Last week we called in the mobile slaughter company and had two of our heifers sent to the butcher. They came very early in the morning as I was getting ready for work Tim was outside waiting for them and I kept the dogs inside with me.
I was quite worried that I might freak out about the whole thing, but I just reminded myself that this is the reason we started this little farm in the first place. Home grown grass fed beef. This is the reason for all of our hard work and expense. And then I did fine. I did not go outside, so I never heard or saw anything which is the way it needed to be. So now we wait for the butcher to call in a couple of weeks and then we go into town and pick up our meat.
The real test will be if I can eat it! I don't think it will be a problem because somehow I seem to have separated the cows from the whole process. Mind games :)
We were also blessed to have buyers for more meat than we had. We ended up selling part of what we were going to keep so our friend Laura could get some beef. Tim's boss bought a whole beef for his family.
When we decided to sell grass fed beef we were concerned that people might not like it or might not understand how different it is from grain fed. We decided to supply each of our first time buyers with a cookbook called "Free Range Farm Girl" for grass fed. Hopefully it will help them cook great steaks!
We kept Mama and Norma, and we will probably have Mama bred so we will have another baby in the spring. I didn't want to over-winter cows again because the mud was so horrible last year. But Tim really wants to do it, so here we go again!
Going through this whole process has made me think about all the farmers past that didn't have the luxury of a mobile slaughter man to do the dirty work. Farmers past (and probably many today) have to kill and butcher the animals they raised.
We are dang blessed!
