Imagine putting ten months of tender loving care, not to mention feed and management and other resources into raising a gorgeous, perfectly finished blackbelly lamb, then having all your work ruined in the 30 seconds prior to slaughter...or worse yet, getting packages back from the butcher labelled "pork steaks!" Or "pork shoulder roast!"
Earlier this summer, we were preparing to have three wethers slaughtered on the farm. The mobile slaughter truck pulled in, and behind it, a neighbor, whom I hadn't seen in a long time (years). The slaughter guy talked me into killing the lambs in a manner that required handling. What ensued was a sheep rodeo, with my neighbor launching enthusiastally into the bedlam, apparently having fun making it worse, and me stupidly not running his *ss off the property. The animals were thoroughly traumatized. Who knows what happens when you haul the poor little buggers to the butcher instead of having them dropped on the farm without knowing terror? Well, the proof of the pudding was in the eating. The meat was tough. Tasty and delicious, but tough. The last three to be harvested were shot on the farm within seconds of each other and completely without alarm. These three were also the ones that received all that tasty calcium rich alfalfa, and the meat surpassed every expectation of tenderness and flavor! But get this...there was an older ram slaughtered at the same time as the two wethers. Instructions were to grind, and this would likely be fed to our dog. When we got our order, we discovered that ALL the ground meat, from two prime wethers AND all the mutton, had been tossed into the same box. To top that off, we received several packages of steaks, which I never order...just simple chops, roasts, and ground. BUT that's not the worst of it!!! Those steaks were labelled PORK STEAK and some packages were labelled PORK SHOULDER ROAST!!! Now, if I had SOLD any of those animals, from the rodeo'd lambs to the mis-labelled, mis-processed animals, I would have had some very irate customers on my hands! But that's not the only problem. I worked my tail off and probably ended up spending close to $6 a pound to raise those animals and have them processed, and all my work was in theory wasted, by a careless butcher. We lose control of the whole process when we hand off the animal to the butcher! Lots of us don't have any control over where we must send the animals, but here in our area, we have at least six abbatoirs, three of which are USDA inspected and one is certified organic. The custom shop has lost our custom, but now we are faced with having to haul our animals to a USDA plant and await the result of having shipped our naieve little farm lambs off to a packing plant. Something tells me that some of these abbatoirs are very much behind the curve when it comes to awareness of the current groundswell of concern about buying local products as well as grass-fed and organic. Doing anything less than a first class job of butchering can ruin a year's worth of the farmer's work and literally wreck his customer base. We fight the "establishment" with our exceptional but non-standard hair sheep. If we are not in partnership with the abbatoir, we seem to be wasting our time, trying to attain "artisanal" quality in the finished product. I am not sure what I am going to do next season, but it will almost certainly involve hauling the animals in. Probably the best I can do is put the best "finish" possible on the lambs and hope that the trip won't corrupt the finished product. Until we get these details ironed out, I will always have some concern that our "finished product" will vary too widely in quality. Regards, Barb Lee Blacklocust Farm Registered American Blackbelly Sheep http://www.blacklocustfarm.net _______________________________________________ This message is from the Blackbelly mailing list Visit the list's homepage at %http://www.blackbellysheep.info
