From the Pastures: Lamb is great on grill

Hello from Graze-N-Grow. These longer, warmer and sometimes wetter days are really giving the crops and pastures a great start. While most of my neighbors are done or close to finishing planting, we’ve just got a good start. And so have the weeds. I don’t mind them in the pasture — they are just salad to the sheep, but a different story in the organic row crops without chemical intervention. The lambs and calves are doing great on pasture now. The bucket calves were getting grain all winter, but are managing quite well without that now.

Our annual holiday lamb sale day is around June 15 and already we have many calls, wanting to reserve theirs. So, because we no longer supply a 6-month-old lamb in time, I held over some of our later old-crop lambs and hope the extra weight will bring up their value enough to cover their feed costs. Since we are price-setters and not just price-takers, I think it will work out well.

That market only deals with male lambs, but for the last four or five years we’ve managed to find a good market for breeding age ewe lambs up in Wisconsin. An old-order Amish farmer became an unpaid advertiser for us about five years ago when he spread the word he liked the load of lambs he got from us and others have come about every winter since to get a trailer load. Last week, a Minnesota Amish heard from him and wanted 100 head. I doubt I can build my flock up with that many leaving, but we will see.

I am not looking forward to putting RFID tags on every animal that leaves my farm and I was hoping that mandatory tagging legislation had been dropped after listening sessions years ago voiced strong opposition from our country’s livestock producers. But it seems that the powers that be are relentless to make it happen.

The meat industry is a strong, powerful, consolidated and well-financed industry, unlike the diverse and independent livestock industry we are a part of. Their lobbying efforts and the money behind them are a strong influence on policy decisions. We already have an effective traceability system in place and if food safety was really their motivation to push this through they wouldn’t be allowing foreign meat from countries that have poor safety records — when you can’t figure things out “it’s all about the money.”

So much for that, I will jump off this soapbox and hope you all have a safe and enjoyable spring. And that means “eat more lamb, it’s great on the grill.” Happy trails.