Wark Farm

Stories from the farm May 2023

Guest post by SaM:

There will be dead lambs. Now before this crude and blunt way of phrasing things makes you want to delete this email, I’m asking you to bear with me for a while. Because it’s not a bad thing. Every year again, we get ready for lambing. About 150, maybe 200 of the best sheep selected to go to the tup. Put on the best grass, grass especially saved for them. And then the waiting for the first lambs begins. And every year again, there are the highs of that first strong lamb, still shaky on its legs, but very soon skipping through the fields with a gang of other lambs. The high of a lamb that needed a bit of help on its way out, our hands still bloody from pulling it out its mum but now breathing, alive and well, suckling its way to grow up to a strong sheep. And then there are the lows. Those days that the weather turns against us and the sheep with their lambs, with never-ending drizzle and a cold that seems to drain the energy out of everything. The ewe or the lamb that goes down, a hidden weakness, or maybe just old age, wiping away life. Or the lamb that is born still, its mum still waking at its body. These lows are crushing and there are days we find ourselves wanting to just give it all up. But here I sit, at the tail end of a rather low period (for various reasons) and I am realizing that all of this, the highs and the lows together, is just as it should be. Life isn’t a sanitized happening. Society makes it so very easy to sanitise our lives. We don’t need to see death (bar fictionalized violence of course), ‘real’ death that is. We don’t need to touch blood, with supermarkets offering us products that are so far processed that some products are completely devoid of anything substantial. We don’t need to accept imperfection, as there’s an entire industry out there making their money out of replacing ‘real food’ with artificially perfected food. But such life is missing something essential (and comes at a high cost, but elaborating on that would stray me far too far away). So here I am, a bit sad, a bit happy, but alive and in the distance I hear the lambs bleating.

The May order form is now updated and online. You can find the link below. Our regular customers already know that it's first come, first serve for our delicious meat cuts that are not only full of flavour due to the breeds we use and their grass/herb diets, but also free of nasties such as pesticides and antibiotics. You can find all the info on the order form, including more info about the specials of the month.

As ever please get in touch if you have any queries.

Best wishes

Laurel & SaM

May 2023 Order Form