A36—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, October 24,1981
Ag school
By Walter F. Naedele
PHILADELPHIA - There are
no teachers at Saul High these
days and no students, but the
animals are doing fine.
The cows get milked twice a
day; the pigs are rooting around
noisily.
Some 100 chickens have died in
the last month, but that’s because
they were eating too well.
The only agricultural public high
school in the nation, the Walter
Biddle Saul High School of
Agricultural Sciences has been
blacked out by the five-week-old
teachers’ strike against the
Philadelphia public school system.
It would seem the strike might
have hurt Saul more than other
schools because, when it hit the
teachers and students at Saul, it
also hit more than 20 cows, more
than 20 sheep, over 200 chickens on
the high school's farm, as well as
lots of rabbits, gerbils and mice
used for laboratory research.
During normal school years,
students and teachers had spent
parts of their days caring for the
animals as part of Saul classwork.
But when the teachers’ strike
began Sept. 8, the teachers went to
the picket lines, the students went
home, and the animals had to stick
around the farm, across from the
mam school building on Henry
Ave. in the Roxborough section of
the city.
Fortunately for the animals,
three students are paid year-round
to milk the cows and clean their
barn, working shifts that get them
up before dawn and get them home
after dusk.
Usually they fit school work into
the time between their barn
chores. These days, they are
working overtime, caring for all
the animals.
The three have gotten a fourth
hand, because a June graduate of
the one that keeps rolling when otheis quit!
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shut by strike, animals aren’t forgotte
Saul has been assigned tem
porarily as their supervisor, filling
the role of the resident farmer who
is on strike like the rest of the
teachers.
“Because of the strike, there’s a
lot more that doesn’t get done (by
the students and teachers),’ says
Stephen Rippert, the June
graduate who has been working a
five-day week at Saul, sandwiched
around his regular five-day-a-week
job caring for laboratory animals
at the Upper Menon offices of
Smith Kline Corp.
So, says Rippert, he and his
three workers have had to pick up
the slack.
•‘The classes, the students \KOuld
do a lot of the work cleaning up,
feeding and changing -the bedding
on the rabbits and all that, the
chicken feeding and taking the
manure out.”
The paid work, he says, used to
be "confined to the barns, taking
care of the cows, getting the
manure out, the general cleaning
up and taking care of the sheep.”
But now his crew has to take
care of the small stuff, "like the
animal lab, to • make sure
everything is fed and watered and
the pens cleaned out. They have
gerbils, rats, rabbits, hamsters
and guinea pigs.”
That’s besides the 23 cows, four
calves and about 25 sheep which
his guys normally attend to. The
pigs recently had been bought for
an annual livestock show in which
the high school takes part.
Ralph Bartholomew, principal at
Saul, noted that apart from the
strike, the worst problem at Saul
was the proliferation of laboratory
animals, whose numbers are
usually kept down through
classroom experiments.
“The laboratory animals the
rabbits and such reproduce so
rapidly,” Bartholomew said, "we
have a problem about how to get
rid of them.”
On a recent chilly, blustery
afternoon, the cows seemed warm
and contented inside the small
barn on the ridge, high above
Wissafuckon creek.
It was the afternoon milking, and
two of the four workers were
dealing with the tubes of the
mechanical milking machine.
The other two workers were in
the next room, deep into, the worst
part of the job,'shoveling straw out
the door into a truck. The room
reeked, because the straw was
thick with manure.
Down the slope from the cow
barn, pigs rooted in their outside
pen, hitting a mechanical feeder
with their snouts. On the other side
of the pig pen, the sheep lay on the
grass, watching the pigs.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - On
Sunday, Oct. 4, the U.S. Depart
ment of Agriculture raised the
rates it charges to inspect meat
and poultry products to reflect the
increased cost of providing these
services.
Donald L. .Houston, ad
ministrator of USDA’s Food Safety
and Inspection Service, said the
basic hourly inspection rate would
increase from $13.46 to $14.64.
Houston also said the overtime
rate paid to USDA inspectors
would increase from $16.76 to
$18.12 per hour, and that the costs
for laboratory services will go up
from $26.24 to $27.28 per hour.
Under the Federal Meat and
Poultry Inspection Acts, USDA
P.O. Box 219
539 Falling Springs Rd.
Chambersburg, Pa. 17201
PH: 717-263-9111
On other, afternoons, there had
been teachers in the pens, working
with the animals. And on other
afternoons, there had been cows
out m the pasture between the barn
and where the woods began, and
teachers and students working
with them, too.
it was a quiet place that af
ternoon. But the student-workers
said most of the work was getting
done.
What didn’t get done in the early
days of the strike was the proper
feeding of the 200 chickens on the
Saul farm.
Larry Zqck, one of the three
student-workers, says that when
the strike hit, the only feed for the
chickens was super-grade gram
for fully developed chickens.
The student-workers didn’t know
about such distinctions, he says.
USDA
poultry inspection rates
must assume all inspection costs
during routine working hours in all
plants producing meat and poultry
products for Interstate or foreign
commerce. . However, USDA
charges the plant for all man
datory inspection services ex
ceeding 8 hours per day or 40 hours
per week.
Houston said the new rates are
being implemented on an interim
basis without a formal propsal
because of the immediate need
to bring inspection costs in line
with expenses starting with the
new fiscal year in October.
“The interim rule still provides a
means for full public participation
in the rulemaking process,”
Houston said. "' ’
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A —f|( A? fM*'
increases meat,
V a* ’J
because their job is to care for the
cows and the sheep.
So, Zack - says, the not-fully
developed chickens which were fed
the grain produced super-grade
eggs, rupturing and killing
themselves in the process.
“There were 200 chickens,”
Rippert says, “but we’re down to
about 95.”
Despite the strike, things haven’t
changed that much at Said.
The chickens that are left still
produce their eggs each day.
Normally, the eggs-would be sold
to whatever members of the Saul
faculty wanted them.
These days, the eggs are taken
across the road to the ad
ministrative offices and, Rippert
says, sold to whoever is there.
, Reprinted by permission from
the Philadelphia Bulletin, Oct. 13
issue.
N6tice of the interim rule was
published in the Sept. 17 Federal
Register, available at many public
libraries. Comments, which must
be received by Dec. 1, should be
sent to: Regulations. Coordination
Division, FSIS Hearing Clerk,
Room 2637, v South Agriculture
Building, U.S.' Department of
Agriculture, Washington, D.C.,
20250. ,
Why take* chances on
anything less than a red
and -yellow Ritchie
Fountain 1 Call your '
Ritchie dealer for water
that won’t quit.
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