Author: bn

As I explained in my last post, last December, I decided to raise my own birds for meat. Having helped another family slaughter sixty chickens, when I was age 6 or 7, I was complacently comfortable with the idea. In the dark of winter, I didn’t figure out all the details. I’m prone to grandiose hand-waving accompanied by “It’ll be fine” or “We’ll figure it out, later.” The minutia that matters had been left as an exercise for the spring (with me as the “idea guy,” my ex frequently got stuck with some of these details to “figure out”). In mid-February, she asked a question so simple it belies its complexity. “How many and what breed?” She was ordering our egg chicks from a mega-hatchery in the mid-west and needed to place the order. I still hadn’t done any research or prep work, knowing I’d figure it out when I needed to (insert hand waving here)… well, I needed to.
I spent a couple of hours digging into Wikipedia articles and documentation on breeds typically raised for meat and concluded that I’d go with the “most common, failsafe, typical” breed. Jumbo Cornish Cross is a breed that originated in the 30’s, selectively bred for large breasts and the speed of growth. When you buy chicken at the grocery store or in a restaurant, this is almost unvaryingly the breed you’re getting. I brushed aside a couple of alarmist comments on www.forums.so-you-wanna-raise-and-slaughter-chickens-huh.com or another backyard chicken chat site. People claimed that they were ‘unnatural freaks of nature’ and similar non-specific complaints. Yeah, yeah, ok. (Insert more grandiose hand-waving) I needed to tell the ex what to order and needed to do it now. “It’ll be fine. I’m sure they’re just reacting to factory farm conditions… the same thing we’d have concerns about. (more hand-waving).”

• $1.25/chick
• quantity 14 (“I dunno, whatta you think? How ‘bout a dozen?”)
• add to cart
• checkout
• done (hand waving away the rest of the important details, “we’ve got months”)

5AM, our phone rings. We missed this call, but it woke us up enough to check our voicemail. The message said, “Your chickens are here. Please come pick them up.” Our post office is a small, single counter, rural post office and when I arrived, 20 minutes later, I could hear a cacophony of tiny baby bird cheeps from the lobby. After I rang the will-call bell, the top-half of the Dutch door opened to reveal two full-sized tables covered in little boxes of chicks; a heat lamp was somewhat precariously hung over each table. CHEEPCHEEPCHEEPCHEEP, the largest hatchery in the US only has a few delivery dates and our delivery was clearly only one of dozens in our part of rural Washington State, today. The Duvall post office clearly knows the drill and prepared appropriately. Our tiny box emitted a solid CHEEPCHEEPCHEEPCHEEP on the drive home and it continued as they were transferred into the makeshift brooder box fashioned out of Home Depot scrap lumber, last year (less than $7, including casters.)
They seemed innocent enough. They were exactly the same size as this spring’s “egg bird” chickens and their demeanor almost identical. They were adorable, as all baby chicks are. They were fluffy, white, and almost completely helpless. All the chicks pooled under the heat lamp and did their best “melting” routine. As they fall asleep, they allow all their tiny muscles to relax and as their little bodies slowly settle into the pine shavings, they leave the impression that they’re melting. “These aren’t freak of nature chicks. They’re just chicks.”
A few days later, it was clear that these birds were bred for meat. They packed on the pounds at an alarming rate. Clearly larger than the layer chicks, I was concerned about the equitable distribution of food and introduced a divider down the center of the box to separate them from the layer chicks. At two weeks, the Cornish Cross chicks were nearly twice the size of the breeds we’d purchased as layers. In addition to the “meat birds”, we had ordered some layer hen chicks to replace those eaten by predators, last year: Black Sex-Links, Arucanas, Barred Rocks, and were surprised with a Brahma or Cochin “Free Chick” rooster (“buy 25, get a free rare bird”). This year and last, I’d admired how the Sex-Links always aggressively pursued food. They seemed to have great survival instincts and were bold, outgoing, and curious… but they were amateurs compared with the Crosses. These girls wanted their meal and wanted it NOW! We took to calling the left-half of the box the “Fatty Chickens” or “The Fatties.” When we talked about them, my ex often referred to them as “your chickens,” reminding me that this motley bunch was my idea. Her not-so-subtle slips of language took the form of comments like, “Have you fed your chickens yet?” or “Man, your chickens are nasty.”
Each trip to the garage, just hours apart, I’d find that The Fatties had completely emptied their food. On the other side of the box, an equal number of “egg birds” (which we’d started calling, the “Little Girls”) had barely touched theirs. I augmented with a second feeder. They emptied both. Having read a lot more about this breed, I started regulating food. The most scathing commentary about the bird highlights that, given free access to food, their bodies grow out of proportion and their legs can’t support their rapidly growing bodies. I found some missives that described several families’ experiences. Most of them still seemed to think that it was acceptable to raise this breed, with a few caveats… including the rate that they’re allowed to consume feed.
At 4 weeks, they’d outgrown their half of the brooder box and were transferred outside. Some perspective is due here. All 25 chicks were shipped in a small vented cardboard box roughly 10 inches square and about 3 inches tall (remember that these hatched from eggs). It was a cozy fit, but they could still move around (they won’t ship fewer than 25, as they need to have contact with other chicks for warmth). Less than a month later, 14 of these chicks had outgrown their 4 foot by 3 foot section of the box. They’d grown from the point where I could hold 3 or 4 of them in one hand to each of them roughly the size and shape of a small cantaloupe, roughly the size of our one year old laying hens. Size wasn’t the only indicator that the Fatties had ‘turbo instructions’ in their genetic programing. They were fully feathered. The Little Girls more closely resembled a can of soda and had just started putting on feathers, giving them a loveable awkward gangly teenager look.

