by 
Hello Friends,
This update covers November-January. I can’t believe I have not sent a regular farm update since October! I am continuing my social media break through February 7th, but here is a little look at what’s happened from November-January!
WARNING: I have some lamb processing photos at the bottom of the post, so stop short if you are not interested in seeing them :).
(2 week old orphan lambs)
In November one of my oldest ewes die shortly after giving birth to twins. I never had success raising lambs on powdered formula. For these lambs, I sourced raw goat milk and had a huge success!!
| 10 weeks old and 40lbs!! |
The ram lamb hit 40lb by 10wks!! To stay budget friendly, I switched to a lower cost formula once the lambs were around 7 weeks (still NOT powdered, but one of you left a comment on facebook telling me how to amend cow milk from the store… THANK YOU!). I plan to make a video with all 3 homemade formula recipes I tried.
The flock is 1/2 way through lambing! I scheduled a January/February lambing instead of March/April lambing this year. Parasite pressure is really hard on my March/April lambing group. This lambing is an experimenting to see if we can mitigate some of the struggle.
In 2020 we experienced what seemed like “food shortages”. In reality, there was a bottle neck in our meat processing system.
80% of our nations meat supply is controlled by 4 major meat processors.
From 2020-2022, local slaughter houses were booked up to a year in advance as major meat packers recovered from lock-down-related closures.
Since observing this, it has been my goal to get in touch with how to process my own meat.
Butchering livestock is way outside of my comfort zone, but so far I have processed 3 sheep. It has been very rewarding to develop this skill set…
The first lamb had died of bloat (she gained access to a feed bag and over-indulged). I decided to make lemonade out of the situation and use her as my first practice! I was not able to eat this one, since I had just run a dewormer treatment the day before (withdraw period is about 14 days for the dewormer I use)
The second lamb was much smaller, but still some great practice.
The third was a mutton that I was able to breakdown and use for a dinner party! It tasted really incredible!
Thanks for reading this update!
-the Shepherdess
The lambs are for thy clothing, and the goats are the price of the field.
Proverbs 27:26
Good for you, Grace! I bow shot, field-dressed, and butchered a deer mostly by myself and it was a challenging, though good, experience. I figure if I eat meat I should be willing to go the whole 9 yards, but quite frankly, if I had to butcher every bite of meat I eat? Well, I’d be eating a LOT less of it. Lol
“I’d be eating a lot less of it”. So relatable! 😆😆
You are awesome !!!!!!!!
This sure was an encouraging comment 🙂
I’ll give God the glory for the good you see. Thanks for your support!