Well, thank goodness. Common sense has prevailed in the realm of Endeavour, Sask.
As CBC reported, in early August an occupational health and safety officer showed up at the Covlin farm and told them their kids, 8 and 10, weren't allowed to work in the licensed food processing plant on the family farm. Turns out they weren't 16, imagine that, and thus this was bad. The inspector couldn't have kids vacuum pack meat and do all sorts of other things farm kids are likely to do on the family farm, namely helping out with the chores. In this case, chores meant raising, butchering and processing free-range chickens, as CBC put it, "from pasture to fork."
This running of fowls ran afoul of rules, as they stand. So the Covlins ran to the CBC and cried foul.
By the end of the week the deputy minister was phoning them, saying yes, the kids could help out, but none of those neighbour kids under 16. So all's well that kinda sorta ends well, right?
Perhaps the 3,370 social media shares and 898 comments (as of Aug. 13) on the initial story might be something of an indication of the outrage felt by the people of a province that still feels it has ties, however tenuous, to the family farm.
The Saskatchewan Party, which has long claimed rural roots, must have had a canary over the slaughtering of chickens, since causing their base to fly into a frenzy would be akin to putting their necks on the chopping block. No wonder Saskatchewan Labour Minister Don Morgan was trying to smooth out the feathers from this dust up.
I was once one of those kids. We didn't have a licensed meat processing plant, but we did have our chicken coop. These chickens, massive "farm chickens" that made store-bought fryers look like sparrows, provided a substantial portion of our diet. Back in the early 1980s, we were probably about 50 per cent live-off-the-land sustenance farmers. The half-acre garden, moose and deer in the freezer provided the other portion of the daily menu not bought in the store.
As soon as I was big enough, my job was to carry (or drag) a three-gallon pail of chop from the old wooden chop bin to the chicken coop to feed the chickens. When it came time to butcher, I helped a little bit, but not too much, since well, I was chicken about killing chickens.
The motorized chicken-plucker was shared among several members of the family, and would make its rounds to our place when it was "off with their heads!" time. I can still do a good impersonation of what a chicken sounds like post-decapitation.
Step forward to today, and it appears we have health inspectors who seem to think milk comes from a box in the store, and farmers magically become farmers at the age of 16.
It wasn't that long ago I was reading that traditional fowl suppers are going the way of the Dodo bird because potlucks aren't prepared in commercial kitchens. This is something officials are now clamping down on. I wonder how Saskatchewan people survived after-church potlucks and fowl suppers for all these generations? The horror! We should all be dead by now from these dens of iniquity, the church basement and community hall.
The big birds in Regina had better realize that those few farmers remaining just might know what they're doing, otherwise they might find that their own goose is cooked.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