With the weather warming up, we assembled a roosting house out of 3/8ths inch plywood, tacked some poultry netting to t-posts and relocated The Fatties to their own front yard pasture. They adapted quickly and the Little Girls were happy to have the full brooder box to themselves. I continued to regulate The Fatties’ food and they took to foraging better than I expected. They’d occasionally find some unfortunate worms, slugs, bugs, or grubs. They scratched the lawn in their makeshift pasture and picked at the more tender grass. Chickens acting like chickens. All I could have hoped for.

I was, however, shocked at how quickly they grew. Their legs had grown in a wide stance like a linebacker with huge pectoral muscles filling everything between. The fat squat little birds waddled and flapped their wings when they ran. I’d never thought of a chicken as graceful, but started to regard our full-grown laying hens as ballerinas by contrast. We often joked that they looked like they had really bad boob jobs, as the size and angle of their breasts looked… well… fake.
By 5 weeks, The Fatties were the size and weight of a 5-lbs. bag of sugar. They were lazy and awkward. They largely sat alternately in the shade, and the sun, then back again. The foraging instinct had given way to the chicken equivalent of couch-potato-channel-surfing-pizza-delivery-ordering-sloth. They had started to eat while lying on their tremendous belly girth. Food, or the promise of food, was the only thing that could get them to move at a speed faster than a crawl. I continued to regulate feed and was horrified to see how they were plowing through ½ gallon of feed in under ½ hour. These were, by all measures, lazy, fat, American chickens.
At 6 weeks, we moved the Little Girls out of the brooder box and into the fenced front-yard pasture with The Fatties. After a few turf wars and establishing pecking order (Fatties first, as they were over twice the size of the Little Girls), they settled in. We moved the roosting house every day or two and the entire fenced area was moved every week or so. The Fatties sat with no regard for hygiene, often not moving when they pooped, resulting in crusty chicken shit on their feathers. I hadn’t exactly thought about our laying hens as “clean,” but when presented with these foul eating-pooping-sitting-machines, I started to.

At 7 weeks, in a poorly planned and poorly executed attempt to weigh them, I drew the conclusion that the one I plucked out of the pen was “at least 7 pounds.” By this point, we were trying to decide which weekend to slaughter them. They didn’t seem unhappy, but we felt wrong about letting them continue. We were into the peak of summer and it was evident that the heat was too much for them. They sat on their huge chests, with one leg cocked out to the side and their wings hoisted off their bodies in an attempt to stay cool. The Little Girls were fine and actually seemed to enjoy the sun. We setup a misting system to provide some evaporative cooling for The Fatties, it seemed to help, but just highlighted that these are not “natural chickens” (natural = “of nature” and we had to give these birds A/C). The weather cooled for the next couple weeks, while they continued to eat and grow.
It was clear that these birds were going to be better off in our freezer than in our yard.
In the next post(s), I’ll share our second experience slaughtering chickens.
 

