Hickman Family Farms in Arlington, AZ lost around 166,000 laying hens in a fire on Saturday.?ÿ What a mess.?ÿ With apologies to Herb Morrison for stealing a quote from his May 6, 1937 broadcast during the very hot landing of the Hindenburg, "Oh, the humanity!"
Although this would be a perfect time I will offer up no fried chicken jokes.?ÿ Not even a boiled egg joke or two.?ÿ What a damned mess.?ÿ And this hit me harder than I would have thought.?ÿ I'm guessing that is because of my lifelong respectful relationship with the simple 'yard bird'.?ÿ
We always had chickens.?ÿ As a mere tyke I remember snatching my own breakfast from the chicken coop.?ÿ I remember watching my granny grab a fat old hen for tomorrow's Sunday dinner.?ÿ She cheated.?ÿ She used a straightened out wire clothes hanger.?ÿ But the results were always magnificent.
And as Holden and I grew older we were handed the manly responsibility of providing fresh fowl for the table.?ÿ "Catch us a chicken and I'll make dumplings" was all it took.?ÿ It's hard to believe but my tracking and hunting skills were learned from an old woman that came to the territory in a buckboard.?ÿ God bless you Granny.
If you were ever lucky enough to have to pluck and clean your own dinner you would know what I was talking about.?ÿ Plucking a chicken took a little time.?ÿ Gutting them only took a second with a good pocket knife.?ÿ And with the aid of modern technology (a garden hose) and a clean up crew (two dogs) there was no trace left of the deed.
Once you hand pluck a chicken there's plenty of feather stubble left on the carcass.?ÿ This is then easily removed by an open flame.?ÿ Granny wouldn't allow anybody to singe chickens on her stove in the kitchen.?ÿ Instead we used a two-burner gas cooktop she had on the back porch by her wash tubs and wringers.?ÿ That and a huge pot provided hot water for washing.?ÿ The burners were perfect for scorching off the chicken's pin feathers.?ÿ Which brings me back to the fire...the smell is obnoxious.?ÿ Burning hair times 10.
I can't imagine what 166,000 full-growed hens smelled like as they burned alive.?ÿ I bet the fireman that responded will tell stories for years.
So I guess if there is anything good to come from the fire at the Hickman Family Farms is that every pot-lickin' dog and coyote in the county will be well fed for the next week or two.?ÿ 😉
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Around here, they incinerate this kind of thing. It stops disease. So says the Guberment.?ÿ
So, the dogs go hungry, coyotes don??t benefit.?ÿ
o well. I don??t understand many things. If it??s ok for Baptist??s to eat, why not coyotes?
N
If this was like the gasoline retail market there would be a 20 cent per gallon increase nationwide overnight. ???? ???? ???? ???? ?????ÿ
How did the fire start? Anything that burns down like that in Fl is automatically classified as arson and thrown to the appropriate insurance detective. ?????ÿ
I've seen antique plucking machines in museums but we never had any such contraption.?ÿ I quick visit to YouTube provided this delightful PSA of something called a "Mother Plucker".?ÿ Enjoy.
OMG, you??re not thinkin?? of a ??temporary modification? to SWMBO??s washing machine to pluck yardbirds, are you? Jumpin?? Jesus, have you forgotten the dishwasher catastrophe? If so, you are living proof of a glutton for punishment. ?????ÿ
@nate-the-surveyor There used to be (maybe still is) a chicken farm in South Georgia that had a pretty neat way of disposing of dead chickens.?ÿ When you're raising thousands at a time you're going to have a certain amount dead chickens.?ÿ He put a fence around one of his ponds and started raising alligators.?ÿ When a chicken died the carcass went to the gators.?ÿ After a certain amount of time he harvested the gators for meat and the skins.?ÿ That's what I call efficiency.
Andy
@flga-2-2
Nope.?ÿ I'm a retired Okie nowadays and live in town.?ÿ I buy my chickens wrapped in cellophane.?ÿ The only clue to my upbringing would be to catch me peeing behind the garage when I'm mowing.
Besides, I have 4 Australian Shepherds.?ÿ Chickens wouldn't last long around here.?ÿ And if any of them did I damned sure wouldn't be able to catch them.?ÿ?ÿ
I'd never seen that kind of machine, but did know people who had a pucker that looked like a motorized tire with rubber tongues on it, for you to hold the carcass against.
Fifty years ago commercial turkey packing plants had huge rubberized machinery that plucked the turkeys regardless of size as they came through hanging from a chain conveyer system.?ÿ A couple of ladies inspected what came through to pluck what few feathers/pieces remained.?ÿ Imagine 15,000 per day.
As to the fire, this was a frequent problem in the early days of confined hog growing facilities.?ÿ Insulation of the structures was vital to profitability, especially in more northern climates.?ÿ Too late it was discovered that certain relatively inexpensive insulation material had a fire spread rate that was insane.?ÿ If a fire started at one end of a 400 foot-long building the fire could be at the other end of the building in only a handful of minutes turning the entire building into an inferno.?ÿ Many thousands of hogs died before that variety of insulation was removed and replaced.
