Our yearly sheep harvest.
Rest in peace, sheep, and thank you.
Your spirit leaves, but your body lives on through us.
A few weeks ago, when the farm was still covered in snow and ice, we harvested the most remarkable ewe. She was the matriarch of the flock - and she was a big mama. And so strong. She died peacefully in the pasture, but she was stubborn about it. She continued to graze, even as her spirit was leaving her body. So beautifully powerful, even in the end. Dynamic animal energy we are so grateful to witness and consume.
To be clear, we don’t actually raise the sheep ourselves. We live on the farm where they’re raised, we help with their chores over the winter, and we harvest one or two for our family every year, but we don’t take care of them on a regular basis throughout the year. My husband, Will is the vegetable manager for a local college and we live on the farm he manages. The farm grows organic vegetables, pasture-raised cattle, and sheep and sells it to the college, at the local farmers market, and through a CSA subscription program. Will trains new apprentices and students from the college every season and they leave here having a stronger connection to their food and the land it came from. And we get the privilege of living on the farm.
Putting the ewe to rest in the pasture where she grew up, raised her babies, and gave back to the land in so many ways.
After the ewe passed, Will, Rose, and I worked together to process her body and remove her precious organs (organ meat is highly regarded in our house), as well as skin her hide as carefully as possible in hopes of it becoming a beautiful sheepskin. Her hide is the biggest I’ve seen and the layer of beautiful white fat underneath her skin was SO thick (it’s now very clear how these sheep stay warm during our cold winters on the farm). We will be attempting to tan her hide ourselves - even though we really have no idea what we’re doing. We looked into having it done professionally, but it’s beyond our financial means right now, so we’re crossing our fingers and hoping we can pull it off. Her hide is so thick and beautiful - it would be a shame not to use it.
After letting her meat dry in the cooler for a few days, Will and I spent an afternoon butchering and vacuum-sealing everything for the freezer. We ended up with about 60 lbs. of meat that will feed us for months (we typically harvest two sheep per year). Butchering is still a new skill for us, but we’re getting better with every animal we harvest. We love The Ethical Meat Handbook for helpful instructions when we need them. Highly recommend it for newbie butchers like us.
The next task was rendering tallow from the beautiful white fat the ewe provided for us. I spent almost two weeks cooking it down in the slow cooker and filtering out meat bits and other impurities. It took much longer than anticipated because I could only render so much at one time in our Instant Pot and I filtered each batch three times. I ended up with over 10 lb. of tallow to work with. We use the tallow as cooking fat, but I’m also planning my first attempt at homemade soap using her tallow and the solar-infused calendula oil I made last summer. I’m still in the researching phase (thank goodness for Youtube tutorials) and I’m admittedly a little intimidated by the lye, but I’m excited to try it. Soap-making has been a goal of mine for a long time (I think I bought my soap molds back in 2015 and have yet to use them), so it will feel very rewarding if it turns out well. And we’ll have another homesteading skill to add to our self-reliance repertoire.
A slab of rendered tallow - filtered and washed - from the incredible fat keeping this ewe warm during the winter.
Harvesting animals and utilizing as much of their bodies as we possibly can is incredibly important to our family. It’s honestly one of the most prominent parts of our life together. Between raising animals on the farm and hunting animals in the wild, our lives truly revolve around animal harvest. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.