This is a repost from an article I wrote on a blog from another time.  I’ve had enough inquiries about the photo I have posted on flickr that I decided to resurrect it.
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I cut into the breast on the left side of the bird, feeling a little more resistance than expected, flip the meat to the side, and spotted something very unusual. Is that a leaf?
Having just spent a full day slaughtering chickens, I’d reacquainted myself with every part of the bird. The parts that you don’t see in a grocery store were as familiar as the shoelaces on my favorite red sneakers. I’d smelled guts, butts, and that chickeny chickeny smell that you just don’t get from any other animal. One of my favorite (yes, it’s weird to have a “favorite”) part of eviscerating a chicken is opening the crop and the gizzard. I love seeing that the animals raised were eating real food. Finding a bird full of grass, worms, and bugs makes me feel like we’re doing something right. I get used to the sight of Western Buttercup leaves, as I’m splitting open chickens.
Day two, I’m standing over a cutting board breaking down the meat we intend to consume over the next year. Hindquarters in that pile, breasts in that, wings over there, and the carcasses, largely stripped of the big bits of meat go into the stock pot. After a few birds, either eviscerating or butchering, I drop into the rhythm of the work. My hands move more deftly than they’re typically capable. I start to find the tendons and separate the feet from the body in two quick moves, instead of fumbling around. The knife seems to know exactly where to turn at the bottom of the breast meat, just before the ribs. I get confident; a really good feeling for something oft deemed antiquated.
Toward the end of today’s butchery session, something interrupted the flow of my work. There was a little more resistance than usual… then, after I exposed the breast meat… green. GREEN!? How did a leaf get … into the meat? I look closer. As if a play on “Green Eggs and Ham,” this really is a swath of green meat, right in the middle of this broiler’s breast. Cutting down the other side, I see exactly the same thing. Green meat. WHAT… THE… HELL!? Is it spoiled? The birds have spent the night in our freebie fridge on the porch. Did it fail to maintain temperature? Did it rot overnight? Nervous, I take a sniff. Nothing. Not spoiled?! What foul fowl is this?
Washed the hands and took a quick gander at the magical internets and, after reading several alarmist blog comments (“OMG, MY WHOLE FOODS CHICKEN BREASTS ARE ROTTEN!! MY DINNER PARTY IS RUINED!”), I found references to Oregon Muscle Disease. Oregon Muscle Disease, also known as Green Muscle Disease and Deep Pectoral Myopathy, is most commonly found in heavy meat chickens. I was able to find a few descriptions of the condition and one or two that discussed the cause at length:

It has been estimated that, in turkeys and broilers, the supracoracoid increases in weight by about 20% during activity for the huge blood flow into the muscle. The increased size of the muscle is so marked in the heavy breeds that the muscle becomes strangulated and ischemic, because the increased pressure within the muscle occludes the blood vessels and causes a necrosis of the muscle […]. The resultant necrotic muscle has a characteristic hemorrhagic appearance, with a swollen reddish-brown lesion (early developing stage) that later becomes green and shrunken and then pale green (old stage), depending upon the time of induction of the vigorous wing exercise […]
(The Occurrence of Deep Pectoral Myopathy in Roaster Chickensfrom the journal “Poultry Science”)

