The nature of the flock is expansive. Nature has ways of keeping numbers in check—predation, illness, starvation, battles to the death between rams—so that the flock is kept in balance with the land, waxing and waning with the seasons in a constant flow of homeostasis. In nature, only the strongest, most well adapted or just plain lucky survive to pass on their genes into the next season of expansion, and only the strongest of those born will survive. Such is the unforgiving cycle of nature. Life is fleeting, beautiful and brutal.
As shepherds, we have assumed responsibility for the lives we nurture and protect, and we have an obligation to see that responsibility through to the end. We have a duty of care for our flock and the land which includes death, timely and sure. This is the reality: death is inevitable in the cyclical processes of raising animals, and making the decision on who stays and who goes is a necessary part of managing the flock. The health and vitality of the flock as a whole and the land they live on demands we make these decisions. The flock must wax and wane with the seasons, be kept within limits that ebb and flow with the growth of green forage—enough mouths and hooves to impact in the luscious height of summer, no extra hungry mouths or heavy hooves in the scarcity of winter when the earth is sodden and bare. And for the strength of the flock and future generations, weakness must be culled, in farming as in nature.
And let’s not forget that the crux of all this is to feed us. For the land we live on, this ridge of rock that grows little but scrub and sheep, to sustain us, too.
The farm system must function as a whole. The land and our resources can support so many mouths and hooves; we need this many to feed us and produce replacements to keep the flock strong and productive and keep future generations coming; we need to improve and refine the flock to our conditions with every generation; we need sheep that will produce well on tough upland conditions and we need the whole flock to work as one unit. So every sheep we keep is chosen with the whole working system in mind.
The ewes must fit the land. Breed choice is only the beginning. Every farm will have unique conditions—topography, climate, soil and forage type—and management systems that individual ewes must adapt to within the broader traits of her breed. For us, she must be strong, hardy and intelligent. Small, but thrifty, able to produce and rear a strong fat lamb and keep her own condition on rough hill forage. She must have the wits to learn the lay of the land, where the best green grows, where water flows, where to shelter when the weather throws those wild, perpetual torrents of Atlantic rain that only the southwest of Ireland knows. And, she must stay within our bounds, respect the fences and stay with the flock. She must have strong mothering instincts, be fierce enough to protect and stay by her lamb, and she must be soft and amenable to handle, a trait that is innate, inherited character as much as it can be trained. She must have hard hooves and a rainproof fleece, and she must thrive on heather and gorse.
And for my purposes, I’m looking for colour and fleece quality as well as the conformation and thriftiness to lay down a bit of fat and make a decent, flavoursome carcass, without concentrate feed inputs. We don’t feed grain or soy and our good pasture is sparse and saved for lambing; they have to grow on and fatten well on tough, hill forage.
We are on rough, wet, marginal hill land where tough moor grass grows fast and voraciously through early summer, and heather, gorse, the hay and beets we provide and whatever other wild herbs and scrub they can find carry them through the rest of the year. We have learned not to carry too many hungry mouths into winter. Our ram lambs are kept entire (not castrated) and finished at five to six months—into the freezers before the grass turns and they start to lean out or need feeding. We actually eat a lot more mutton and hogget (one to two years old) than lamb, we prefer the deeper, robust flavour of older animals, but we always have older cull ewes and hogget ewes that won’t quite make the cut as we refine and improve the flock. It’s not worth our resources to store ram lambs overwinter, and I won’t castrate babies, I just can’t, which bringing them on beyond their first autumn rut would require—we have found when we’ve let them grow on that our entire rams as hoggets make tough, ropey meat. Five to six month old Shetland and mountain lamb raised and finished on heather is delightfully delicate, mild but distinctly imbued with the flavour of the land, of heather and fresh, mountain streams, certainly not mushy or bland as I’ve sometimes seen younger meat described by mutton enthusiasts. We cut them down into little, bitesize chops (our sheep are way smaller than commercial sheep) and keep a few boxes in our freezers for light, summer eating.
Buck kids are a little bit different, they mature fast and we butcher them early for the same reasons above—we don’t castrate and it’s not worth our resources to separate them from the female herd and grow them on. But we keep our goats on a different system to our sheep and I will go into that in separate post.
So to my ewes, my ladies. We were blessed this year with a fine, strong crop of ewe lambs, our first generation born here on the hill, born of the rocks and heather they live on, and all of them will stay. But for them all to stay means some others must go. And what makes one more worthy than another? Not our soft human sentiment, no, if that were it we’d keep them all. We have to be pragmatic and base our decisions on what’s best for the flock, the land, and economics—they all cost money and resources to keep. These are the hard decisions. The ones we have raised for over a year or two or five, established trust and a relationship built on ear scritches and pocket treats, named and known as individual members of the flock. Perhaps tended them as they birthed and reared their lambs, or perhaps had to rear their lambs for them (bad mothering is always a cullable offence, two strikes and they’re out). Perhaps she’s never produced a lamb. Perhaps handling her in the pens was always a fight (if we could even get her in) or we fetched her back from the neighbour’s grass and raised the fences in a vain attempt to keep her where she should be, one too may times. Perhaps she just doesn’t thrive or keep up with the flock despite the same care and feeding, or we’ve nursed her through too many illnesses and she lacks the hardiness and vigour our high, exposed land and organic, outdoor system requires. Perhaps she just doesn’t make the cut in quality or thrive. We have learned not to carry problem or weak animals—they will only drain resources and lower the vitality of the flock as a whole.
We all know of sanctuaries and “rescues” that have gone bust or much worse because they just don’t have the resources to keep up, trying to keep every animal alive at any cost. We have visited “hobby farms” on our quest to build a flock, of people who clearly love their animals and keep them as pets, who will eat faceless meat off a styrofoam tray but balk at the thought of “eating their own”, where land capacity was so overwhelmed that sorry looking, worm-ridden animals were standing on tape-fenced, bare paddocks, grazed to bare soil, not a tree or a blackbird to be seen or heard, and that, to me, the desolation of all other life for the few species we see fit to keep, is a very sad state. No. That’s not how I want to do it. I want to know my food and the land it grows from, to be participant in the cycles of life feeding life feeding me. I want a healthy flock on vibrant land, a farm that feeds the soil as well as us and sits in balance with nature. And for that, we must cull.
Some might and do ask why we don’t sell the ones we cannot keep. I will not sell problems to be someone else’s problem, or cull animals for someone else to cull. That, to me, would be a failure on my responsibility to my animals. And after all, our farm must feed us.
So here we are, at the end of the green season and the shepherding year. The moor grass has turned. The land and the ewes are lean after a summer of rearing lambs on the hill. The lambs and yearlings and the ewes that did not rear lambs are fat and nutrient rich on all of summer’s green and luscious growth. Harvest season.
Very well written, and a great insight into a sometimes difficult topic.
Couldn't agree more with this, "I want to know my food and the land it grows from, to be participant in the cycles of life feeding life feeding me. I want a healthy flock on vibrant land, a farm that feeds the soil as well as us and sits in balance with nature. And for that, we must cull."
lovely, a very poignant description of reality.