Around the Farm
full circle: rutting rams, restoring the land and what happens to the ram lambs
Four little guys whose births I witnessed. Helped, even. Knelt in the straw soaked in blood and birth fluids, held my breath as they spluttered their first breaths, wobbled their first steps, teetered and toppled and snuffled and fell and again, ’til they latched and drew their first sucks of life-giving sustenance from mother ewes roused by the sounds and smells and tastes of their newborns. Watched them grow and play and chase over the rocks and learn to chomp on green heather and bog myrtle. Fed and handled and cared for.
What happens to the ram lambs? People ask.
They feed us. They feed our community. It only takes one ram to service a flock of ewes yet half the lambs born are male and the rest will fight and rut and wrestle for resources. Nature has ways of making sure only the strongest and most well adapted pass on their genes to the next generation. We have to make those decisions (I wrote about the making the decisions on culling here). Only the best can be kept. The rest will rollick for a while as ram lambs do, feed the soil as they grow fat turning cellulose grown from summer sun into protein to feed us. Their meat and their beautiful pelts that I will tan into alchemised permanence with the skins of the trees that sheltered the lambs, to support us and our farm and the rest of their flock through the winter. Full circle, nothing wasted, life feeding life.
My craft work is centred in making full use of all the resources given to us by the lives we raise to feed us. Beautiful, benevolent sheep, purveyors of wool and fat and protein that give life to the soil that feeds them as they cycle cellulose and microbes, heather and scrub into our sustenance. How could I let a single lock of luscious curls or a drop of blood be wasted of the lives we raise and sacrifice for ours?!
For there to be life and sustenance, there must be death.
It gets easier. People say you harden to it but I think the opposite is true: it softens you, if you let it. The acceptance of it, our place in this tangled web of life, and theirs. That we are all made of mud and stardust, to eat and be eaten. For there to be life and sustenance, there must be death. And I will honour that death the best way I can.
I described in this recent essay that after this year, we will not sell meat anymore. Our local, small abattoir is now too far away (any meat we sell has to be processed through a licensed abattoir). But it doesn’t matter to us—our aim is to feed ourselves. I make a little money back from my sheep’s wool and hides, we can do without raising meat to sell. We already raise most of our own meat and we’ve been processing our own poultry for more than a decade. Last year, we home-butchered our first sheep. Our goal is to set ourselves up to raise and process all of our own meat here, at home. To take their lives with swiftness and reverence on the land that held and nourished them. Give their blood back to the soil that gave them life, the same soil that soaked up the blood and fluids of their birth and flourished under their hoof prints. Full circle, nothing wasted, life feeding life.
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