These chickens are bred to maximize the size of the breast muscles; American consumers have learned to expect tidy heat-shrink wrapped packages of huge chicken breasts. Producers, processors and retailers are eager to serve the demand with the highest margin cut of the bird. In intensive poultry operations, meat birds are raised in large warehouse-like coops. The birds are kept in almost complete darkness to minimize flight/flapping instincts and the occurrence of deep pectoral myopathy (DPM). Our birds are kept outdoors and on pasture: certainly more likely to flap.
After a few minutes of surfing the poultry information superhighway, I went back to parting out the rest of this years’ meat birds. Left with thoughts of what I’d learned, I reconsidered a question that’s become quite common, since we started the farm… “are we doing the right thing?” We’re raising our own food (plus some for others) and are trying to “do the right thing” in every decision we make. I’ve commented on our decisions to let chickens “behave like chickens” and this years’ flock was most certainly allowed to behave like it wanted. Some of that behavior included… well… flapping and, apparently, some of that flapping led to “strangulation” of the pectoral muscle. While all the research I’ve been able to find states that it “does not appear to affect the general health of the bird,” it can’t be pleasant. So I’m left with a query and a quandary; our decision to raise the chicken we like to eat in the way we think is “right” has resulted in something most decidedly “not right.”
In commercial production, incidence of DPM is as high as 1-2% (higher in “free range” plants) and us Americans buy almost all our meat parted out. Our addiction to ‘boneless skinless chicken breasts’ means that most people are unlikely to ever see bright green chicken meat; processors find it and discard it during deboning. So, given 1 bird of the 33 birds we slaughtered this year had this issue, it’s not surprising that we had one… but does that make it “OK?” Nothing else about commercial chicken production is OK with us, why would this be?
In our quest to provide food for ourselves and those around us, we’ve taken chickens with breasts so big that they’d be well suited for Hollywood and thrown them into the forest to “behave naturally.” It’s a case of doing the right thing with the wrong bird. The Cornish Cross flock from this year (and certainly their Jumbo brethren from last) may just be the wrong birds for us.
If nothing else, this has spurred our interest in finding a heavy meat bird that’s well suited to this environment. We’ve discussed finding a bird that we can sustain-ably (both meanings of the word) raise in the way that we think is “right.”
Oh, and in case you find green meat in a “free range” roaster, from our farm or another, it isn’t spoiled, it isn’t poisonous or bad to eat… in fact it may actually be more “green” than you’d thought.
This last winter, I decided to raise “meat birds” alongside our flock of egg laying chickens. We’ve always been aware of our food sources and since we started raising chickens, I’ve become increasingly reluctant to purchase chicken from grocery stores. Even the ‘upper crust’ retailers including PCC Natural Markets and Whole Foods (affectionately and accurately called Whole Paycheck) who tend to carry products claiming to be natural, organic, free-range, pastured, massaged, and pampered couldn’t assuage my guilt. I knew how our “egg birds” were treated, with table scraps and forage, wandering wherever the bugs and slugs took them. I couldn’t convincingly conjure that image to match even the boutique brands of butcher-wrapped breasts or thighs. Sure, some are better than others… but they’re still raising thousands of birds. Scale and cost always have trade-offs.
It’s worth a brief aside on my perspective on raising animals, commercially, as pets, for byproducts, or for personal consumption. In the past few years, there have been vast numbers books written encouraging people to be more aware of what they eat. Several of them, including the works of poster boy Michael Pollan, talk about the buzzwords, laws, politics, marketing, and myths behind the meat we buy. Most of what I’ve read reinforces my motto. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but it works for me.
I strive to provide a situation where the animal can behave the way it wants to behave.
Rephrased, this aids in my decisions about what I eat: “was this animal allowed to behave the way it wants to behave? The way it would without people here?”
If you’re eating a chicken, did it freely roam and scratch the soil for bugs? If you’re going to spread chevre on a piece of toast, was it milked from a goat that wandered and grazed on a variety of foods? Was it allowed to climb on rocks or stumps?
This more than anything else cuts through much of the complexity of the decisions we have to make about animal treatment. This question, ultimately, is why our freezer if full of our chickens. Research into the producers whose chicken is available in retail around us left me uncomfortable with the answer to that question. In the best cases, the answer was inconclusive. In others, it was deceptive. Most labels follow the “letter of the law” and use phrases that conjure sunny grass filled pastures with animals frolicking free and grazing on dandelion greens and wildflowers. The “letter of the law” allows for some pretty loose interpretations of the words “free range” and allows for liberal use of unregulated words like “natural, pasture raised, and antibiotic free.” While the picturesque scenery and accompanying language on the label is nice, it probably bears little resemblance to the warehouse where that McChicken was raised.
So… we decided to raise chickens for food. In another post, I’ll delve into some of our experiences.

While picking out the farm property/house, obvious points of interest were the electric, water supply, sewer, water heating, and house heating. I think about each of these as “supply systems” and have been working to build plans to improve the “sustainability” of each.
The term “sustainable” used in marketing misses the mark when used to describe our goals.  Yes, we want what we do to have a minimal ecological footprint and examine the source, transportation, and materials used to produce what we buy… but that’s not the only way I’m using the word. I want our “supply systems” to a) help us survive (supply clean potable water, keep us from freezing, keep us out of the dark, etc.) and b) require little input to continue function.

sus·tain·a·ble [ s? stáyn?b’l ]
1. able to be maintained: able to be maintained
2. maintaining ecological balance: exploiting natural resources without destroying the ecological balance of an area

