You know the saying — it’s all fun and games until you start killing your livestock.  I’ve ostensibly been running a farm whose main product is meat; tomorrow it gets real.

Three weeks ago, before I moved the main flock to Eric and Deb’s place, I separated out the 3 biggest lambs from February, along with ewe #132, the one with all the prolapse problems during her pregnancy.  They’ve been living the high life since then, free to roam the 2 acres of the Fortress and eat any plant they want, but early tomorrow morning I’ll load them into the trailer and drive them to the appropriately named Blood Farm, a small slaughterhouse and meat processor in Groton, MA.  I have customers anxiously awaiting their meat deliveries, so almost exactly a year after moving here, I’ll see my first income from the farm.

I think I’ve threatened more than once to write a defense of carnivory, but it’s getting late, and I have an early start tomorrow, so I’m punting once again.  The preview is that I was a dogmatic vegetarian for more than a decade, and while there are lots of horrors in livestock farming, I’ve come around to believe that well-raised meat animals are a critical part of agriculture.  And a Canadian shepherd named Dan Needles makes an interesting argument that the sheep come out ok too.  More to come…