Thermal shirts. That’s something I will miss when the power goes out and there’s paper bags on all the gas pumps. Yea, that’s totally off subject but my head is pretty random today.
A friend works for a guy who builds and repairs chicken houses. The chicken business is a funny thing – “chicken farmers” are really just cogs in a giant agribusiness machine. Say you own twenty or thirty acres and have a good history of paying the creditors and pleasing the boss. You go hat in hand to the big chicken corporations and beg to get in on their grower program. You put the family farm up as collateral and they send in the chicken house builders who slam up a couple of 400 foot long houses. Then the company has their chick makers deliver a shitload of peepers, and they start eating the feed that the company feed people deliver into the automatic feed hoppers. Basically, your job is to make sure the machinery stays running and pick up the dead birds everyday. The company’s computers send out the catcher teams at the appropriate times to load up the chickens and then the shit crew cleans out the barn and lays down new pine shavings in preparation for the new load of chicks on the way from the chick machine. The blessed cycle of all things chicken repeats endlessly… and when your two houses are making the company money they build you two more and two more after that, and when you have 8 houses you make enough money to buy another piece of property and make a new chicken world – with a crappy house slapped up on site to install the alcoholic you scrounge up to pick up the dead birds and call you if the motors stop running. Once upon a time I had a dream of being a chicken farm “manager” hehehe…
Until your chicken houses are almost paid for, then new regulations are implemented requiring an upgrade to the newest equipment that saves a couple of pennies per bird. Upgrade or loose money, and loosing money is not an option, it will be a breach of contract and Chicken Corp owns your farm. Sometimes the compost shed catches on fire and needs rebuilt. Maybe the house needs to be converted into a “black out” house – total darkness in the daytime and lights on at night. It’s a climate control thing y’know. Keep them inactive during the heat of the day since electricity for lights are cheaper than running the swamp coolers. At any rate the company sends out the builder crews and they gut whatever needs to go and slap in whatever the computer dictates is necessary for shareholder dividends.
This is where I come in.
Since “the farmer” could care less and the company doesn’t have the common sense of, say a flock of chickens, all the old tear out material is strewn all over the place waiting for the farmer to dispose of it. The farmer hates the company by this time and bitches at them to come clean up the mess. The company of course stalls as long as they can. This is a very nice window of opportunity for me to salvage buttloads of 2×4s, lots of 2×6s, metal roofing in damn near perfect shape, boards, chicken wire, odd hunks of wire, cable, rope, hard foam insulation and assorted scrap metal. What in hell I’m going to do with all these piles of tear out is a daunting prospect, but the goats are getting a new house at the very least. I got about 400 square feet of 1×6 pine boards that are going to make beautiful polished wood walls in the garage attached to the guest house. I’m just a junker, I guess. Last year there was a sawmill that went into operation and I hauled truckloads of offcuts and slab wood out of it before the place got torched and burned to the ground. Ha ha… this winter’s firewood is already done. This year will be shed building until my buddy looses his job or the wife says “no more piles”!
But what bugs me is that every day some bulldozer is digging a big hole to shove some chicken house tear off debris into just to get it out of sight. Thousands of square feet of insulation heading for a landfill. Acres of perfectly good metal sheeting sold off for scrap metal. Miles of board feet of dimensional lumber piled and burned. No fucking vision is suppose. I don’t see anyone else grabbing this free stuff, and my friend says he’s never seen a scrapper out on any of the jobs he’s been on.
Where are the fucking “poor”? Driving the bobcat scrapping chickenshit out of the house for 7.25 an hour. Catching birds for even less and inhaling all manner of foul crap blowing around. Driving some company truck full of some company shit to or fro just to keep the machine running. Waiting for a lucky break that gets you a “manager’s” job so you can send the wife to the chicken processing plant working a gut sucking tube in evisceration while you stay home sucking down beers and watching ESPN… on satellite tv.
See, I got to that bit after all! I was driving back home with a load of salvage lumber and began to notice that every dumpy house trailer in every dumpy mobile home park had a satellite dish turned towards Mecca 1 or whatever the silver god in the sky is called. Every damn one of them – I drove around in a couple of parks just to make sure. Aw, whatever. Dumping on the Tube Boobs is just too easy.
Man, I wish I knew how to find out where Mega Chicken Corporation is doing their upgrades! I could use a lot of used but useful material myself.
I once looked at a property that used to be part of the giant chicken agribusiness. It had the 400 foot long sheds, two of them. It was no longer in production. I passed on it because I couldn’t envision picking up the life of corporate chicken farmer, plus the previous owner had spread gravel all over the property for the feed trucks to drive up to the sheds. Anyway, the site was famous in local circles for one event that is still engraved in everyone’s memory: the Great Exploding Chicken Incident, circa 1994. It seems that one hot Yamhill County summer day the ventilators in the sheds blew a fuse. No one noticed it at first, and soon the chickens were dying by the hundreds. The owner got the fans going again, but too late: the situation got totally out of control, and every damn chicken on the property died. And then they all started decomposing. It stank up that whole corner of the county, and eventually the owner begged for help to bury the odorous mess. Pits were dug. Volunteers had to go into the sheds and load dead chickens into wheelbarrows and tractor buckets. And, likely as not, each time someone went to pick up a dead chicken, just the act of grabbing it would cause it to ‘explode’: the gases of decomposition had built up in the chickens, and just disturbing them by picking them up would tear the skin and release the gas. Ergo, exploding chickens. it was awful. I gotta say, those are real neighbors, to come and help with that situation.
I know what you are saying. I just found a local place that salvages greenhouses. I picked up 7 6′ x 24′ polycarbonate panels for $60 buck each. Now I can get to work on my greenhouse.
Would any be close to NE or NC Arkansas? Don’t mind doing a bit of recycling or salvaging myself.
Sorry Steph, it’s in NW Arkansas, but I know the chicken business is where you live, too. Ask around at the feed store about who builds chicken houses and follow the leads.
Didn’t think so, but just knowing where to start asking is a big help. There should be someone close because one of the realtor’s we met told us to get a load of chicken manure & till it in during the fall and we would have a good garden spot come spring. Can’t be too far away if that is considered good advice.
Great reminder that there is STILL stuff out there for the asking (if you know where to find it). For the first couple years when we had the farm, we scrounged fence wire (or whatever) to keep the goats in.
One particularly fine find consisted of the slightly rusty metal panels from supermarket shelving, all about 3 feet long and 2 feet wide. Talk about Hadrian’s Wall ! The goats never did figure a way to shinny up those slick metal shelves, stacked along nearly 2 acres of fenceline. Heh heh.