On a farm, every day includes at least some labor. Today was no exception. We started the ewe sorting process today.
Any that were marked for sale or butcher went into the winter corrals for further evaluation. While this may seem like it’s just physical labor, it’s actually a skill that’s rife with subjective judgments. How do you choose whether a bad mother is worse than bad teeth? Does temperament count, and how much is it worth? Will a great fleece offset some grey fibers in it?
As we processed the entire flock, I got to thinking about labor and our attitude towards it in the US.
In many cases, we denigrate any skilled physical labor. An experienced fence builder is as much an artist as a manual laborer. At least, a good one is.
A skilled tailor provides a far, far better product than anything off the shelf, but we don’t value skilled tailors, and many of us refuse to pay for their services. There are fewer and fewer of them nowadays.
Farmers, who feed us all, rarely, if ever, receive the actual value of what they produce. If you included inflation, the costs of materials, and the value of their time, farm goods would be astronomically more expensive.
Right now, the going price for lambs on the hoof for slaughter is about $1.00 per pound. That’s for live weight. The parity price – or the price that a lamb would be bringing if all input costs and inflation since WWII were included – should be around $2.15 per pound. Plus, a live animal is not all meat. The head, hooves, hide, guts, and other inedible parts offset the finished weight even more.
Unlike any other major livestock in the US, sheep are charged a per-head slaughter fee. All other animals are charged based on carcass weight. If you have small sheep, it costs the same to have it processed into meat as a large sheep does. So, puzzlingly, meat from smaller sheep always costs more to produce.
Small farms like ours cannot compete against large, multi-national corporations that import from the lowest bidder. Most of those imports don’t accurately reflect the true cost of transportation, wages, working conditions, and regulations that producers in the US must comply with. Our labor is only rewarded if we step outside the standard market model. Plus, because we’re small, we will never achieve the economies of scale that a large company can.
When you next go to the store and notice the high cost of domestic food, keep in mind that maintaining a skilled local labor force that can provide high-quality food is crucial to the survival of our culture. Do we really want to be dependent on other countries for our food and our oil?
Food for thought this Labor Day.