Friday 2nd November 2018
The deed is done
And so the deed is done but we are fairly sure those last few hours were as good as they could be. In an ideal world, it would be great if our livestock dispatch could be done on the smallholding in order to avoid the stress of the travelling but, legislatively, this is not really possible. There are, quite rightly, rules and regulations regarding animal welfare and bio-security that for the most part, mean handing your animals over to your local abbatioir, is the only and correct way of producing your meat, especially if you then want to sell it (as we do).
So, we are now one cow and two pigs down but also three more sheep as today we sold three of our four ewe lambs to friends of ours from just outside Barnstaple. They have gone to be useful lawn mowers so waving them off this afternoon was a bit more of a joyful occasion.
We have now booked the remaining lambs (3 wethers and a ewe lamb) into the abattoir for a week today and… have tentatively added Onion's two wethered kids to the list too!! We have tried to sell them as 'pets' but the decision always was that if they didn't get sold, we would put them in the freezer. Another tough call but we know from past experience that wethered goats 'can' get rehomed a fair bit as people underestimate the care they need and the strength they have as they reach adult size!!! For this reason we didn't compromise on price, knowing that if someone was prepared to pay what we were asking, it would hopefully be with the intention of giving them a 'forever' home and understanding what that meant!
Part of our original plan in adding Boer goats to our mini herd was to produce goat meat for the freezer, alongside lamb, pork, beef and poultry! Trouble is, over these last few months we have found that we are now cutting back on our own meat consumption quite a lot and as such, much of the meat we have produced this year we will need to sell. We stand to make more money this way as meat commands a much higher price than the live animal so in many ways, this way forward is not a bad outcome... assuming that is of course we do sell all we need to.
Depending on how this goes, how much we enjoy our first beef and whether we continue to eat less and less meat, will then shape our plans for next year.
We have now booked the remaining lambs (3 wethers and a ewe lamb) into the abattoir for a week today and… have tentatively added Onion's two wethered kids to the list too!! We have tried to sell them as 'pets' but the decision always was that if they didn't get sold, we would put them in the freezer. Another tough call but we know from past experience that wethered goats 'can' get rehomed a fair bit as people underestimate the care they need and the strength they have as they reach adult size!!! For this reason we didn't compromise on price, knowing that if someone was prepared to pay what we were asking, it would hopefully be with the intention of giving them a 'forever' home and understanding what that meant!
Part of our original plan in adding Boer goats to our mini herd was to produce goat meat for the freezer, alongside lamb, pork, beef and poultry! Trouble is, over these last few months we have found that we are now cutting back on our own meat consumption quite a lot and as such, much of the meat we have produced this year we will need to sell. We stand to make more money this way as meat commands a much higher price than the live animal so in many ways, this way forward is not a bad outcome... assuming that is of course we do sell all we need to.
Depending on how this goes, how much we enjoy our first beef and whether we continue to eat less and less meat, will then shape our plans for next year.