Episode 2 A Rainy Day for a Processing Tour

All right so a beautiful Wednesday. We had all sorts of plans on the farm to get some electric fence set up to move some cattle and get some farming done but good news is it's raining like crazy and we need the rain. It just meant that I had a change of plan. You need to figure it out or is it going to be a hot mess when we get back? So I'm now over here at the plant. I had to bring some stuff over here to get keep the guys going. So they're working on a basically a whole new system for our killing our pigs. So we're putting in a new skull tank, a new knock box, lift. So we've got all these new beams going in and so the guys are in here putting it together. I had to bring them some tools and kind of go over a few things with them. So this is our kill floor. It's set up really well for cattle and when we decided to be doing a lot of pig structure for the pigs. So now we're going to have two separate sides so we can change on a whim from going from cattle to pigs without having to do a lot of reconfiguring. You know we've been doing 40, 50 a day in here but we have the capabilities of doing a lot more and especially with the pigs. I think we're going to be hopefully doing you know 100 plus a day and we wanted to make sure all the infrastructure was ready and going for when we really get rocking and rolling. So continuing on with the tour a little bit we're going to go in look at our processing floor. So we've got a nice viewing area where we can see everything that the guys are cutting. So as you can see in here we've got our processing floor. We got guys in there on the table making cuts. We've got people over here setting up to run grind through in the grinder and you got a lot of trim sitting up there they're going to run it through and make ground beef. But it's kind of cool having this viewing area to be able to see what's all going on on the processing floor without having to get the gear on and actually go out there. All right so this area here is our loading dock. We have two truck bays so we can back up two full on semi trucks here and be loading them out and then we've also got a third bay for maybe smaller customers it's just a pallet or so we back them right up as well. Behind this door here is our packaging room. So as you can see backside of the processing they're in there putting everything in the packages putting them in the boxes and then putting them on pallets. So this is the freezers where we keep all of the frozen product. We've got it all categorized in here so we know exactly where everything is and when they're going to get ready to ship they can come right in here and take it right out and put it on a truck. This side of me here this is our value-added processing room. So this is the room that we do all of our jerky, we do all of our bacons, our hams, anything that's value-added gets we got two smokers in here so we smoke the product and then we package it and basically do all the prep work in here. So it's basically our ready-to-eat room when stuff comes out of here like the jerky it's ready to go to market ready to eat.