The Second Shift: Grinnell College student finds job processing chickens at B&B Farms

It’s easy to feel disconnected from the food we eat when chicken comes plastic-wrapped at Walmart or served hot on a plate at the dining hall. But for Brynna Schwab `28, helping process a chicken from start to finish was just a day on the job at B&B Farms five miles southwest of Grinnell. 

Schwab found out about B&B farms when her policy analysis class visited on a field trip, where they discussed Iowa’s water quality and nitrates found in the soil. The students were allowed to sample the water found at the farm and compare them to other water samples found in Iowa. 

“They kind of advertise to the field trip, ‘Okay, if any of you students want a job or are interested in doing this [processing chickens], then just call our line and we’d be happy to have you, because we’re preparing to get our chickens done soon,’” Schwab said. “And so I reached out, and they were happy to have me.”

B&B Farms is owned and operated by Barney Bahrenfuse and Suzanne Castello, who have been farming chicken, beef and soy for 30 years. They said they have been entirely organic for over a decade, and have hired student farm hands for much of that time.

“We’ve been to two college student weddings that both started over processing chickens,” said Bahrenfuse. 

Schwab said she arrives on site at 7 a.m. to begin work. She said someone would first slit the chickens’ throats and defeather them before handing them down the line.

“I would butcher them by taking out all their organs inside, prepping them, saving the livers, the hearts and the gizzards, and then separating those into buckets, because some people want those specifically,” she said. 

After butchering and saving the organs, Schwab said she would put the chickens in an ice bath where customers could select one they liked.

“You can’t buy smaller cuts,” said Bahrenfuse, who sells all of his and his wife’s organic meat products on site. “We just sell a quarter of beef, half a hog, a whole chicken.”

While the idea of butchering an animal might make some people queasy, Schwab said she wasn’t fazed.

“I’ve been hunting since I was about six years old, so I’ve butchered deer my whole life,” said Schwab, a native of Columbus Junction, Iowa. “My parents have butchered chickens, or been in families where they’ve butchered and ranched and farmed and things like that. So the concept was not too unfamiliar to me. I just had to put it into practice.”

Schwab processed about 120 chickens over the course of a 14-hour day. “It was meant to only take about eight hours, I roughly believe,” she said. “But due to some people calling off like the night before, one person having to leave part of the way through, I worked from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. that night.”

The process started months earlier when the chickens arrived in the mail as two-day-old chicks, said Bahrenfuse. 

The chickens spent three weeks in a chicken house until they feathered out, he said, and then were moved into the field in one of two partially enclosed movable chicken houses so that they would have constant access to fresh food on the ground.

As part of Schwab’s payment, Barenfuse and Castello gave her a chicken to take home. “They’re like, ‘we want you to take the biggest one home. You worked really hard,’” Schwab said. “It was absolutely delicious. I brought it back home with me during a break. It didn’t feel as grainy as regular chicken, but it just felt so much richer, and also, again, just the kind of, like, emotional satisfaction of having butchered it myself.”

While Bahrenfuse said demand for local, organic meat has been on the rise over the past several years, he also said the benefits of organic farming goes beyond taste. 

He said he’s extremely concerned about the impact of pesticide spray and agricultural runoff has had on soil quality, water quality and pollinator health.

“When I was a kid and you drove for an hour or two at night your windshield was covered in, splattered in bugs,” he said. “We are killing off the insects.”

But, in some ways, having a connection to your food is just as important for the self as it is for the environment, said Schwab.

“Having faced an animal from life to death and then to your plate is a really big thing that a lot of people are very emotionally disconnected from,” Schwab said. 

“I learned that lesson myself with hunting again, because I’ve done it since I was six years old, having been faced with the value of life and putting respect to that.”