There’s a rumour going around that the cost of food has tripled in the last decade. This is something that I hadn’t noticed as I grow and produce most of our food at home on the farm. What I don’t grow myself I will buy from the shop and choose organically grown wherever possible. Organic meat and dairy produce are very expensive to buy and yet when you raise your own livestock, these two food groups become very low cost sources of food.
I’ve been keeping milking cows for the last 14 years and we’ve certainly seen a few come and go. At present we have three cows and just to make sure I never run out of the precious white liquid, I like at least one if not two cows to be pregnant at any one time. We used to have the cows artificially inseminated but that takes a bit of vigilance. A record needs to be kept of the heat cycles of the cows and then you need to be precise with the timing for that all important phone call to the Semen Sellers. This used to work fairly well when I was at home on the farm full time but definitely very difficult to achieve when going off to work on most days. It was time to let one of the bull calves grow up to do the job so that nature would take care of this little problem for us.
Otto, our Dexter/ Jersey bull certainly did the job but then it was time to remove him from the girls once he answered the call several times over. (He even served his mother and that was not a good thing). I placed a flyer on the local IGA notice board and had a few inquiries, but no bull sale. After a bit of a think about the situation, and also after checking the freezer, we decided we were going to keep him after all!
We have always done our own home kill in the past but with old age creeping up on Frank, and yes, me too a bit, we decided to give the bush butcher a call and see how much it would cost for him to do the job. We were pleasantly surprised that for $70 he would shoot, gut, skin and quarter the beast for us and I would cut up the rest of the meat myself. This meant that we couldn’t hang the carcass overnight to tenderize it, but I’ve learnt to overcome this by slow cooking the meat in a crock pot overnight. Low temperature cooking is the healthiest way of preparing meat. Thawing the meat in the fridge and leaving it there for several days before cooking it will also tenderize the meat beautifully.
The bush butcher only took two hours to do the job and he even cut up the carcass into smaller segments for me to carry upstairs to the house. We buried the paunch and the head in the worm farm and I’m sure the compost worms will soon double in number with all that nitrogen rich feed. We placed the hooves and bones in a cut down old water tank under a thick pile of woody mulch. This particular tank garden is a place where we discard all the organic waste, and as it slowly fills up with mulch, paper, cardboard and green waste from the gardens and this will eventually become another garden. Otto is still with us.
The meat took until the afternoon of the next day to cut up and bag for the freezer and when it was all done, with sheer exhaustion, I celebrated with a glass of lemon wine. The next day I took out the bags of semi frozen off cuts of meat and with the help of a WWOOFER, we minced the meat, then turned the mince into sausages. We used fresh garden herbs from our balcony garden, including sage, dill, marjoram, oregano and added lots of garlic as well. Another favourite style of sausage we made was with lots of dark brown miso, a good dash of Indian chili spices and paprika to give the sausages a rich red colour. I added some sweet whey left over from cheese making and also some cassava flour to help bind the sausage mince together with generous additions of celtic sea salt and black pepper. I buy hog casing from the local butcher and everything is totally natural and organic.
I love to have a sausage with an egg, fresh garden herbs and some sauerkraut for a hearty brunch after a workout in the garden. It is very rewarding when you can enjoy good food that is raised and made with your own hands. This is food that money can’t buy and when it’s all said and done, the cost in dollars is negligible. After all, this young bull cost me no money to raise. He drank his mother’s milk when I didn’t milk her and he only ate grass. All it takes is the work you put into it, and of course, some green acres of pasture to support a few cows.
