Farewell

On my penultimate livestock day i was told id be working with poultry, i wasn't best pleased as id been excited for the day as it was the last one with my livestock buddy and we had planned to have a bit of fun and play with the piglets. But in the end it worked out well and i managed to do everything and im pleased i had some experience with the chickens as i hadn't up until that point and i did want to work on all aspects of the farm. The day i was working we had to move 200 chickens from one area to another and so we set about catching them, well actually Csilla, the poultry pro intern, caught them and them handed them to me and i carried them to the hutch for transporting, she was passing me about 4 or 5 at a time and they weren't that small so it was difficult to keep them from flapping away, some of them were quite flexible too and were straining upwards to try to peck at my fingers. We seemed to be cramming quite a few into one hutch so we stopped and moved them, unfortunately on the short journey one of the chickens didn't make it, we think it had suffocated, it was amazing for me to think that the amount of chickens we had in the hutch for just a very short time is the usual amount for the that sort of space for battery hens where they spend all their time, its just such an awful existence. I think that if they are going to have quite a short life they may as well get to enjoy that time, and our chickens generally do, they have so much space to roam and do as please for much of the time. I also had to help clean out one of the roosting sheds which id been told wasn't a nice job as it smells like ammonia. I was given a set of white overalls and a face mask to keep the dirt (and lice apparently) off me and the smell from getting up my nose but once i got in there and started mucking out it was too hot to keep the mask on and when i took it off i realised that it didn't smell at all so i must have got a good one, lucky me! We were also collecting eggs as we went along and had to remove the hens from each little box to get them which most of them didn't seem to mind and didn't even flap when i reached in, one of the chickens laid an egg in the poultry guys' hand and he passed it to me, it was still warm so it sort of felt like a fresh boiled egg and it was perfectly clean.

On the last three days that i spent at the farm 3 sows farrowed each producing more than 10 piglets, im really starting to worry about how many pigs are on the farm and the amount of pork that is coming back that they just can't sell. The farmer is reluctant to sell the meat elsewhere and so it all just comes back to the farm and a lot of it is kept in freezers which are becoming increasingly full. Most of the piglets were fine but there was one runt in a litter that a had a cut so deep you could see its jaw bone and i found a very little dead one in a growers pen that the growers were trying to eat so i removed it. Pigs seems to like to take themselves away from the group to die.

I did on the whole really enjoy my time at the farm, there were definate ups and downs but it was a very unique experience and im so glad that i was able to do it. I would have liked do some work in the horticulture department as that seemed to be very well organised and there was always something new going on but i was there for a limited time and was already doing quite a few different things.

I enjoyed my livestock best of all as it was so unlike anything i had done before or what i ever imagined i might end up doing and yet it was so interesting and fun and challenging. I never got over my fear of the bigger animals but i did work with them when i had to and tried not to chicken out of certain tasks.

I will miss the interns so much as they were such a lovely bunch of people and there was a community spirit that made even the hardest days bearable, it was the kind of atmosphere id hoped for whilst assuming it could never actually be like that, i was really taken back by the kindness and good humour of every single one of the interns.

Thanks for reading

K