I can't imagine a 400' long burning barn full of hogs all at once trying to get to daylight.?ÿ Something like Black Friday at Wal Mart....sheesh.?ÿ?ÿ
Funny "plucked turkey" story:
Years ago my neighbor was told by his wife to run to a friend's place and pick up the turkey for Thanksgiving.?ÿ I went along because we needed more beer.?ÿ We got to where the turkey was at and found out the turkey was "on the hoof" with gobble intact.?ÿ
We were all standing around the pickup jawing and drinking beer.?ÿ The fully feathered twenty pound tom was getting to be a handful to hold so my neighbor tied his leg with some baling twine and tied the other end to his bumper hitch.?ÿ Problem solved.
After a half hour of a seriously beer infused bull session we decided to "bet back to the house".?ÿ Neighbor and I hopped back in the truck and took off down the road...a recently graveled road.?ÿ About 5 minutes later he slammed on the brakes and looked over at me and exclaimed, "The turkey!"
We hopped out to find one totally nekkid turkey at the end of the bailing twine.?ÿ A closer inspection revealed he was still alive but unwilling to move.?ÿ We tossed him in the back of the truck and headed on.?ÿ I asked my neighbor if he was worried that the turkey might jump out.?ÿ
He told me he thought the turkey was probably pretty happy just to be laying there... 😉
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Did the writers for the Chevy Chase and the dog scene in "Vacation" contact you for ideas??ÿ If so, I hope you were well paid, in beer or otherwise.
I am reminded of an "egg factory" that I visited once in the 1980's. Lots of cages with augers and conveyors for feed, eggs, and waste. The electrical wiring was perhaps suitable for your average shed, but should have been in sealed boxes here because the fumes from the chicken waste had corroded all the copper in the junction boxes.?ÿ I figured it was an electrical fire waiting to happen.
There were other problems, too. The reason I was there was that a friend of a friend lived next door to it, and had talked three of us engineers into trying to help the owner figure out problems with a backup power generator.?ÿ It appeared to be WW II surplus, with a huge diesel engine and wired to a transfer switch that they would pull if the REC power went out.?ÿ They had tried to use it once, and burned out a lot of motors, and we were trying to figure out why.
We looked over the wiring inside the generator, and found a rat skeleton next to a chewed wire. Lots of other bad insulation and flaky controls, too.
After some cleaning up and taping bare wires, we hooked up some instrumentation and had the owner run the machine.?ÿ There wasn't a proper muffler on it, and it was LOUD. There was no tachometer on it, just a vibrating reed frequency meter that read 55-65 Hz. He cranked it up until the frequency meter seemed to indicate 60 Hz, but our measurements said 40 Hz.?ÿ The vibrations of the engine were tickling the vibrating reeds.
We had him rev it up until we read 60 Hz on our instruments, and the reeds also gave a solid indication we were on frequency, much stronger than the vibration before. We couldn't yell loud enough to communicate over the roar. After he shut it down, he said he had never heard it run that fast. That explained why motors burned out.?ÿ They draw far too much current at low frequencies.
We probably wouldn't have had him start the engine if we had done a proper examination of it first.?ÿ We learned there were five safety features; oil pressure, overspeed, over temperature, etc. and none of them were functional.
The farm got 3-phase power from the REC, of a form called high-leg delta.?ÿ It is an economical way for the utility to supply both 120/240 plus 3-phase for the big auger motors with only two transformers.?ÿ The generator wasn't wired for that, but rather balanced wye, so would cause additional lesser problems with wrong voltages.?ÿ The local handyman electrician who installed it apparently had no concept of that.
They had added the high leg to an older installation of 120/240 on the farm, by just adding an additional 1-pole switch (code would require all poles on one handle).?ÿ The owner told us that he had once shut off the switches in the wrong order, and burned out small appliances in the residence.?ÿ That made sense, because if only the high leg was hot, it could come through motors and put 190 volts on the outlets in the house.
We ended up writing the guy a letter listing the problems we saw, and wishing him good luck, as we weren't in business doing that kind of work.?ÿ I don't know if fire or finances caused him to go out of business, but when I drove by there a few years later the chicken houses were gone.
What a mess.?ÿ Lucky that place didn't kill somebody, let alone a mess of chickens.?ÿ
One of my more rural REC jobs was a new primary to a mobile home residence and a large barn.?ÿ Apparently the resident had attempted to rewire his existing service so he could run an electric Lincoln arc welder.?ÿ From the sounds of it he followed the wrong path like you described above.?ÿ When he attempted to fire up the arc welder he blew up all the wiring and appliances in the mobile home.
This was all to avoid the ATC (aid to construction) cost of having a proper primary circuit ran to the place.?ÿ ATC costs vary but his would have been a few thousand dollars.?ÿ Far less than the cost of rewiring the entire place and replacing all his appliances I'm sure.
Not to be macarbre but when Newcastle disease infects an area many coops have to euthanize all their hens.?ÿ It involves gassing them then using Bobcat skid steer machines in the coop with helpers shoveling the dead into the bucket for disposal in dump trucks where they are incinerated.?ÿ A friend that has a 160,000 coop (big) operation told me he pays big money for insurance against such calamities and it pays to insure for the odd year where he loses it all when he makes big bucks most years.?ÿ
Couldn't smell any worse than the amount of waste 166K birds would generate.?ÿ I remember driving by a cattle feed lot in SE Colorado a dozen years ago and almost barfed in my truck.?ÿ I have an incredibly strong stomach so few things get to me but that smell was unbelievable.
