The Chen-Jasic crew would be able to finish the whole block in two more days.
Livestock, Toilets, Food, And Bedding
MingWei and the other Chen young men had a different assignment that first day. After they got their work boots, they met at the other side entrance to the hospital, the service entrance. When everyone was together, they were bussed out to the barns. First up for their bus was the chicken barn.
Delivery staff had dropped off a quarter-container of feed and bedding straw for the chickens. That amount of feed would last quite a while, especially after they could let the chickens out of the barn. There was also a quarter-container of water.
The Chens and work crews from other colonist groups were met by a foreman.
“How many of you guys know how to feed chickens?” Aaron Sorensen asked.
The Chens all held up their hands, then looked around. They were the only ones.
“Can you guys divide these others up among you and train them as you go?” Sorensen asked.
“Yes,” MingWei said. “We can train.”
“Excellent. All right, then. Get to it. There’s buckets in the barn.”
They started filling buckets with feed from the top hatches of the container, and taking them into the huge barn. There were hundreds of chickens there, both hens and roosters, and of different breeds, all in their own cages. Whereas normally a feeding operation would be accompanied by all manner of noise and clatter, the chickens were lethargic and quiet.
MingWei walked over to Sorensen.
“Chickens sick?” he asked.
“Nah. They’re just still tranquilized. It was time-release stuff. They’ll be a lot noisier tomorrow. Probably won’t start laying for another day or two after that.”
MingWei nodded.
“They look healthy otherwise. These are good chickens.”
“I hope so. They’re all we got. After feeding, we need to water them as well. There’s a water system in the barn, we just need to pump water into the tank.”
MingWei looked to where Sorensen pointed to the water tank high on the side of the barn.
“We got a double-bellows water pump for that,” Sorensen added.
“Easy,” MingWei said. “We start that now. We do not need so many for feeding.”
“Fair enough.”
With four guys spelling each other off on the water pump, and the others distributing bedding and feed in the barn, servicing the chicken barn only took a couple of hours.
Sorensen called a bus, and he rode with them over to the cattle barns.
“OK. We got the dairy cattle in one barn and the beef cattle in another. Another crew is already working the dairy cattle. All of them are pregnant now, but they won’t drop for a while, so they don’t need to be milked yet. Anyway, that’s their problem. For us, it’s the beef cattle.
“Stringing the inner stock pens for the cattle is the first priority for the fence guys, so hopefully we can let them out into the stock pens yet today. Stringing the fields will take longer, but in two-three days we should be able to let them out to graze.
“Today we need to get them out of harness and get them fed and watered. Water is same as with the chickens – fill the tank on the barn – but the tank’s bigger, so that will take longer. The rest is getting them unstrapped and fed. My suggestion is to fill the feed troughs first, then unstrap them. They’ll be happier then, and not get in our way while we fill the troughs.”
Sorensen looked over to MingWei when he said that, and MingWei nodded. Made sense to him.
“All right. Here we are.”
There was an entire container of feed here, and a whole container of water. There were also two of the double-bellows water pumps. Looking at the size of the tank high on the side of the barn, that was going to take a while.
To one side, MingWei saw a work crew stringing fence. They had a truck with three large spools of fence wire on it, on round stakes on the side of the truck. The wires fed through a fixture on the back corner of the truck. The truck drove very slowly along the line of fence stakes and the wires unwound from the spools. Crew on the ground were clipping the wires to the stakes behind the truck.
When they got off the bus, MingWei signaled to two of his cousins, and they and their protégés from other colonist groups headed over to the double-bellows pumps and started hooking up the hoses.
MingWei went on into the barn. It was an astonishing sight. Hundreds of cows, with some bulls off in one corner, lay in their pens. He had never seen such massive wealth gathered together in one place before.
When the tranquilizers had hit them, the cows had lain down. Then the loaders had strapped them tight down to the steel deck with cargo nets. The nearest rolled a lazy eye toward MingWei as he came in.
“Tranquilized?” MingWei asked Sorensen.
“Yeah. Just like the chickens. They’ll come around though. Once there’s feed in those troughs, they’ll get up.”
MingWei nodded, and went back out to get the bucket work started. The feed container had been dropped close to the barn, and they could use a bucket brigade to get buckets to runners who would deliver the feed to individual troughs. They started at the far end of the barn and worked their way back, so the work would get easier as the day went on.
Sorensen, MingWei, and two of the other colonists started unstrapping cows once their feed troughs each had a bucket of feed. The plastic cargo netting was held to holes in the steel deck by metal clips.
“We need to save all the steel and plastic in two piles outside,” Sorensen said. “We’ll re-use all of that for something. Recycle
