Lambs, Spring & all the feels

Some sleepy musings, brief market updates, lamb races in no particular order.

Local things, real quick

This email is coming to your inbox when there are innumerable things happening and changing in our world & country. We are at a loss on how to wrap it all up into catchy declarations. But, I hope we can all see how political food & farming are. Free Palestine.

We shifted our newsletter platform to substack. Choosing platforms often feels a bit of a blighted task, but we hope this might be a good option for what we’re trying to do. We really want to improve and develop the newsletter format for Meadowfed, shifting away from publishing content on Instagram. This is the first email from substack, all subscribed email addresses have been moved over to the free tier, don’t worry! Nothing should change in terms of what you’re receiving, just giving it a shot. You can stay in the free tier if you like, or upgrade to be a paid subscriber to support the efforts. What ever works for you, works for us. We’re just glad you’re here.

I want to get the locals-only part of this email out of the way, quick. We’re back at the Tuesday Market in Thorne’s Plaza in Northampton. It runs every Tuesday, 1pm-6pm until the beginning of November & you’ll find us in our usual spot with our friends Preservation Orchard & Masa Mexicano. The Greenfield Farmers’ Market starts Saturday, April 25 and will run until Halloween! Market and Farmstand information is all available on the website, which will hopefully be updated by the sending of this email.

The only major shift I can think of right now is that we’ve transitioned from ‘non-gmo’ grain for our chickens, to organic. Due to new regulations by the EPA, we can no longer be certain that ‘non-gmo’ will be free from harmful chemicals such as PFOAs and glyphosate. This means, unfortunately, that we have no choice but to raise the prices of our eggs and chicken. We are committed to doing what we can to keep them as low as possible, but there will be an increase nonetheless. While they’re available, we will be offering pullet eggs (pullet eggs are smaller eggs laid by hens when they’re young) at a lower price to bridge the gap as best we can. We continue to gladly accept SNAP/EBT and continue to have our Community Supported Coupons (CSC), which we hope will offset some pressure felt by you the customer & the sharp increases in cost of living expenses.

If we could make our food stuffs available for free and still live & sustain the farm, we would. Farmers, especially small farms, are not making money if we’re lucky, we’re keeping our businesses going. We feel the pinch, too & our pricing and markets are not recreational. We want you to have what we’re growing, it’s why we’re doing it.

Last year, SNAP/EBT was halted and impacted customers dramatically. We started a mutual aid effort, where customers who could or supporters who wanted to donate could, and that money would be made immediately available in coupon form for customers who needed it (no questions asked) to use for purchasing food from us at markets. That fund has been immensely helpful and helped feed a lot of people through the fall and winter. This funds has been depleted and we’d love to do what we can to replenish them- if you are able to donate, or interested, reach out and/or venmo @meadowfedlamb (it’s a biz account on venmo) with the memo CSC- or email us and we can talk about it more.

Thank you!

Ok, ok Spring!

It may seem counterintuitive that our newsletter efforts feel routinely reinvigorated in the Spring (oft considered our “busy season”) after a winter hiatus, which is wrongly labeled the “off-season.” I have to insist that the myth of the off-season has been lovingly plaguing our minds this year. Although we are about a decade into the season-to-season marathon, as the farm grows the winter often feels like a bigger impact than other seasons. It might be because the days are short, which shouldn’t come as a surprise but still somehow catches us off guard every new year. But, also because every non-farmer I talk to, suggests we must be reveling in the luxury of free time as the snow falls... Which is such an intoxicating idea, I think I fall for it every Fall while I over promise game nights and dinner parties. Farming as owner-operators, especially multi-faceted farming, doesn’t afford anyone involved free time.

Don’t get me wrong, I literally wouldn’t be doing anything else. And we relax, I swear. You’ll find us at the movies in early winter, forcing relaxation while the sun sets early (even though we do get hounded by our theater seat neighbors to put eggs in the farmstand while we watch the previews at the cinema.) We rejoiced (on the back end of some real stress) when we brought the sheep in from their off-site grazing to the winter barn a month earlier than average because of a snowstorm December 1st. Not rotating the sheep into January has consequences for our hay supply & goals of over 200 days-a-year of pasture rotation, but it does save us from having to hammer in electric net spikes, and simplifies feeding chores with a more predictable routine and eases the restless threat of losing access to the sheep with the trailer during snowstorms. I even visited my dearest friend in California before lambing & ate a comical amount of small ripe citrus fruit.

A lot of you heard my busy-winter ramblings in our January newsletter, when I teased the new yarn and advertised for the beloved Farm Fiber Days. If any of you follow us on social media, you may know that we’re just wrapping up lambing, and I always find myself in a reflective mood as lambing season grows & wanes.

Coincidentally (and also so not a coincidence) lambing season traditionally aligns with the onset of spring. It’s a wild feeling. We’re watching lambs take their first steps, bumbling around to connect to the teat, iykyk. We’re watching Spring... spring. Spring has sprung. The temps are low(ish) at night, we may have had a couple of snow squalls, but the mornings feel different, warm and louder. More comfortable and energized. And, I say this as someone who loves winter! I absolutely rejoiced in the snowfall. But Spring brings a barrage of emotion & sensation that is truly unmatched. I guess it’s a cliche.

