Job description

This position is in our small, on-farm 20C Butcher Shop here at Mace Chasm Farm. We are mainly butchering animals that were raised right here on the farm & we direct market our meats & eggs locally in the eastern Adirondacks through 3 Farmer's Markets, our Winter Delivery Route, Winter CSA, and stop-in sales here in the shop. We rotationally graze Katahdin sheep, Devon beef, heritage breed pigs, layer chickens, turkeys, and meat chickens. The farm & shop are run by a small crew - anywhere between 3 & 7 people, depending on the time of year. Being part of this crew, you will learn as much as you care to about Animal Husbandry and what it takes to operate a Livestock Farm.

Weekends are our main market days, and we butcher from Tuesday through Saturday. The farm also runs a Food Truck that serves up our meats along with neighboring veggies, cheeses, brews, and breads three times a week. One of our weekly events is Taco Thursday at the AuSable Brewery right across the street from our farm. Good times with a short walk home.

We live in an incredible place, and in a really cool community. There are awesome mountains, cold rivers, and a beautiful lake around us. This area suits people best who enjoy rural life. We are happy to field questions about what this area has to offer.

We are looking for someone with knife skills. Ideally, this hire would already be comfortable breaking down whole animals into retail cuts, making sausages, keeping the shop stocked, keeping track of orders, etc. We'd like to find someone who:

• is efficient & focused
• enjoys customer service & sharing insight into the products we're offering;
• is organized, tidy, attentive to details, and is consistently finding ways to make improvements;
• is into what we do here as a whole & likes farm life

Responsibilities (which are shared w/ rest of shop crew) Include:

• Planning production for the week based on what we have coming in to the rail.
• Ordering/harvesting fresh herbs for sausages.
• Breaking down whole animals
• Guiding Interns
• Keeping batch & yield records
• Keeping the Shop stocked for retail, while building inventory to take to markets.
• Making sausages & preparing the full gamut of cuts!
• Keeping an eye toward our food safety protocols and compliance with the regulations we work with here.
• Making stocks, rendering fats, smoking meats.
• Coming up with awesome ideas for products that our customers will like, and trying them out! In some cases, this will require some paperwork to obtain a scheduled process.
• Keeping the shop, equipment, & walk-in clean, organized, and in good repair.
• Updating and managing the online system we have for customers to place orders for drop-off. Packing orders on Fridays.

The Butcher Shop is in full swing Tues - Friday, with a wrap-up day on Saturday. Your days off would be Sunday & Monday. We make around 2-300 lbs of fresh sausages per week, and will usually have 2-3 pigs, lamb, and 1 beef on the rail to cut for the weekend markets. Chickens are harvested every other week in the Summer & Fall ( that's 10 processing days), and turkeys come in around Thanksgiving. Poultry processing is a routine team event, usually tackled by 5 of us for the day.

This is still a new business - 2016 is our fourth year here and we're still shaping our systems large & small on the farm, so it is important that people here be creative, pro-active, and engaged in that process.
We eat an awesome farm lunch together every day.

Compensation; $500/ wk plus housing & farm food.

We have on-farm housing at the moment, but are planning to shift to off-farm housing for next season. We try to be flexible and accommodating with regards to days off and time with visitors, etc. July, August, and September are crush-time, and extra days off are harder to schedule than during other months. In this region's economy, we have to make almost all of our bread and butter during the summer markets.

This job could be year-round or seasonal depending on your interests. Minimum commitment overall is May 2016-New Years Eve 2017. We're moving in the direction of an addition to the Butcher Shop of a Curing Space so that we can spend some of our winter months switching gears to making Salumi when the Summer pigs are ready but retail markets have slowed. We're not sure whether the addition will go up during the 2016 season or the next one, but that will be an exciting step!

Don't hesitate to contact us with questions great and small!

Have a nice one!
MCF Team

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