Vegetarians Beware - Lisa and Rich go Butchering!

Photos (some grisly): http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=245930&id=510568119&l=8ffe137a8b

One of the main aims of this trip was to seek out as many new experiences as possible, particularly any we'd be unlikely to stumble across in our lives back home and regardless of whether we were confident the experience in question would be a good one. In other words, if it was new and unusual we'd probably give it a go. It was for this reason that we found ourselves spending the best part of a month working for stay at Soggy Bottom Holding - a rare breeds farm with its own on-site butchery, looking after the animals and, well, butchering them.

Oddly, looking after the animals proved to be more of a challenge than turning them into foodstuffs. Every day we had to feed the pigs (Saddlebacks, Tamworths and Iron Age) who lived in various free range enclosures/amongst the trees/on impossibly steep hillsides around the farm. Their diet needed to be protein heavy so that they could grow quickly and healthily, and as we were slap bang in the middle of the Waikato, NZ's dairy producing heartland, the cheapest way to do this was to go to the dairy factory down the road, buy a shipping container full of out of date McDonalds cheese slices and feed them to the pigs in blocks of 160. (For those who might occasionally partake of the odd Big Mac, be grateful for the relative freshness of your cheese slices as when they go bad they develop a delightful mucusy coating that probably wouldn't do much for your appetite). Each pig would get 2-3 blocks of Ronald's slowly decomposing rejects each day, as well as the odd bucket of windfall apples, leftover ciabattas from the local farmers market and the occasional camembert (these were well fed pigs...). Getting all this food up and down the hills to the pigs required the assistance of a Polaris Ranger and, at least during our stay, the skills of a world class rally car driver. It was a rainy mid winter when we arrived, which had turned the entire farm into an extremely hilly quagmire. The Polaris was essentially a quad bike with a canopy and the tracks we had to drive on were slick, muddy ruts so deep that once the Polaris' wheels were in them the vehicle operated like a self-driven rollercoaster - the ruts dictated the direction of travel and the only control the driver had was over the speed at which we slid down the track or struggled up it. This would have been terrifying at the best of times but once you threw in the vertiginous drops that lined the tracks, inclines more suited to downhill skiing and my personal favourite "the corner of death" (a 90 degree corner at the bottom of a hill, the track only inches wider than the Polaris and a 3 foot deep pothole along one side), you had the makings of an particularly grisly episode of "999."

We probably wouldn't have been so worried about riding around under these conditions if our good hosts, Jono and Sarah, had shown any flicker of concern for our safety. Instead they reacted with thinly disguised disdain when, on our second day, we timidly suggested that perhaps we weren't quite experienced enough to be whizzing across their hillsides without killing ourselves or at least severely damaging their shiny new Polaris. In fact, the whole time we were there we got the distinct impression that anyone other than a fully fledged farmhand would be looked down upon whilst working on their farm, and as time went on I began to wonder if we were being filmed for some kind of hidden camera show. Examine, if you will, an extract from my journal:

14 July 2010.

Today I:

* Felt extremely redundant pruning puny larch trees with shears while Jono scooted up and down the hill pruning 5 big cypresses with his chainsaw for every half a dead twig-fest I managed. At one point I was actually snapping the branches off with my fingers. And I'm pretty sure he only left the larches for me to do out of sympathy. Also spent significant amount of time dodging falling branches being lopped by said chainsaw and trying not to fall down the hill. Not finest hour.
* Collected 30 litres of fresh milk from Mike's dairy farm - more difficult than you'd think, decanting a 10 litre bucket of milk into several glass jars. Ended up with lots of milk on the floor and several further buckets of water needed to wash it to the drain. Then driving home without spilling milk all over back of car slight concern... Only casualty = cracked jar but miraculously no milk spilt.
* Was so cold I took warmth from (1) the ham scented steam rising from an industrial bain marie, and (2) a hairdryer.
* Tried to look compentent as I struggled across a marsh, jumped over a small stream, climbed a fence and clambered up a steep muddy hill to see a sow and 7 baby piglets (v. cute). All attempts undermined when on way back I sank my foot into the swamp and lost welly in it, which Jono came back and pulled out as I removed my mud covered sock and regained composure.
* Narrowly avoided death (again) driving the Polaris (against my better judgment) up and down mud-logged narrow hillside tracks, at times sliding sideways in a rally-car stylee, at others inadvertently pressing the accelerator at key braking moments.Scooped the remnants of a cow carcass from a wheelie bin and burnt it in an old metal drum. This involved making a wood burning fire, trying to haul dead animal bits out of the bottom of the bin without falling in or smearing self in blood and guts from the side of said bin, avoiding leaping fat-fueled flames from the fire and hoping the acrid smoke plume floated obediently down the valley and not towards the unhappy neighbours' house...
* Scrubbed blood from the wall of the butchery.
* Felt like Cathy in Wuthering Heights climbing great big flipping hill in the wind and rain in order to feed cows.
* Spent some time living out my worst nightmares and re-enacting the downside of Glastonbury by sliding around and getting stuck in mud while attempting to build a pig enclosure. Regretted offering to leave relative safety of the track to help build said enclosure when result was being asked to put up an electric fence running along the edge of v. muddy, v. steep hill. Felt quite proud after avoiding thorn covered tree trunks, thorn bushes and ankle breakage to actually erect said electric fence.
* Discovered how loud and blood curdling the sound of pigs squealing is, whilst feeling traumatised by having to help put nose rings into a penfull of piglets.

In other news, our composting toilet has now reached crisis pyramid situation, and is starting to encroach up the toilet chute. Not good. Smell ripening. Apparently Jono needs to remedy with raking... It is still v. cold in our hut and the shower has now run out of hot water.

After this, the time we spent in the butchery hacking up pig carcasses and mincing their internal organs seemed like a holiday. In fact, it was also really interesting, and because Jono butchers his meat himself we were able to get stuck in and actually feel fairly useful. We learned how to butcher a whole pig (honing our cleaver skills on several spinal columns), made sausages from start (manhandling buckets full of cow and pig bits into a giant mincer) to finish (cutting the sausage links into singles, arranging on polystyrene trays and operating the vacuum packer), cured, sliced and packaged bacon and prosciutto. The highlights for me, however, were making black pudding and brawn. The black pudding is one of the top sellers at Jono's market stall, and making it was like stumbling into a slasher movie. Large buckets of congealed blood, livers, kidneys, hearts and other organs are tipped into the mincer which, when switched on, spurts blood across the room and continues to do so for much of the mincing process. The end result strongly resembles a murder scene. The brawn making was more of an experiment really - one which I won't be repeating in a hurry as it involved spending the first part of a morning pulling the boiled flesh from a pig's head, trotters and tongue before pressing it into a loaf tin and leaving it to set. I can tell you that there is a lot of fat on a pig's head...

After 3.5 weeks we had definitely had some new experiences, most of them good but some more suited to the "once but never again" pile. A definite high point was helping to man the Soggy Bottom stall at the nearby farmers' market. After feeding the animals, rounding them up and sending them off to the abbatoir, chopping up the carcasses and turning them into sausages, roasting joints and bacon, packaging and labelling them we were now able to sell the finished products direct to the public, and in doing so we realised how much we'd learnt about our food and where it comes from. All in all, then, an interesting and eye-opening few weeks.