This year, I vowed not to go into winter with as many sheep as I had last year. Our fall slaughtering has started. We’ve already done 16 adult ewes, and today we sent off 10 young rams.
We have to schedule slaughter dates over a year in advance. I have 66 slots reserved for this fall. I can always call a couple of weeks beforehand to cancel a few, but there’s no reliable way to add more slots or get more dates if I have too many sheep. I have already had to schedule my 2008 and 2009 slaughter dates. This can be a real problem – not only do I have to estimate how many sheep I’ll have for slaughter, but I have to do it before breeding even starts! I’ve been caught before with more sheep than slaughter slots, so this year, I decided to reserve extra. It seems like I’ll be using all of them!
Our slaughter protocol starts at a minimum of 3 weeks before the scheduled date. The first step is deciding who’s on the butcher list. Rams that butt us, ewes that have failed to care for lambs, ewes who have no more teeth, and similar issues make the list first. I also cull the lowest-ranking lambs to the freezer – about the lowest 75%. My goal is that the keeper ram lambs are all in the top 25%, so the rest are scheduled to be dinner.
For ewes, I try to select keepers from the top 50%. Our list of “keepers” includes our for-sale animals, too. This year, we produced 88 lambs, with 49 ram lambs and 39 ewe lambs. Right off the bat, we have to select about 37 rams and 20 ewes to butcher. That doesn’t leave us with many slots for old ewes!
Once the sheep are on the list, we do a few things to ensure they produce good, tasty meat. Our sheep are forage (grass and hay) finished. That means no grain at all. This is a more natural method that produces wonderful, healthy meat, but it does mean that the sheep have no excess glycogen in their muscles at slaughter. Muscle glycogen stores are what affect the pH of the meat at slaughter. The pH, and subsequent changes in pH as meat ages, affects tenderness and taste.
Grain-fed animals have excess glycogen stored in their muscles. Under stress, the stored glycogen is used to combat stress. Our sheep have none of the extra cushion that a grain-fed animal does, so we need to do more to ensure that our animals are not stressed. Through trial and error, we have learned that as little as 15 minutes of high stress can ruin the meat. Plus, the bad effects of high stress can take as long as two weeks to clear the muscles.
The first step we take to reduce stress is moving our butcher sheep to sex-segregated pens three weeks before their slaughter date. Rams are kept with rams, and ewes are kept with ewes. We keep all of the slaughter sheep together, so they’re with their buddies the entire time. A huge stressor for animals is being around strange animals and people, and this step largely eliminates that.
The small pens serve an additional purpose: since they’re in smaller pens, they’re unable to retreat from human contact. They get used to us being near them, and the stress of human contact gradually reduces.
We also feed as much legumes as we can during those last three weeks. Legumes produce more muscle glycogen, so a high-legume diet is better for loading up before butcher.
We load sheep onto the trailer the night before. That way, the minimal stress of loading has a few hours to wear off. We also keep food and water on the trailer with the sheep until they walk into the kill pens. Most slaughter houses want animals off food and water for 24 hours prior, but for our forage-finished sheep, that would ruin the meat. We are fortunate to have a butcher willing to take the extra time it takes to prepare sheep with full rumens. While it’s possible, it does take a little extra time, and many places will not do it.
Finally, based on research data from France and Finland, we’ve added one more insurance policy. Just before we leave the driveway, we give each sheep about 10cc per 50 lbs of weight a mix of 50% propylene glycol and 50% molasses. Propylene glycol is a food additive for ruminants. It provides a quick dose of glycogen that penetrates the muscles within about 15 minutes. It’s often used to treat pregnancy toxiemia, or to smooth transitions when sheep go off feed. Molasses makes the mixture good-tasting, and it ensures that the sheep eat it. We’ve found that this gives us about an hour and a half to get the sheep to the slaughterhouse before they use up their glycogen stores.
Once there, we slowly unload the sheep and get them into their waiting pen. The butcher has worked with us to make sure our sheep are killed first. This process is very labor-intensive, but we feel that it produces the best possible grass-finished meat, and it minimizes the stress that our sheep feel.
We are proud to provide tasty meat, and we’re also proud to make sure our precious sheep experience as little stress as possible.