Yesterday I participated in the slaughter of twenty lambs; the remaining fifteen will be killed today. This is not the first time that I was involved with this project, but neither was I raised on a farm. I did not do the killing or wield the knife, but was instead an assistant to those who did. What might be seen by some to be a difficult and uncertain undertaking is seen by me to be an essential element of my life.
Although I spent some time not eating meat and dairy, the two now comprise a significant portion of my diet. I have evolved into this lifestyle for several reasons. For one, I am a physically intense person, and wound myself regularly. I have found that the meat of animals and the raw milk of my goats enable me to heal quickly and maintain my strength.
Additionally, as a consequence of the opportunities I have been granted and pursued in my life, I am surrounded by animals. On a local scale, meat is an ecological and economical food for people. I had been encouraging a friend of mine recently to raise sheep in her yard, which comprises the better part of an acre. As she concluded with my encouragement, at the end of the summer she would shear and eat her lawnmower.
What many do not realize and industrial agriculture has forgotten, is that animals integrate into our lives, making it better and easier and more complete. In the present age, we have exported this component to industrialized compounds at the edges of our streams and rivers, where great pools of liquefied excrement stew under the sun, before being pumped into tanks, sprayed onto nearby fields or trucked by diesel to more remote locales.
The loss to the individual is in excess of the energy wasted, and is most profoundly felt in the human soul. We have evolved with the companionship of animals, and without them we are bereaved. We lament the empty stall, filled by plastic gasoline cans and greasy wheeled mowers. That is, if such things are allowed by the neighborhood covenants.
It is not unusual for these covenants to forbid vegetable gardens much less grazing animals, and mandate lawns be maintained a particular shade of green, no matter the time of year or the weather conditions. When the rules and regulations of human communities literally contradict the laws of nature, nature will suffer in the short term and humans in the long.
When one learns about how to raise an animal, one simultaneously learns to live. This is as clear to me as anything that I have ever observed. We see in the animal ourselves but remotely. In managing the diet of an animal, we come to understand what restricts our own. When we witness the miracle of reproduction, the mysteries of this earth are revealed to us in practice. With the killing and butchering of an animal, we come to understand the mechanisms that enable our own existence.
Health is achieved when the expectations of a biological organism are met. If the ecology is not healthy, its inhabitants cannot be. This is one reason I reject the use of the term environment, as it implies that we are separate able. One can have a room without a chair, but the chair cannot exist without a space to occupy. We do not live in this environment as a self sufficient being, we are embedded in it, and its condition becomes our own in short order. We are inextricably connected to what we mightily attempt to separate ourselves from, and it has become an exercise in amputation and butchery.
The lambs eat the grass in the pastures all summer, a bit of hay, some alfalfa pellets, minerals, salt and some very small amount of additional feed. They are sold as whole lambs to a list of well positioned customers for a very fair price. They live between six and ten months, and then are killed by a mobile slaughter truck on the farm. Taken to a local butcher shop, they are picked up by the customers cut and wrapped and frozen.
Considering the limited inputs, this is an ecologically sound agricultural activity that offers a small scale farmer the opportunity to feed their neighbors and earn a modest living. Ruminants like sheep, convert the grass of the pastures into protein that can feed people. My goats perform the same function, when I consume their milk. I could not eat the grass and leaves that they sustain themselves on, but their milk is a nearly perfect food for me.
Unlike cows, sheep tread fairly lightly, and they do not pose such a formidable physical threat. I am surprised that more people do not grow their own meat. I spend my summers looking out over one vast expanse after another of grass land un-grazed, fences unchallenged and eventually unrepaired, and barns holding boats that never venture to the sea. What lies dormant in America today?
Unlike the pigs that I grow, sheep and cows and goats do not require many times their body weight in feed to produce their edible parts. In spite of the great effort I make to raise my hogs ethically, I have yet to overcome the fact that I must buy tons of certified organic feed to produce the meat.
This year I grew a feed corn in my garden, and I have already made plans to produce far more of it next year from the seed of this year’s crop. It could very well be that with reasonable success there, I could be feeding a hog or two in a year or so with corn that I raised myself. These modest efforts, being made by myself and many others, offer America a way forward in the twenty first century.