It’s a lot of sensation happening concurrently- spring and lambing. Lambing is not for the weak, whether you believe in high or low intervention, you have to make peace with death just as presently as you celebrate life. It doesn’t matter if you are a sentimental shepherd with strong emotional ties to your ewes, or a hands-off shepherd, lambing season is a time of extremes.

*TW: I will be discussing some lambing experiences, which include language involved with loss, you still have a couple of paragraphs, but I wanted to give a heads up to anyone feeling sensitive towards such topics, or might find such language triggering – we totally get it*

Whether or not you feel the responsibility to intervene, you can’t raise sheep unless you love them. Our entire year is built to try and control the variables present in every season, make the best possible investment in genetics, anticipate weather events, hope for good weather windows, ace the nutrition plan, *pay attention*, accommodate chaos. Also, be efficient and don’t break the bank, try to get some sleep, answer emails. The sheep are the center point of our lives as shepherds. We may all keep different boundaries, we might look for different things from our flock, but the deep commitment to our animals is shared among us. And, in some calculations it all begins & ends with lambing, on a loop.

Lambing season is full of learning, I believe that to be true no matter how long you’ve been doing it. Your confidence grows, develops, but lessons also change and shift under the weight of experience. At the risk of sounding like I’m romanticizing it, the whole thing is exhilarating. But I cannot stress enough that failure is a huge part of the process. Because of this, I have found it deeply moving to connect with other shepherds, sharing tricks or observations, bouncing off ideas, reporting outcomes & trends. We share a really important context, the commitment to our animals, the reliance on them & the responsibility to care for them. Just exchanging emails with a farmer-friend brought me to tears one morning last week. Because lambing, in many ways, is lonely. It’s as lonely as it is beautiful. There is a burden of observation that makes it hard to pull away. There are times in lambing season during which my having eyes in the barn, as one individual, could be the deciding factor on whether or not an animal lives. It’s not always that deep- but really, often it is.

Not every birth is dramatic. Many ewes have it handled & don’t even need to be thought about. We love that & prioritize that during our brood flock selections. But, it’s not guaranteed. Nature is capable of amazing things, the ewes bodies are built for this. Things happen sometimes. Maybe a lamb’s amniotic sac breaks, or a lamb’s leg is caught behind her hip. We had a ewe with two lambs tangled together because one of the lambs’ femurs either didn’t form correctly or snapped high up near his hip in the birth canal- I’ve never seen or felt such a pretzeled mess. Our primary breed is Finn, who are known for having higher multiples than other sheep. Twins, triplets and quads are routine, this year we had sextuplets from a single ewe. But multiples carry a higher likelihood of non-standard lamb presentations. We deliver a lot of breech lambs, for example. We had two separate ewes with lambs presenting a curved back with no discernable limb nor head. Negotiating high-intervention assists can be a trip, the kind of thing you can read about a hundred times but none of it means anything until you’re hands in, making decisions. We resurrected a hypothermic premie on the dashboard of our truck, another ewe had a full term lamb born with his eyelids fused shut. We had an anal prolapse, vaginal tear, uterine infection, retained placenta. I learned some cool stuff about the nerve that stimulates the rumen & how it relates to the lungs & had a grief-filled reminder how to execute a post-mortem c-section.

The burden of observation is also the beauty of care, knowing each member of the flock. That is one of the reasons why we love to have a smaller overwintering flock. There is a saying thrown around the livestock world, mostly by people who don’t raise sheep or are feeling burnt out, that sheep are always trying to die. I don’t agree with that. I think that they are, as prey animals, experts at hiding when things are wrong until they are so down that you notice. A lot of shepherds (and I like to count ourselves in this camp), try to know our flock well enough that we can anticipate or intervene when needed, before it’s life-saving. This applies to all seasons of management, but it feels highlighted during lambing season. It’s valuable to have ewes that can lamb easily, it’s our responsibility as shepherds to facilitate that and keep animals safe within reason – and that reason is defined by every shepherd, individually.

Every year, after lambing season and going into the next, I try to get right with my gut. The hardest & biggest moments of lessons learned in what is a mere almost-decade of lambing, have been when I didn’t trust myself enough. Didn’t advocate for myself or the sheep confidently enough. You have to get right with the fairies, right with your gut, be nice to your vet, listen a lot. It’s empowering, humbling & exhausting. By now, all the lambs save one (maybe pregnant) ewe, are earthside. 64 lambs born on the farm. 59 of them are bouncing around the barn. We’re so grateful for the successes & spend a lot of time making sure we understand the losses.

The further we get into this farming project, the more trust we can put in the sheep. When you read that, it should really say, the more trust we hold in ourselves. Managing a flock of ewes through lambing is almost like a physical sensation of trust, and a real in-your-bones understanding of the power of patience.

Thank you

Thank you for the support, the time and the interest. Are there things you want us to talk about in a newsletter? Questions you might have, or things you’re curious about- let us know!

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