Angel Arias Silk Tree Farm Reflection 2/26/13
*I will be posting reflections on my internship days at the farm, to paint a better picture for what is done here and how my experience as an intern on the farm is*
Today was my first real day at Silk Tree farm, so naturally I was expecting that it wouldn't be quite as work-filled as it might get later on. I almost hoped it would be the quite the contrary, because having a whole lot to do would be pretty nostalgic to other similar experiences at past LTIs, but it was still a pretty fun first day. Cathy showed me what they did for their morning chores, which consisted more or less of just feeding the animals and making sure they were well, she described that normally they did their morning chores earlier when they wake up, but they didn’t get the chance to do that today since they had to get a trailer for the pigs to be led into so they could bring them to be processed. I’ll get to that part later. We fed the goats, chickens, and pigs and then we headed inside, talked and ate a bit. We talked a lot about my project, which is something I am wanting very much to delve into, development-wise I mean. I think that I have a very healthy amount of research, and when I supplement all my knowledge with what I am also going to be learning at the farm – which I am sure will be vast, I’ll have a lot to tell. But having a lot to tell will mean nothing if I have no mode or plan with which to teach it. Which is why I want to really get on top of planning how I am going to teach it – but, I had been speaking to Cathy and since there is a lot that I will be doing on the farm, while I try to put this together there are other aspects that I will certainly attempt to add to my project that resonate with it, like figuring out how to make organic chicken feed, well, organically. I want to maintain a balance however, between development and research; I just hope that I manage it all well. After that (Which was a while), we had to prepare to get the pigs ready to be moved into the trailer, which meant we had to mark them with a, I think it was called a “livestock marker” or something along those lines. You’d use it to mark the animals, because when processing them, like many other processes the stock would have to be numbered and organized. While I am on this note, I might go on a bit of a tangent and talk about cut sheets. A cut sheet is a form that someone would fill out to signify which cuts of meat they’d like from an animal. So, say you wanted, I don’t know – bacon or something, you’d use the cut sheet to signify the kind of meat you wanted, how much of it you wanted, and there are other variables to it too, like how much to a package you want, and other specifications. But this goes to the customer, and then the seller can either sell some of the animal, or the entire animal, depending on what the customer chooses or what the seller and customer have agreed on, the seller, if they hadn’t sold the whole animal, could sell the rest of the meat somewhere else, like a farmers’ market. Now that that little distraction has been run through, the marking of the pigs, yes. You use the things that look like giant pastels (Though the texture was nothing like a pastel) and mark the pig with it. I am guessing this is also done so that they know which pigs are yours and which pigs aren’t, so we used a pink one, didn’t really know how well it would work, but tried anyway. They gave the first two digits to be marked (The processing facility, I mean) which were 90 but the other two were free to be chosen. 03 and 04 would be the other two, respectively, so after the first pig was nearly done being marked I decided I might try my hand at it. Oh yeah, and, pig pens tend to get very, very muddy due to the rooting that the pigs do. Not that I had a problem with that though, I’m not very skittish, especially around something like that. Also, these pigs seemed to have quite the infatuation with shoe-laces. A lesson that I had to learn the difficult way (I really must remember to bring boots next time or something). So three numbers had already been marked on the pig, I finished it up with a fantastic, grandiose rendition of a wonderful number “3”. Maybe that is a lie, between the shoelace biting, pig-shuffling and the odd feeling of being in an unfamiliarly muddy place I’d say that my three came out to be surprisingly average, maybe a bit too slim. But it wasn’t bad, and being in the pen was pretty fun, even though I got a bit dirty. To be expected, and it wasn’t as if I wore clothes I didn’t expect to get dirty so it was okay. It was nice, and after we’d marked them we had to get some fencing to kind of, get it around them and then lead them to the trailer. We bent it around to make an oval shape, unhooked the gate to the pen, and waited for one of them to walk out. We held the fence above them, and then we’d bring the fence down on them and walk them to the trailer. Ideally, that is how we’d hoped it would go anyway. Pigs are pretty strong creatures, more so than one might expect even. So instead of immediately walking underneath the fence like we hoped, the pigs instead started rooting all in the fresh, un-rooted land that lead to the fence, and they were doing for a bit. Guess it was because there was a whole bunch of food for them to find there so they were taking advantage of that. But eventually one of them came over, we clamped it down, and the pig was not happy. Pushing and shoving this way and that way, but it wasn’t too difficult to keep the pig in there, especially when there were three people. After some struggling, some more rooting, some trailer unlocking, and a lot of shuffling we got the first pig in there. Now, the second pig was less of a problem than the first, actually, after we got him in he was a lot more calm than the girl. He was fairly cooperative, save for the fact that he sometimes had spastically placed fits of rage. When that happened it might have been easy to control, but one person was unlocking the gate, so it was just the two of us holding it. When he went for the right and left sides, which were unattended, it was a bit nerve-inducing. We kept under control though, each time it happened. But the problem that we were having was that when we were trying to get the second pig up the ramp into the trailer, the first pig kept hobbling near the entrance, which is no good. If she got out, that would have been unfavorable, so we had to try to keep her on one side of the trailer while we tried to get the second pig up in there. But it was almost time for me to leave, so Cathy told me that they could handle it, I wanted to stay a bit longer to make sure that I could help out and the pig would get in there, but I had to go and catch the ride back. I hope that they didn’t have additional issues getting the pigs in there, I suppose that I will find out on Thursday.
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