What Does “Lamb Harvest” Mean?
Lamb harvest for this year was yesterday. We sold all our lamb, a cow, and 5 dozen chicken eggs!
Someone asked me the other day what we really mean by “lamb harvest.” It’s become my nice and efficient way of referring to everything that goes into selling our lamb “crop” every Fall. Just like corn, lambs are born in the spring, grow all summer long, and are either sold for meat in the fall or stay in the flock as breeding animals. And breeding for next year starts in the fall too, basically right after “harvest.”
There’s two ways of selling lamb for us right now, freezer lamb or live lamb. Technically they’re both live lamb sales because selling the “live” animal allows us to stay out of the USDA processing and labeling regulations. But live lamb is actually transferred to the customer still alive and freezer lamb is transferred to the customer cut and packaged for the freezer by an approved and inspected facility.
Since we’re not a USDA inspected processing facility (and don’t have any interest in being!) freezer lamb means customers pay us for the live lamb plus a transportation fee–which covers the cost of the animal and us hauling it to the inspected butcher shop and then bringing a box of neatly packaged meat back. Customers write a check to the processor directly for cutting it up, packaging and labeling, and freezing it for them.
Sometimes it occurs to me that my kiddos look like homeless vagabonds in their “stay-home-day” clothes. When I saw that blaze orange flash outside the other day, I knew it was one of those days.
Direct live lamb sales for us are a little different. People buy the live animal (same as above) but they pick it up at the farm and what they do afterwards is up to them. The vast majority of our customers (all of our customers this year) are from African or Middle Eastern cultures that eat lamb for religious holidays, family celebrations, and even as part of their staple diet, and buy it directly from us because they eat all (or almost all) parts from the animal–not just the chops or occasional rack of lamb you’d find in the grocery store. And the majority of them don’t have somewhere appropriate for self-processing–though many of them know how to–and prefer to!–do it themselves.
Yep, it was bad. But it was cute at the same time. Speedracer has been wearing his orange hat because we recently reminded the kiddos that hunting season is starting.
So for a segment of our live lamb customers, after they buy lamb from us, we agree to let them use of one of our sheds, and a hose, and a bucket, to self-process before they go home. We charge a small disposal fee if they would like us to bury and compost the waste–otherwise they can haul it off the farm when they leave. We offer the same options for customers that buy a live cow from us, but we also offer to help move the animal around using the tractor.
There’s something both laughable and reassuring about how totally un-self-conscious our kiddos are sometimes.
Turns out that we have developed a regular customer-base of families that appreciate and utilize this opportunity and all of our lamb for the last three years has been sold out by word of mouth from our customers in one fell swoop every Fall. We agree to one day where the farm will be available for self-processing and everyone comes to pick-up or to pick-up and process that day.
So what does “lamb harvest” mean?
Well, I use it to mean both the whole concept of selling lamb as a farm product every Fall, but also that one specific day in the Fall when our customers come and pick-up and process here on the farm. And this year that specific day included about 30-40 men, women, and children coming out to the farm to self-process their lambs (our entire lamb crop for the year!), and a cow, and buy eggs…and take pictures, and check out the ducks, and have lunch together, and share cookies with us, and chase the barn cat, and play on the tree swing…
It was the epitome of providing real food to real people.
So this year, our lamb harvest was yesterday. I’m sure I’ll have a few more details about this year’s lamb harvest to share on Friday (although we don’t think it’s polite to take pictures since we’re not the ones doing the processing!) but if you have any questions, I would love to answer them! And “lamb harvest” sounds so much nicer than “lamb butchering day.” {smile}
See where I’m sharing this week…
Wow Jamie — that is so cool and beautifully written. I would buy my food from you if we lived nearby. And Greeks like their lamb, too.
Yes, we had fun making contacts with some folks at the Greek Festival last year. I feel like we could sell 4 times as much lamb as we raise right now if I had the time and energy (!) to run that many animals. There’s definitely demand for it. {smile} And the cultural exchange has made it such a rich experience for us!
It is amazing to us, farming in Britain, how much freedom you have, not just from the authorities but from public opinion which is very squeamish and often ignorant about where our food comes from. If we allowed our lambs to be slaughtered on our land, especially by people seen as foreigners, we would have protesters chaining themselves to the railings and lying down in the lane. We are not allowed to control the foxes using dogs since the hunt ban and in England there are protests going on at present to prevent the department of agriculture from culling badgers which are thought to carry TB to the dairy herd.