(previously printed in Black Hills Simple Life Online Magazine)
The more we know about food, the more we want to have better
control over the entire life cycle of what we eat.
That is a big undertaking, but increasingly
more important for Rick and me.
It
started with gardens.
I wanted to grow
all of our veggies.
A couple years later
with gardens in place and vegetables growing we realized we needed manure for
composting our gardens, so we might as well get some chickens and collect their
manure while simultaneously getting eggs.
We did not want to order sexed chicks, so we
decided to order straight runs, which means we would potentially get 50% males
with each order.
For us, that meant
butchering cockerels for meat as we did not wish to have more than one or two roosters.
Then with all of the bad press about large
corporation-raised meat birds testing positive for various viruses and
bacteria, we were further convinced to go ahead and raise our own
broilers.
Even though chickens can
produce a lot of manure, it is not enough for two greenhouses and six outdoor
gardens.
We started talking about other
livestock.
Ever since I was a kid I had wanted
to have a few sheep again.
We decided to
take on some bum (bottle-raised) lambs last spring with the intention of manure
production, grazing, and ultimately a freezer full of organically fed lamb in
the fall.
What else might we easily raise
about the gardens that could be beneficial to our gardening process as well as
serve an ultimate purpose of providing food for the family?
Turkeys!
For years I had been either sourcing a local Thanksgiving turkey or
ordering as wholesome of bird as I could find from a local health food
store.
Why not try raising a couple
turkeys?
The thing about growing healthy, happy animals for your own
family’s food is that when other people find out what you are doing, they want
healthy food for their family, too.
Maybe they are not wild about knowing all of the details, but they
certainly would rather know that the chicken, lamb, or turkey they are cooking
for their own dinner table was happily going about its business on a sunny
hillside a few miles out of town a short time ago rather than think about so
many animals that are raised for our dinner tables in very confined, smelly
spaces and being fed low-grade feed.
We get a lot of questions about our attachment to our
animals and the fact that the chickens, turkeys, and lambs are raised for food,
not necessarily companionship.
No one
shames us for it, but a lot of customers state that they could not do it.
Sometimes I am surprised that
we can
do it.
We thoroughly enjoy baby animals
and just love everything about them….their frolicking energy, fuzziness,
cuteness, and dependence for food and shelter.
From Day One we know that specific animals will eventually be food for
us or for our customers, but that does not keep us from caring for those
animals and tending to them just as we do our pets.
Fortunately, farm animals have a way of
becoming independent, large, smelly, demanding, and well, not so cute.
As that transition happens from tiny, sweet
baby animals to full-grown animals we still take great care of our livestock,
but we give more thought to how we will conscientiously honor the animal’s life
and make sure its last days are sunny, well-fed, and just plain enjoyable.
We both enjoy having meat with our meals and
we feel we need to materially participate in raising and butchering some of
that meat to fully appreciate it.
Raising animals for food is fun, entertaining, melancholy,
soul-searching, rewarding, and difficult all at the same time.
So, as the scope of our Bear
Butte Gardens vision grows, we gradually add in the components that we need for
the gardens and for our own family and also see where our customers’ needs take
us.
