Sheep Harvest and Butcher Course-January 25 & 26 2025
Learn to ethically harvest, then butcher a sheep and take half a lamb home with you!
For over 11,000 years humans have been living with cultivating sheep. Among the first animals to be domesticated, we have wrapped our bodies in their fiber, eaten their flesh, and lived along side these ever-giving beings. We now live in an age where we have become distant from the origins of our food as well as giving and taking life. We would like to invite you to join us in one of the oldest human rituals, the sheep harvest.
During this two-day weekend course, you will learn how to humanly dispatch, skin, gut, and butcher a lamb. You will be working closely with professional butcher and farmers, Brett Jensen and Carissa Miller. We will be working with four lambs (two people on each lamb) that were born and raised in the pastures of Withywindle Valley Farm. Each participant will get hands on experience with every step, and walk away with half a lamb that they have processed themselves!
Discounts will be offered for our future hide tanning course if you want to tan your own hide.
Who is this course for?
This course is great for hunters (same process applies to deer and elk), farmers, folks interested in raising animals for meat, or even someone just wanting the experience of harvesting and butchering their own meat. Our goal is that you can walk away empowered with the knowledge to process any quadrupedal beast from live animal to neatly butchered and wrapped in your freezer.
What to expect?
Our course will be held on The Withywindle Valley Farm in the old family gathering barn. We will provide coffee and tea in the morning, and a hearty lunch both days. On Friday evening we will share in an organ meat feast and celebration drinks. If you are traveling from out of town, on-farm camping can be arranged (although it will be cold as it is winter!) We will provide all the materials you will need. You can bring along some bags to take your meat home in.
Schedule:
January 25th 2025:
Arrival: 8:00am - 8:30am ~ low stakes meet and greet + coffee
8:30am - 9am ~ introductions and talk over the class and expectations
9am - 10am ~ slaughter introduction (method and tools) and questions
10am - noon ~ hands-on slaughter experience, hang and drain all dispatched lambs
Noon - 1pm ~ lunch, get the jitters out (maybe a game)
1pm - 2pm ~ skinning and evisceration demonstration
2pm - 5pm ~ hands-on guided skinning and evisceration of all participants lambs
5pm - 6:30pm ~ tidy up and hand carcasses overnight to cool and release rigor
6:30pm - ?? optional organ meat dinner (prep or buy pie crust and tortillas)
January 26th 2025:
Arrival: 8:00am - 8:30am ~ low stakes meet and greet + coffee
8:30am - 9am ~ talk over the class and expectations
9am - 10am ~ introduction to butchering and cutting (Cleanliness, Tools, methods, european vs. american)
10am - 11am ~ carcass breaking, disjointing, breaking to primal demonstration
11am - noon ~ work-on breaking everyone’s carcasses into primals
Noon - 1pm ~ hearty lunch
1pm - 2pm ~ continue to break carcasses into primals
2pm - 3pm ~ explanation of cuts (get a big a posters) and packing (wrapping and vacsealing
3pm - 6:30pm ~ students make their custom cuts and pack their cuts as they like.
6:30pm - ?? ~ clean-up and sanitization