Life and Death on the Farm

We lost a ram the other day to what has to be have been a coyote (or pack of them). He was in a field without donkey protection. Lesson learned. We loose animals sometimes to owls, hawks, dogs, coyotes and once to a bobcat. There are a lot of hungry animals in the woods. And you take a dry summer like this past one and it really stresses the native wildlife. We try to protect our animals with field fencing and large cages or coops at night. But where there is a will there is a way!

Of course, as my daughter points out to me, the largest, hungriest animals on the farm are us.  And to that regard we sent the first of our ram herd to the butcher about two weeks ago. Five rams. And now they are in the freezer.

I have never experienced such before. I was not raised on a farm. My dad was not a hunter nor a fisherman. My maternal grandfather had a large farm that supplemented his earnings to feed his large family. He would raise a couple of cows to sell for his kids school tuition or to have a little extra cash some years. I think I remember "Gramps" butchering a hog and putting it in a smokehouse but my mother thinks I dreamed it.

We loaded the rams by feeding them in the trailer on Saturday and then again on Sunday and then just shut the trailer gate. Very anti-climatic. We drove to the local abattoir. Unloaded, one at a time, as the man weighed them. And then went into the office to tell the lady how we wanted them processed. They would be killed, then hang for 9 days, and then they would butcher and package the meat. And so I picked up neatly packaged meat, just like you would see in the grocery store.

Until I started this new life, I really never thought about where the food in the markets came from. There is such a push right now for "farm to table" but someone has to raise and care for those animals. All my family has been made more aware of the reality of the process. I think it makes me more determined to give the animals on my farm the best life they can have for the time they are with us.