Brother Justin Experiences Real Farm Life

My family came to Virginia for this week’s Family Fun Week. On Saturday afternoon, they all arrived at the farm to meet the animals and see the land, and on Sunday they spent most of the day there as well.

I was just about to walk with my parents when I looked into the sheep pen, to see Ashley the sheep with a blood-covered muzzle. Dripping blood. How disturbing!

And how was sheep still standing, with a constant drip of blood? Poor sheep!

Momentarily flummoxed, I finally figured we should treat her like an injured person: stop the bleeding and figure out the problem.

We corralled her, and I got some wet towels to stanch the blood. There was no obvious gaping wound to explain the blood, and it appeared to be coming out of her cheek, not her nose (nostrils were clear). Perhaps she got in the way of the cows’ horns, and she was badly scraped? It’s still a mystery, as her wool appeared to be intact, and by the following day, she appeared to have no more than a bruise on her cheek.

Rarely a dull moment!

Late that evening, we took advantage of my youngest brother Justin’s presence, and processed BB the ram lamb. We felt like the possibility of his demise while we were away from the farm was a bit too great. At about 10:30pm, my brother shot him in the forehead. He was expecting a pretty big kickback, a loud noise, and an exploding head, since he thought he was shooting a rifle at point blank range. When instead he heard a tiny plink from the .22 (a gun usually used for killing squirrels and snakes and other small critters), and a head still intact, well, he was surprised.

Brave Phil cut BB’s throat, and the lamb bled out. This is such a hard thing to do, but I think it’s nicer for the lamb to be around his own people, to be on his own land, to not have the stress of the transport and the unknown processor people.

Phil had a very hard time sleeping afterwards, though. The adrenaline, the sorrow; it was the first of the babies born on our land to die on our land.

Phil is getting better at processing. He had the animal gutted within the hour, and skinned in another half hour or so. Since it was after midnight, and Justin had a 7am flight, we cut the remainder into large sections and put it all in the freezer for another day. Done by 12:15am, it felt like a productive few hours.