Skip to main content

Surprise Inspections

Just after Christmas, we had a surprise inspection of our meat plant.  No big deal, except for one fact, our plant was closed.  Yes, it was a coincidence, but not entirely.  Our plant lead butcher is Muslim, I think I mentioned this before, and he brought two cousins and a friend to the business. All were trained as butchers, and all had extensive qualifications.  Apparently, it is not uncommon for generations of butchers.  Anyway, in early January there was a wedding in the family, and the entire team had been invited.  We discussed with Jennifer and decided that it was more convenient to shut down the plant for two days.  We don't operate near capacity anyway so as long as we had time to plan, and we did.  It caused no concern or problem on the farm.  Obviously, as the plant would be shut down we took the opportunity to do a deep clean and perform some necessary maintenance. 

When the inspector was on site, the refrigeration company was inspecting the systems and calibrating the thermostat.  Needless to say, he was not happy, but that's the consequence of a surprise visit.  Because so many of our butchers are Muslims, (about 70%) they follow the Muslim holiday calendar.  which means that on the high holidays, our plant is closed, guess what was the date of the second inspection....yep, again the plant was closed for the day.  It was midweek.  Now we did warn the previous inspector that our plant was closed during Muslim holidays, instead of Christian ones.  I guess it didn't register.  

Guess who showed up last Monday at 8 am.  Yep the inspector, this time everyone was around, actually it was a busy day for both teams.  We run a two-team 13-hour day schedule.  The first time starts around 6 am and the second team arrives just before 11 am.  We got top marks, which doesn't surprise me, our head butcher is driven and demanding with regards to meat handling hygiene.  

Still who will believe that in the space of 60 days, we had 3 surprise inspections.

Note:  As a company, we are indifferent to employees' holiday preferences, we provide a certain number of paid holidays per annum.  A farm is different than other businesses, animals have to be fed every day, cows have to be milked, and someone has to be there when calves or kids are born.  There is a real 24/7 responsibility towards our herd that dominates everything.    



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

Spray painting Taylor Swift G650 aircraft (updated)

 First, a bit of paint will not harm anyone.  These climate activities are going to learn two things in the next few days:  (1) Trespassing at an airport is a felony almost anywhere in the world.  That means criminal prosecution.   (2) removing paint from an aircraft is expensive.   So these climate activists are about to find out the reach of the British criminal system and it will not be pleasant, the UK has very strict laws about that, I would be surprised if cleaning the aircraft of all the paint will cost less than $100,000.     I am sure that when they planned (premeditation) this little show they had a very valid logic to doing this.  Tonight, they are probably realizing the depth of their troubles.   I understand that in the UK it's a minimum one-year jail sentence.    Also, good luck travelling with a criminal trespass charge against you.  I am relatively certain that the airline industry will slap them with no-fly status. Update;  It seems that what they threw on the airc
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more