I first posted this on our social media on April 10, 2022. I feel it is a good reflection on why we’re doing what we’re doing, so I wanted to repost it here as well.

I hesitated to post this from last week but this is real and this is a part of the life we’ve chosen to invest in. We have made a very conscious decision to be connected to our food – to have a direct effect on the meat we eat, to take responsibility for how it’s raised, its quality of life, and the way it impacts our environment.

Last Friday, we had a mobile processor come and slaughter two lambs and a hog. We loved the fact that the processor came to us – it meant that until the very last moment, our animals were stress free, in the comfort of their home environment. (Normally we would have to put them in a trailer and drive at least an hour to a processing facility – which can stress the animal, causing them to release cortisol into their body.)

The dispatching was so quick, no struggle whatsoever. Nick actually carried the lambs up to the man doing the processing, they were in his arms until the knocking gun did its job. The hog was happily eating grain when the .22 sounded.

In our fallen world, there isn’t life without death.

If you’re believers like we are, the sheer fact that Christ had to die so that we could have eternal spiritual life gives weight to what these animals are sacrificing to nourish our physical lives.

Even in monocrop farming that feed vegetarian diets, animals inevitably die in the process, and wildlife and biodiversity gets wiped out by the pesticides, herbicides and fungicides required to farm that way. Natural ecosystems are fundamentally attacked by monocrop farming (think thousands of acres of soybeans, corn, wheat etc.) but that’s for a different post.

I hate to say it, but if you eat, whether it’s a steak or tofu, you’ve inevitably killed something.

So we’ve chosen to be responsible for the death, by offering the best life possible.

I always encourage people to reach out to local farms to source food whenever possible. No, not everyone is meant to be a farmer, I totally get that. But you can still visit them or call and ask questions. It helps us keep one another accountable in raising our food in the most beneficial ways.