As part of The Grand Tour of 2017, in which we took the world (or a bit of it) by storm, we visited Ouseburn Farm. It’s an amazing place, very similar to Arion Farm Park (the place responsible introducing The Farmer and Princess), right in the middle of Newcastle upon Tyne(it’s pretty much underneath the Byker Bridge on the A193) where they grow vegetables, fruit, animals and, as per their mantra, people – well, their minds at least. At the time of our visit, we’d been away from the menagerie-as-it-was long enough to be missing them bigtime and this visit utterly rejuvenated us with their full circle, permaculture, paddock to plate ethos. So much so that I wrote a facebook review about it, mentioning their ideals, vision, environmentalism…and the bacon butties we enjoyed in the cafe.

Weirdly, I’m still receiving the odd unpleasant message regarding my ignorant, Earth destroying, barbaric and sadistic tendencies to this day; some meat-shunning folk can be downright nasty. But I stand by my review. As the world as a whole gets further and further away from being involved in the sourcing and preparing of what fills our bellies, I believe it’s important this sort of place exists.

All this by way of introducing this weeks topic: Homekill.

This week the Homestead received two important visitors, firstly, Les from the Malvern Lions delivered ten bales of pea-straw for the vegetable garden makeover and the second was Pete and his boys from Malvern Homekill Services. Incidentally, both occurred on the same day and both were directly connected with filling our tummys.

When we started on this lifestyle for real, folk were fast to tell us not to name those animals destined for the freezer. I did, and still do, totally disagree. Instead, all our animals spend their days running as part of their respective flock, idolise the feed bucket, and, depending on their personality, either quietly sidle up for a bit of extra Homesteader attention or observe our paddock lurking ways from a goodly distance. Here every animal, and human for that matter, are treated equally and with love, each given the dignity of a name and the propriety of being mourned. It would be wrong to hide from the direct result of our actions.

To this end, I can tell you Fred the ram and Wes the wether, along with Bruce and Trevor the pigs, were swiftly and professionally dispatched this morning. For them, it was just like every other morning; the sheep were a little befuddled as to why I didn’t open the pen again once they’d dealt to the feed-nuts but quickly settled, and the pigs were vocal about their need for Second Breakfast ala Tolkein’s hobbits but the joy of the misty rain quickly had them turning to frolicking in the mud instead.

Today, the Homestead is a little quieter; it has a melancholic air. As it should. The personalities we chose to dispatch are missing from the paddocks. That’s sad and I’m feeling it, but it is also real and at the core of our lifestyle. Our freezers will soon be filled to the brim again with meat from animals that had wonderful lives and ate well – and probably a little too much. The parts not destined for the butcher or processing plants (bone meal etc) are now deep-composting to be used on the Homestead gardens a couple of years down the track. Circle of life and all that./

This blog post isn’t about justification or designed to chastise; we subscribe to the ‘You do you, Boo’ school of thought. It was written simply because, as part of my duties as on-site Homesteader, I’ve just undertaken one of those hard tasks.

It’s filling my head at the moment.

As it should.