I'm off to the Tuesday Northampton Farmers Market to sell our lamb meat this afternoon in the sweltering heat. The Farmer is in haying mode doing his first cutting of the fields he mows. It is a massive job and very time consuming. Because it is me there at the market and not him, everyone is curious where he is. I tell them he is "haying" and almost every single person looks at me with a quizzical expression. I ask them if they know what that is and of course, most don't. I explain that if you raise grass fed animals, what do you think they eat in the winter? Grass. I get the funniest responses from people. Farmers market shoppers have many of the buzz words down - grass fed, local, sustainably grown..... but most of them don't know what anyone of them mean. They are clueless as to what really goes into a grass fed animal product.
Anyway, the other morning on the way to move sheep, I stopped at a field before the rain came and snapped these photos of some wildflowers. The flowers will all be mown in a week or so and be bundled up into haybales. I suppose that is a marketing opportunity - oh yes, our sheep eat wildflowers. Must think about that one!
Enjoy the photos and the day!
5 comments:
hey! The Flowers just give it some Flavour! :-D
However, for the CONSUMER-CLUELESS you could always tell Them that the various Flowers are what make the Wool come in "Different" COLOURS!
;-D
Yep - just like chocolate milk from the brown cows! Can't tell you how many times I've had people tell their children to feel the cotton from my sheep! ;)
How poignant. Isn't it wild how out-of-touch people are with respect to nature/food? I'm an urban gardener, and every time I tell someone I grew my garden from seed, they have this bewildered, borderline shocked look on their face. SEED? You can grow things from SEED? But that's not the sad part - the sad part is what you said - most of them don't care. Just gotta shrug and carry on. :)
Are we (as a nation) really that far removed from the land that 'haying' doesn't make sense? Color me surprised. Helen
Need to tell your customers that the wildflowers make the meat taste AMAZING! We were joking this weekend that we should plant rosemary in our paddocks so the consumers can have lamb with rosemary.....
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