin had dropped off at 5 places and we had all partook of some amazing bagel sandwiches and taken a walk in the park. It's interesting to see how other farms run their CSA's. The rest of our day in the city was spent walking around a few different neighborhoods, stopping by the store where KayCee and Dana were distributing the chickens slaughtered the day before and then going to a lovely afternoon lunch party. We left the city in the early evening to make the 2 hour drive back to Tivoli. After our early wake up, we were exhausted and gratefully fell asleep soon after getting back to Devin's. It was inspiring and only slightly terrifying to watch him drive a gigantic moving van through the tiny streets of Brooklyn. It made us think that if he could do it in a huge van, we could probably navigate those same streets in our little Subaru.
We spent a couple more days in the Tivoli area. We went on an awesome hike in the Catskills, saw the famed town of Woodstock, took in the fall foliage on back country roads and did some serious lounging before saying farewell to our friends and heading to Connecticut. In Connecticut I reconnected with some relatives that I hadn't seen in close to 10 years. After 2 days in CT, one with my Mom's cousin Dede and another with my Great Aunt Alba, we decided to brave the streets of New York City to go visit Mark's friend Sheila. We set off the morning of October 15th. The plan was that I would drive us to the city and then Mark would drive in the city. Somewhere along the route of our road trip I had decided that it was a good idea to try and drive like a New Englander. I was wrong. In Winston, CT, less than 20 miles from the New York border, I managed to rear end the woman in front of us. In my defense, it was raining and the roads were slick. I may have also been following a little closely....Her car was fine, with only a few scratches on the bumper. The poor Subaru did not fare as well. Our entire front end was crunched in on itself, but the car was still drivable. The police officer, seeing our Oregon plates, took pity on me and didn't issue a ticket. Instead of trying our luck in the city, we decided to head back to Auntie Alba's to regroup before heading into the city the next day. Though it turned out to be an expensive lesson, I finally learned that when one is from Montana, she should not try and drive like a New Englander.
Great blog post! The whole chicken slaughter is pretty amazing!
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