St. Patrick’s Day 2012 and our guests were arriving in the next hour for an annual dinner of corned pork. We corn a pork shoulder and cook it with cabbage and potatoes from the garden and larder. Invited friends come out, less for any shared heritage and more for a convivial evening of good food, drink, and conversation.
While final preparation moved forward, one of the yearling Katahdin ewes had been trying to lamb. She had been walking around in the pasture showing all the usual signs, and those signs eventually included a very large head protruding from her back end. We left her alone hoping she would get on with the job. Half an hour later, with no signs of progress, we moved her into a lambing pen in the barn.
We were both dressed for the get-together, not fancy duds, but nevertheless cleaned up with fresh clothes. Another half-hour went by and the ewe had made no further progress. We decided it was time to intervene. As I held the ewe, Cindy put her hand in the birth canal and extracted the forelegs. The head protruding showed no sign of life, and it looked grotesquely swollen. Applying pressure in sync with the ewe’s contractions, Cindy gradually pulled the lifeless lamb out. She then began swinging it by all four legs, then handed it to me to continue the exercise.
I grasped the slippery legs and swung, without any conviction that there would be any life in the limp body. But after a few minutes I saw the lamb begin to breathe. Cindy had meanwhile cleaned up the mother and filled up a fresh water pail. The lamb was a striking golden red and huge, at least 10 pounds. She looked exactly like a Hereford calf.
We emerged from the barn spattered with gore to find our guests beginning to pull up in their cars and trucks. We welcomed them, went back out to show them the mother and baby. The lamb was already on its feet nursing and seemed no worse for the long afternoon.
The vivid memory came back in detail this week as I drove my truck to the slaughterhouse. That golden red lamb, now grown with two lambings of her own, had reached the end of her time on our farm. We had decided to cull her. Her mother, as a Katahdin, is a hair breed, but her father was a woolly red Tunis. The cross resulted in a lamb with a thick red wool coat. We do not have any interest in wool or the time or equipment to shear those with wool coats. So, as this past season progressed, we culled all of the crosses.
It struck me how unusual the experience: to be both the giver of life and the deliverer to the executioner. This young ewe was a beautiful creature, noble even, as I viewed her standing in the truck bed in the rearview mirror.
A rearview mirror seemed an appropriate method for considering my role in her life and death: It conveys a vanishing landscape that with a few more turns of the road or an averted gaze recedes and disappears. It is an act of removal.
I pulled up at Morgan’s, turned over the ewe to the care of the man who would kill and butcher her. After concluding my business in the front office, I pulled back onto the highway. A last look in the mirror and nothing remained but the memory and a new view.
Katahdins and Tunis (and lions, tigers and bears) – oh my! So thems some relatively exotic breeds. Have you been experimenting with other sheep as well?
I get the hair sheep angle (and you describe it succinctly) – are there other traits you’re looking for as well?
Are coyotes an issue? Seasonal breeding? Customer favorites?
Don’t be pulling the wool over my eyes!
Painful groan. Okay, bad puns aside, those are not really exotic breeds. Tunis has been around since Thomas Jefferson and is fairly common in the mid-south. It is used primarily these days for crosses. Katahdins have exploded in popularity over the past forty years. They are our principle foundation of our flock. We are partial to the hair-breeds because the price of wool remains low. And unless you want to spend the time to maintain briar free pastures it isn’t worth the effort to raise and cater to the specialty knitting markets. That leaves us with the meat market.
For us the jury is out on the Katahdins. We had a very high mortality rate this past winter among our lambs. May have been bad luck but we are keeping a close eye. We may try other breeds like the Barbados or we may develop our own mix. We are not wed to the idea of pure or heritage breeds. We haven’t been back into sheep long enough to establish clear guidelines for what we want. But the following are certainly foremost in our planning:
• Able to tolerate hot and humid conditions
• Able to tolerate or shed moderate worm loads
• Single or twin lambings (preferable singles)
• Seasonal gestation with late winter lambing
• Able to achieve a market weight of 100 pounds on East Tennessee hill pasture with little supplemental feed
That about sums it up, cheers,
Yeah, last winter had to be tough all the way round. I read that Katahdins were developed in Maine, so intuitively I’d have guessed they might handle winters fairly well – but who knows.
Not being very familiar with sheep (can name some of the more common breeds… mostly English names)… the Katahdins and Tunis sound exotic to me. If I were to open up some of the wood on my farm to pasture I’d likely go with cattle. Am inclined toward a smaller breed like Dexters. But part of the reason I’m a plant guy is as much that I’m NOT an animal guy. Go figure.
Hogs in the woods are what you need. Instead raise out some Poland China’s and you will be set. And, they are an Ohio breed to boot.
But be careful if you get Dexter cattle. They are prone to a couple of genetic mutations. We were scared off when a couple of breeders tried to pass off deformed cattle as “normal”. That was over fifteen years ago. Since then the breed has picked up in popularity, so one would expect that the gene pool is a bit deeper.
The hog idea is pretty sound from this end – two of my wife’s brothers are swine experts – so I’d have plenty of support (and also some resistance… my wife has memories of hogs that are best left alone). And smoked pork is about as tasty a treat as I can imagine.
On the ‘small’ cattle side of things I’m most interested in the petite critters for the small size of traditional cuts. Why have a 32 oz Porterhouse steak unless you’re planning to feed a whole family (4-6 folks)? Don’t misunderstand – I have personally finished such a steak at one sitting… but this is strikes me more as gluttony now. I do like the image of a whole T-bone, or NY Strip… and if it were 50-60% the size of what now passes for normal it might be more appropriate.
Low-line Angus are another possibility for a ‘smaller than current commercial’ way to go. I had read that Dexters could have issues, and other diminutive breeds are likely to have issues as well if their population size is smaller. Crossing among some of these and careful selection may be a promising way to go.
Brian:
Saw your Resilience link at Chris’ blog (can’t help stopping there from time to time to see whether he’s back). Very sobering.
So I have to give Frank some serious credit for having done his homework. I’m not in complete agreement with his conclusions, but I find myself counting most of my arguments as pretty small in the whole scheme of things.
As per my more typically rosy outlook then I think I’ll dig a little deeper into his body of work and see if I can find something more helpful. AJ Tarnas appears to have done his homework as well… and I appreciate your link connecting me to their efforts.
Hope your late summer is providing a garden abundance and plenty of happy memories with friends in the valley.
Clem,
Good to hear from you. Your “rosy” outlook is always welcome. My outlook may not be rosy but my disposition is usually. Yes, I thought the article might have a bit for Chris to chew over whenever he surfaces from the daily grind of the late summer harvest.
Cheers,
Brian