Meat and skins

Gudrun and I were talking about the difficulty of leading one's animals to the slaughterhouse when she said that after more than twenty years on the farm, she had calculated that over 1500 of their animals had died for meat, and that is counting their first years on the farm when they could only afford to slaughter 5 pigs or so a year. In the last ten years, that number has risen to an average of 80.

This week was slaughter week, and a particularly busy one since Thomas drove 5 pigs and 2 lambs to the local, mid-sized abattoir in Venne. Mr Krischke only slaughters for organic farms and private animal owners, adding up to around 35 000 animals per year. Mondays are slaughter days, Tuesdays are for cutting carcasses to pieces, on Wednesdays liverwurst, brawn and black pudding are prepared, Thursdays are busy with sausage making and on Fridays, it's the cattle's turn to be carved and the smoking chamber is filled.

Upon arrival in the slaughter room, the animal is tied up and stunned with a bolt gun by Krischke himself. The floor being sloping, the animal falls easily to the side and can be attached to a chain by it's back hooves, whereupon the aorta is sliced open, the blood drained from the body and collected in a plastic tub. Head and hooves are removed before the skin is severed and attached to an electric skinner that pulls it off the body and rolls it up for the tanner to collect. The men cut the carcass open from tail to breast so that stomach, spleen and intestines can be taken out and finally half it length-wise to cut out the meat.

There's an article about the abattoir from 2013 that Gudrun kept alongside other newspaper clippings and which I used to write this. Gudrun told me that on the day the journalists came to visit the abattoir, one of the butchers accidentally stabbed himself in the stomach carving the meat. On slaughter weeks (every other week) Gudrun spends her afternoons chopping and preparing the lamb meat for the shop as well as for orders. I usually slice the salami, bacon and smoked pork ham with the electric slicer and Ute, the baker, takes care of the remaining pork meat.

To replace the slaughtered pigs Thomas has to buy piglets, often ten in one go. He came home with them on Monday after having revamped the sty.

Yesterday one of the workers drove with me to the tannery to pick up some sheep skins and kindly showed me around. Most animal skins get delivered at the beginning of the week by post and are immediately washed in big wooden drums, then the flesh and fat are raked off and the skins washed a second time. They then need to soak in a bath of salt, tanning agent and acid for a period of ten days, after which they are greased and hung up to dry. The skins go through a second wooden drum, filled with sawdust this time, and are finally stretched and softened before they are delivered back to the owner.

Abattoir and tannery jobs are far from being the easiest or most pleasant ones, but they play an important role for the farm and produce half of what is sold here, which is why I wanted to write about them.

We had a lot of fun harvesting the turnips yesterday, pulling them out and feeding the stalks to the pigs. I got to drive the tractor and Thomas was satisfied and relieved to get that off his plate. Today he wants us to finish sorting out the potatoes once and for all. Gudrun needs me to bake a cake for the shop, preferably using the poppy seeds which she is struggling to sell, and those are my plans for today!

Sascha xx