19 September 2026
Our second butcher day
Our second butcher day happened on Thursday. It was meant to happen in June.
Our original butcher was injured in an accident, so the day kept moving. That sounds like a small change in the calendar. On the farm it wasn’t.
The pigs kept growing. The sheep we had planned to take off the paddocks before winter stayed with us. Instead of reducing the number of mouths we had to feed as the grass disappeared, we carried them through the hardest part of the year. That meant more hay, just as hay was getting harder to find.
By the time butcher day finally arrived, the animals were much bigger than we’d planned for.
We panicked a little.
Last year’s butcher day had filled our freezers with a lot of bone-in meat, so looking at this year’s much larger carcasses we assumed we had a freezer problem coming. We bought more capacity in a hurry.
Then Michael from Farm Direct Home Butcher started breaking everything down.
The difference was enormous. Proper butcher-shop cuts. Boned meat. Mince. Cryovac packs we could actually recognise when we pulled them out. Last year we often found ourselves staring at a frozen piece of animal wondering exactly what we were supposed to do with it. This time it looked like meat from a butcher.
And because so much of the bone stayed out of the freezer, all those much larger animals took up far less room than we’d feared. Enough less that, after all that freezer panic, we had room to buy half a cow from Border Ranges Pastoral, whose approach to farming has a lot in common with what we’re trying to build here.
Butcher day itself is always sombre. Nat and Marion have developed a reliable habit of finding somewhere else to be. Anthony stays.
It’s surprising how quickly the brain changes gears. These are animals we’ve fed, checked, worried about and chased back behind fences. Then there is a brief hard part, and suddenly there is a carcass to process and work to do.
The pigs made sure their last few days still contained a lesson. They had become very good at throwing steel panels around. We discovered that when a panel was touching the electric fence, the whole panel became something they were considerably less interested in rearranging.
The other surprise came the next day: relief.
The pig chores were simply gone. No feeding, watering, checking fences or wondering what they’d managed to dismantle. We’d become so used to that work that we hadn’t noticed how much space it occupied until it stopped.
Michael thinks we should keep the animals longer again next time. That may make sense, but we’re still wrapping our heads around what it means for another stretch of pig chores — and, after this winter, what it means for feed when the season doesn’t follow the plan.