My primary focus for the past year has been on water, electric power (for lighting, cooking, computing and entertainment), and heating. The house is on Puget Sound Energy utility power, a well, and septic tank. It has forced-air electric heat, a small Jøtul wood stove, and a big propane hot water heater.
I posted about my water woes in December, but haven’t posted the full impact that this had on our electric consumption. The shocking thing to me is how much of our electricity usage is driven by our water consumption. The well is fed by a 79 foot deep 1.5HP submersible pump and a 9 amp Franklin Electric pump control box. To put this in perspective, that’s the equivalent of flipping on 10 100 watt light bulbs, when it runs! For much of the month of December, the pressure switch was misadjusted and even when working property, we were running the water to try to clear the sediment out of the lines. The effect is clearly visible in the “January 09? bill. What’s going on in that Jan-Apr 08 timeframe?! Our well was broken. There was a crack in the pipe leading from the well to the house. That was fixed in late Feb. and you can see the drop in usage immediately after.
 
My goal for the summer is to draw less than 500 kWh/month. To do this, it’s going to take some diligence, but I think it’s doable. The house has several very large skylights that almost eliminate the need for interior lighting until after sundown. We put a clothes line, last summer and that should supplant our clothes dryer. We’ll probably even use the solar oven (caramelized onions, Israeli cous cous, and lentils work well).
I’ll post again, about our overall energy conservation (and which definition of that word I’m using) and some more metrics another day. I also endeavor to post more about the rest of our “supply systems.” I have to run, though… there’s a light on in the kitchen.

[What follows is a relatively unfiltered description of our experiences slaughtering 14 Jumbo Cornish Cross hens that we’d raised with the intent of humanely raising and slaughtering chickens for meat. My descriptions of “the act” itself do not provide any detail beyond what is required to convey the actions we took. The accompanying images are really no more graphic than you’d see at a neighborhood butcher’s shop with a few exceptions: Americans aren’t accustomed to seeing their food with the head and feet still attached.
Consider that this is a very humane version of what occurs with the prep of the meat you eat. I encourage you to read on and contemplate the choices you make with your food.]
A dull ache in every vertebrae of my back, my calves are burning, and I can’t move my neck. We’re standing over the cutting board, on opposite sides of the kitchen counter pulling off crispy bits of skin, white and dark meat, and shoveling it into our mouths. Just a bit of butter, salt and pepper at 350 in the convection oven and it tastes like this? This is amazing. Ouch, my neck.

An hour before, we were in the front yard off the edge of the driveway gutting this same bird. There’s no way I thought I’d bring myself to eat it today. Following the visceral, bloody, and somewhat disturbing experience, I was left with passable knowledge of chicken anatomy and a freezer full of vacuum sealed whole birds, halves, quarters, parts, and offal. Over the course of two days we slaughtered 14 Jumbo Cornish Cross chickens. Some parts of the process are pretty nasty and I was pretty sure I’d spoiled my appetite for poultry for the foreseeable future. But here I was… eating the chicken I’d just killed… and it was easily one of the tastiest things I’d eaten in a long time.
Having slaughtered a rooster, last year, we changed our approach. We learned a lot in the slaughter of Bucket. I quite simply hacked off his head with a big sharp chefs’ knife coming down on a stump. The results were pretty messy, as the involuntary flapping made it tough to hang onto him. The scalding water was too hot and had actually started to cook the meat. We devised a plan, learning from experiences and a fair amount of reading. We were ready.
Slaughter day. We woke up early and started the prep. Big Rubbermaid tubs, a folding table (our kitchen from Burning Man), a large propane burner and 30 quart stock pot, ice, some really sharp knives, cutting boards, Latex gloves, 5 gallon buckets, 1 gallon Ziploc bags, and some trash bags. After working through some kinks (cone too big, angle of cutting boards wrong, broken thermometer, water too hot, water too cold, need some chairs, better knife needed for this or the other, ran out of propane on this tank, need another bucket, etc.), the next two days followed the same pattern, one or two birds at a time.

I built a small cone out of some galvanized roof flashing and a couple small bolts. The cone was affixed to the tree, with a 5-gallon bucket hanging below it. At first catching one bird at a time was easy, there were 14 of them and they were, I think I mentioned this once or twice, lazy and fat. I entered their little pasture, walked up and grabbed one. Walking back, I’d put it upside down through the cone, holding the feet, wait for the bird to calm down (the cone seemed to have this effect on them), and with the sharpest knife we own, cut through the jugular vein on the side of the neck. The blood would run down into the bucket suspended below, and half a minute later, the bird would pass out. This method is similar to the slaughter outlined in the Koran in preparation of “halal” meats.

