Products from our farm.

We have all the excess goats slaughtered in the fall of each year. The process has gotten easier with time, but it is never easy. We try to be respectful of the lives we have been entrusted with, and in that spirit try not to waste anything. The bones and organs are fed raw to the dogs. If that sounds terrible to you, read up about raw food diets in dogs, a search for BARF will give you lots of information and convert you to a raw food person too! The skins we bring home, flesh..that means take off the meat and fat that is left on the hide, then we salt and dry the hide. We send them to a tannery in Pennsylvania and they send us back beautiful hides which my sons and daughters love!! Maybe at a later point we will make clothing....depends how adventurous we are. A friend from Alaska is teaching us a little about tanning naturally, so we may take over a little more of the process.
Older animals are ground and turned into home made salami...very yummy and due to the spicing not at all gamey.
The poultry we are now processing ourselves. Definitely not my favourite, but my husband kills the bird, the boys hang and pluck the birds and I gut them. The turkeys take 2 to hold down...They are big and strong and flap around a lot.
Excess milk is turned into cheese. Sometimes we herb it, sometimes we make a very yummy lemon cheesecake. Recipes abound on the web.
For a while we had sheep, but I failed totally to control the parasites and lost far too many to worms,intestinal worms that is. Too discouraging so we gave up on the whole venture. But not before we had made about 6 wonderful wool comforters, a pillow, and spun enough beautiful wool for 2 great sweaters. Maybe if I were able to have the sheep tame, we would try that again, but it was heartbreaking to lose lambs at 6 months....