On-Farm Butchering Workshop is Great Success
On Saturday, October 26th 2019, we hosted our first annual on-farm butchering seminar and we were very happy with the day. Ten attendees, of varying farm backgrounds and skill sets were able to get a first-hand look as BUTCHER PETE a/k/a Dan Profitt, slaughtered and processed five of our sheep and lambs. My husband Dave and I are the epitome of small and beginning farmers, we’ve had our farm and flock for only four years. We’re raising sheep, turkeys, ducks, laying hens, meat birds and bees. We’ve comfortably processed over 300 birds on our farm, but anything except poultry is out of our scope. The hardest part for us, in raising livestock, has been getting them to the butcher. It’s been hard numerous reasons: we needed to borrow or rent a trailer to do it, we had to wait a long time to get an appointment, and we didn’t like the fact that their last day was spent on a trailer headed to an unknown facility. It was important to us that our animals live peacefully and putting them in a trailer was not the punctuation we wanted for the end of their lives. We sell half and whole shares of lamb, so taking our sheep to a USDA facility wasn’t important to us, as we aren’t selling individual cuts of meat. When we heard about Dan’s mobile butchering business, we knew it could be a solution for us. And, what better way to learn than to create an event, and share it with other like-minded folks. It was a great opportunity to get an overview of the entire process, from the humane and quick dispatching of the sheep, to the skillful removal of the skin for tanning. Traditionally, a fresh carcass would be refrigerated and aged for multiple days, but we chose to have one entire animal broken down and packaged into traditional cuts that same day, after cool down. This was a great way to see the process from start to finish. Dan has a snazzy refrigerated trailer and the first lamb carcass was cooled down in his cooler while he took care of the remaining animals. After a lunch break (lamb chili and homemade macaroni and cheese), Dan butchered and packaged the entire cooled lamb for our farm use. At the end of the day he took the remaining carcasses back to his facility for traditional aging and processing into packages for our lamb share customers. We learned a lot about Dan before we booked him to come to our farm. He is a career butcher, who has previously worked at Whole Foods, Vermont Packing and various other butcher shops around the country before starting his own mobile butchering business. In 2018, he won the $10,000 Pitchfork Challenge in Keene, NH. He travels the greater New England area doing on-site animal processing. To reach Dan Profitt, a/k/a BUTCHER PETE, you can email him at: [email protected] or call/text him: 857-212-3191. He’s also on Instagram: butcherpetesmobilemeats and on Facebook: Butcher Pete’s Mobile Meats, LLC. We’re so happy to have done this event on our farm and we’re looking forward to hosting the same event in 2020. If you’d like to be on a list for this year’s event, or if you have any questions please feel free to email: [email protected] or call 603-239-4610. You can also find us on Instagram: fullam_meadow_farm or on Facebook: Fullam Meadow Farm