While there is very little literature on humane slaughter of fowl, I endeavor to end the lives of any animals I kill in the most humane way possible. I’ve had a few muted debates with friends about the concept of “humane slaughter” and, while I agree the phrase is material enough for several comedy routines, it captures what I’m trying to do. Why raise an animal in a humane way, only to end its life in fear? Dr. Temple Grandin is an expert on humane slaughter of livestock and, while most of her work is geared toward large mammals, I found much of her writing useful. She’s published some simple guidelines, many of which seem like common sense (keep herd animals together as long as possible, don’t let them witness the slaughter of another, etc.), but are useful when considering what we’re doing and why. The method we chose for slaughter is condoned, by her, for most animals. She’s a really interesting person and I highly recommend looking her up, even if you’re only marginally interested in slaughter; she’s written books on autism and has a very unique first-person perspective on the topic.

After the bird fell unconscious, I’d tighten my grip on its feet. “Death throws” are involuntary muscle spasms that cause the bird to flail about (the source of the phrase “like a chicken with its head cut off”) for 15-20 seconds. The cone contained the wings and held them against the body, which made this easier. The bird was dead, now.

We’d laid out our workspace in such a way as to let us progress with each of the bird through “stations,” each with a separate purpose. While I have the strong urge to define the process with a flow chart, swim lane diagrams, input and output charts, and SLAs, it’s pretty simple:

• Dead chicken goes into 140° Fahrenheit water and sits for 30 seconds. This loosens the feathers for plucking.
• Hot wet smelly chicken (smells like a wet feather pillow covered in chicken poop) goes into Rubbermaid tub filled with ice water. This keeps the chicken from cooking and helps to loosen the feathers. We occasionally had 3 or 4 floating around in the ice bath, gruesome looking.
• Pull a wet cold chicken out of cold water tub and starts plucking into a second Rubbermaid tub. This is much harder than it seems like it should be and my ex was much better at it than I.
• When the majority of the feathers were off, the chicken would be moved to the first of two cutting boards. Pinfeathers and as much stubble as can be pulled off is; wingtips are a particular bitch.
• On the same cutting board, I’d cut off the head (sharp knife, lots of pressure) and the feet. I got good at taking off the feet, at the knees, using a sharp knife I’d pop the tendons and separate the cartilage.
• Feet get the ‘skin’ and ‘toenails’ pulled off. The feet are a great reminder of the animals’ prehistoric roots… more reptilian than bird.
• Feet go into a bag for stock.
• Bird moves to second cutting board. At this point, it looks almost like the chicken you would buy in a store.
• Gutting the bird takes a little bit of time, though I got much faster by the end of the second day. In short, I start at the top, free the “top organs” and then do the other end.
  • The trachea and esophagus can be pretty easily freed from the spinal column with hands. On day one, we didn’t feed the birds, and the crop was small and easily freed. The “crop” is a small sack that contains all the food the chicken has recently eaten. Think of it as a squirrel’s cheek pouch, it allows the chicken to take in more than the digestive system can handle. Day two, we fed them and the crop was huge and messy. Did I mention that these chickens really ate a lot?
  • I would hang the legs of the bird off the table, over a 5 gallon bucket, cut a circle (or modified square, usually) around the “vent” (aka. butt), grab around the vent and pull. Put bluntly, this is nasty. I was basically pulling the entire digestive system of a chicken out, through its butt. It smells pretty strongly. I can’t describe the smell, other than to say it smells like chicken guts.
• There’s a lot of cleanup on the bird that occurs at this point, too. I pack the livers, gizzards, and hearts into an “offal” bag. I hope to make some pate or a terrine; I tried each of these fried, that weekend, and couldn’t stomach it. The smell was… too familiar. Discarding the rest, including lots of little bits that took time to get out (lungs, for instance).
• What’s left is exactly what you’d get if you bought a whole chicken at the store. The only notable difference is that the neck has a little extra skin left on it. We either froze them like this or broke it down further to breasts, thighs, wings, etc.

