When you buy food directly from a small farm, you’re choosing to be a little closer to the truth of it. Not the shiny grocery store version, but the real version — the care, the work, the hard decisions, and the respect that goes into raising animals properly.
And I just want to say thank you for being part of that with us.
The Red X
This week was a bit of a hard one on the farm.
We ultrasound pregnancy checked a group of ewes, and the results were not what we were hoping for. About half of them had not bred. That happens once in a while, but when it does, you can’t just shrug your shoulders and carry on. You have to start asking why.
So the next day, Anne and I sat down at the table and went through the records. One ewe at a time, we looked back at past performance. Some had missed getting pregnant more than once. A few had missed several times in a row. And when we looked close enough, there were a couple that had been here for years and had never done their job at all!
That probably sounds a little cold when I say it that way, but it is one of the honest parts of farming. Every animal here takes feed, bedding, space, time, and care. If a ewe is no longer raising lambs, sooner or later we have to make the decision that she can’t stay.
I don’t much like that part.
We ran the group through the handling system, and I started marking the ones that needed to go. A red X on their backs. That was the mark.
I’ve marked animals before, of course. That part is nothing new. But this time it felt different. As each ewe came along, they weren’t wild or troublesome or hard to handle. Most of them were older, calm, seasoned ewes that had been here for quite a few years. They knew the routine. They walked through the chute without much fuss. They were the kind you recognize without even trying, because you’ve fed them through winters, bedded them in storms, checked them at lambing time, and watched them do their part on the farm year after year.
And there I was, putting a red X on their backs.
Later that night, Anne noticed I was a bit quiet and asked what was wrong. I said, “I’m just a bit sad about shipping the girls off in the morning.”
And that was the truth.
We ship market lambs all the time. That is part of what we do here. Maybe I’ve learned not to think too long on that part, or maybe it just feels different because those lambs are raised for that purpose from the beginning. But these old ewes had been part of the farm. They had history here.
I think that is one of the things most people never really see about livestock farming. You care for animals for years. You make sure they have feed, water, bedding, shelter, minerals, and whatever else they need. You check them in the cold, you help them when something is wrong, and you worry about them when they don’t seem quite right. Then, every now and then, you still have to make a decision you don’t much want to make.
It is a strange job that way.
You have to care deeply about the animals, but you also have to be practical enough to keep the farm going. You have to look after the ones in front of you, while also remembering that the whole purpose of this work is to raise good food for people who trust you.
I don’t think there is anything easy about that, but I do think there is something noble in it. Not fancy noble. Just the quiet kind. The kind that happens in barns and chutes and feed alleys, when nobody is watching and there isn’t much to say except, “This is what has to be done.”
This week, that meant making a decision I didn’t much like.
Because farming is not always baby lambs in the straw and pretty sunsets over the hay field.
Sometimes it is a red X on the back of an old ewe.
And a farmer with a tear in his eye.
Farmer Rod