Mr. Shaw spoke slowly: Grab both feet and turn the chicken upside down. Get control of the wings. Stretch the neck tight and taut the skin to help the cut. Then, he swiftly slit the chicken’s neck. The visitors watched — serious, silent, some pale and grim as blood sprayed the wall below. It would be their turn next.  Since Farm Camp began last fall, scores of food professionals from New York City — including the chefs at Jean Georges and Savoy, the food writer Betty Fussell and a former investment banker now working with sustainable farms — have trekked 200 miles upstate to learn skills like how to slaughter chickens at farms across Washington County.  Instead of swimming holes, these adult campers slosh through the muck beside manure lagoons. They hold piglets during castration procedures and hike at night — not to study constellations but to choose fowl for supper.  The camp’s hub is the Flying Pigs Farm, whose rare heritage-breed pork is often featured at restaurants like Gramercy Tavern and Il Buco. The farm’s owners, Jen Small and Mike Yezzi, created Farm Camp to educate city residents about the realities and challenges of producing food.  “We all have great intentions and we all want to improve the food system, but we have to incorporate the realities of farm life into our planning,” Ms. Small said. “The goal is for people to leave with a better understanding of food production and distribution, so they can accommodate farmers’ needs and not make decisions in a vacuum.”  Campers pay $195 for a program that runs from 11:30 a.m. on Sunday through dinner on Monday (many sleep over at a farm). A grant from the State of New York and a local foundation helps support the initiative.  Mark Lapico, chef de cuisine at Jean Georges, sampled the pure syrup at Mapleland Farms during a fall camp session, and decided to add it to the restaurant’s room service menu at Trump Tower  “Farm Camp was one big, explosive way to really connect with what’s going on in the state and hear stories and understand the struggles and appreciate the work they do,” Mr. Lapico said. “Without them, we can’t do the work we do.”  Last weekend, 16 campers, most of them employees of New York City’s Greenmarket program, arrived at Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, N.Y., during a rainstorm, and soon were gathering eggs and scouring a chicken coop and surrounding field for broken shells. As the campers worked, Ms. Small spotted a hen whose beak dripped with yolk. She explained that once a chicken tastes a yolk it will start cracking every egg it finds.  “You can never cure a chicken of being an egg eater,” she said, separating the chicken from the group. “Sorry, my dear.”  From sunrise to sunset on Monday, the day brimmed with lectures on milk prices and land conservation and stops at four farms (the group had seen two, plus a slaughterhouse the day before). At Eagle Bridge Custom Meat, the campers walked the same narrow paths as the animals and studied the slaughterhouse design and equipment. It was quiet but for the mewling of a small cluster of wide-eyed lambs.  “Oh, God, don’t look at me like that,” one camper told a lamb, laughing nervously.  Heather Rubi, a 29-year-old market manager at Greenmarket, said the camp had taught her a lot about production costs.  “Customers are always asking why things are so expensive,” Ms. Rubi said. “I don’t think they understand the time and work farmers put in. But when you visit a farm and see something like the size of a piglet and how much it takes to get them grown, you get a lot of perspective.”  Ms. Small put a variety of farms — including artisan cheese makers and conventional dairy farms — on the tour to underscore the importance of farming to a region where there are almost as many head of livestock as people (about 49,100 and 62,000, respectively). But she emphasized the importance of dairy farms in particular as “the hidden sector to city residents, but vitally important to farming.”  Shane Nolan, 25, is a fourth-generation farmer whose family has 600 cows on nearly 1,000 acres in Cambridge, N.Y. Each day, the farm ships 25,000 pounds of milk to Agri-Mark, a Northeast farm cooperative.  He pointed out sand bedding intended to make the cows comfortable and described the artificial insemination methods used.  “We’re a small, family dairy farm that just takes care of its cows and wants to produce quality milk for the customers,” Mr. Nolan said. “We‘re not interested in 5,000 cows.”  At the Garden of Spices here in Greenwich, the campers stood for less than three minutes in the barn before the stench of duckling droppings drove them out.  After Mr. Shaw’s demonstration, Chris Wayne, 25, who works for Greenmarket developing new farmers, was the first to take chicken in hand. Wearing a rubber gown, he placed a chicken in an inverted metal cone on the wall, pausing a moment when its head did not drop through the bottom. Prodded by Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wayne reached inside to pull the head through, and then lifted the knife. His cut was deep, his hands steady.  As the chicken began to bleed, Mr. Wayne grimaced, and placed his hand over the top to still its leg spasms. When the motion stopped, he let go and shook his hands, staring at the blood on his fingertips.  Later, after he had scalded, plucked and gutted the bird and packed the meat into a plastic bag to take back to the city, Mr. Wayne walked outside and exhaled. “I eat a lot of chicken, all the time,” he said. “How could I not be willing to kill one?”
Food professionals can spend two days in upstate New York experiencing what farmers do to get them the cheese, pork and other products they use.