Wednesday afternoon, I found myself kneeling in a 3×5 foot shed with a 1500 watt space heater between my legs, a small LED flashlight in my teeth, and my back up against a propane powered hot water heater. The majority of the words coming from my mouth were expletives. Occasionally dashing out of the shed around to the front of our house and shouting, “TURN ON THE BATHTUB!” and running back to the shed. This continued for close to two hours. When I returned to the house my knees and back hurt.
You might ordinarily assume that my behavior was a result of mental illness, some bizarre prayer ritual, or a really quirky exercise routine. In this instance, though, I was attempting to return water service to our house.
The extraordinarily low temperatures we’ve had over the past few days froze a few of our pipes, including those surrounding the well pump pressure switch.
The pressure switch regulates the operation of our submersible well pump, based on the pressure that’s built up in two 75G tanks and the house pipes. By design, when the pressure drops below 35/40 PSI, the ‘cut in’ function of the switch is triggered and the pump runs until the pressure switch reaches the ‘cut out’ pressure (~60 PSI, in our case). It’s how our “water pressure” (at the faucet) is maintained.
Early Wednesday morning, the shower died halfway through the morning routine… it just stopped. We came to the conclusion that the water mains from the pump had frozen. We relocated a small space heater from the greenhouse to the garage, aiming it at the exposed galvanized pipe, and took off for work. We returned at 4 in the afternoon (around sunset) and my adventure ensued. After presumably thawing the pipes with a space heater, we still faced no water pressure in the house. I checked the well house and discovered some very chilly pipes, including drain valve that was frozen solid. Moved the space heater, again, this time to the well house… after the drain valve had visibly thawed, I flipped an L-shaped bail to reset the pressure switch. The encouraging snap of an electric arc and the needle moved from the ambient tank pressure (30 PSI) straight up to 70 PSI, only to drop back to 30, a second later. Another attempt with similar results.
After re-reading some information I’d found a few months back and a call to my father, who lived off-grid for 12 years and just knows this stuff, I was determined to figure it out. That’s where this post began… on my knees, with a small wrench, trying to adjust the ‘cut in’ pressure downward enough to get the pump running without hand-holding. I gave up. I spent some time with my new friend this morning, then, around noon, caved and called a service company. Late afternoon, I called to see if they were going to be able to make it. “Sure, he’s in your area and should be there in a couple hours.” Around 7:30, I talked to the service guy and he made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to attempt to drive out into the sticks with the roads unplowed.
Thursday, we awoke to 7 inches of snow. Determined to gain running water, again, I decided to spend some more quality time with my friend, the pressure switch. There’s no way these ‘snow wimp’ service guys were going to drive out here. I was convinced that something had become lodged under the diaphragm/pressure plate and it just needed to be cleaned.
After all, I’m a smart guy and somewhat mechanically inclined, right? This is what I wanted, right? Yeah, we’re working to become self sufficient and I just need to persevere, right?
I flipped the breaker to kill the pump circuit and made my way out to the well house. I took a picture of the switch without the cover, so I’d remember the wiring. 20 minutes later, I’d pulled the wiring off the switch, drained the last couple gallons out of the well tanks, and unscrewed the switch. I brought it inside, removed the screws from the bottom, pried the switch open, and pulled out the rubber diaphragm. No gunk. Huh… there goes that theory. I reassembled it, put it back in place, reconnected it to the house wiring, flipped the circuit back on, and went back out there.
After an hour of futzing with the two adjustment screws, I had it cycling pretty reliably. The radical change in pressure had shaken loose some rust and corrosion, but hell, it’s water, right?
Punchline to the story? Sometime between the pipes freezing on Wednesday morning and this Thursday afternoon, we ran out of propane. The company that we’d contacted to refill the tank every 2 months, somehow lost our account. So, after all this hoopla, I still don’t get a hot shower.
A few things I’ve learned from this:

• The pressure switch is a really simple and elegant electo-mechanical device.
• Having the propane hot water heater and well tanks in the same shed is a poor idea. Too little ventilation and the thermocouple on the water heater will burn out. Too much and the pipes/tank/switch will freeze in the winter.
• We really could survive here with very little from the outside (no, we’re not survivalists). While it’d degrade our quality of life some, we could boil water from the creek on the wood stove.
• 3 conductor 10 gauge romex is a pain in the butt, in enclosed spaces.
• Sometimes, even paying someone to do it doesn’t mean it’s going to get done. Just do it yourself, city boy.

A couple helpful links:
http://pumpsandtanks.com/faq_page.htm
http://www.inspect-ny.com/water/Water_Pump_Control_Repair.htm