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By Root 546 0

than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild. Before I came to Polyface I’d read a sentence of Joel’s that in its diction had struck me as an awkward hybrid of the economic and the spiritual. I could see now how characteristic that mixing is, and that perhaps the sentence isn’t so awkward after all: “One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

TWELVE

SLAUGHTER

In a Glass Abattoir

1. WEDNESDAY

Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were “processing” broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens.

For all the considerable beauty I’d witnessed following a food chain in which the sun fed the grass, the grass the cattle, the cattle the chickens, and the chickens us, there was one unavoidable link in that chain few would consider beautiful: the open-air processing shed out behind the Salatins’ house where, six times a month in the course of a long morning, several hundred chickens are killed, scalded, plucked, and eviscerated.

I said this link was “unavoidable,” but of course most of us, including most of the farmers who raise food animals, do our very best to avoid thinking about, let alone having anything directly to do with, their slaughter. “You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

The killing of the animals we eat generally takes place behind high walls, well beyond our gaze or ken. Not here. Joel insists on slaughtering chickens on the farm, and would slaughter his beeves and hogs here too if only the government would let him. (Under an old federal exemption, farmers are still permitted to process a few thousand birds on farms, but most other food animals must be processed in a state or federally inspected facility.) Joel’s reasons for wanting to do this work here himself are economic, ecological, political, ethical, and even spiritual. “The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview,” he’d told me the first time we’d talked; by the end of the morning I had a much better idea of what he meant.

WEDNESDAY MORNING I managed to get up right on time—5:30 A.M., to be exact—and to make my way to the broilers’ pasture before the interns had finished chores. Which today, in addition to watering, feeding, and moving the chickens, included catching and crating the three hundred we planned to process immediately after breakfast. While we waited for Daniel to show up with the chicken crates, I helped Peter move pens, a two-man operation in which one man slides a customized, extrawide hand truck beneath the pen’s back edge (thereby raising it up on wheels), while the other grabs a broad loop of cable attached in front and slowly drags the pen forward onto fresh grass. The chickens, familiar with the daily drill, scooted along in step with their slowly moving mobile home. The pens were much heavier than they appeared, though, and it took every ounce of my strength to drag one a few feet across the uneven ground; “moving the broilers” was not as easy as Joel had made it sound or the interns had made it look, but then, I wasn’t nineteen, either.

After a while Daniel drove up on the tractor, towing a wagon piled high with plastic chicken crates. We stacked four of them in front of each of the pens housing the doomed birds and then he and I got to work catching chickens. After lifting the top off the pen, Daniel used a big plywood paddle to crowd the birds into one corner, so they’d be easier to catch. He reached in and grabbed a flapping bird by one leg and flipped it upside down, which seemed to settle it. Then, in a deft, practiced move, he switched the dangling bird from his right hand to his left, freeing his right