it is time for my annual autumn lamb harvest this year will be a little bit different than
past years thanks to the new tool i acquired my redneck hitch hoist while it was helpful with my
pig harvest it did have its limitations due to the size of the hogs this year
where this head choice is supposed to really shine is removing hides from animals quickly
compared to skinning i get to put that to the test with the help of some friends who came over
to learn about harvesting the sheep harvest is a much more peaceful process than the pig harvest
as you guys are about to see instead of having a firearm we just bring a knife
and we can actually get the sheep into a almost dormant state right before the kill that's the
ideal situation what causes the sheep to go into a stressful mode is the flight itself
so if we eliminate its ability to have flight we eliminate it its anxiety altogether and then we
have the hitch hoist hooked up here we'll hitch it raise it once they get up on the hoist we're
gonna try the new uh process of that this thing has where it actually takes the hide off for you
instead of you having a skin we'll see if that works does the stress affect the meat at all
it supposedly does because the animals dumping adrenaline into its bloodstream according to some
can impact flavor and quality so having here at home is the best case scenario for these animals
death is never pleasant right it always hurts um but we our job if we do it right
is it only hurts for a very very short amount of time when the knife goes through the neck
and it cuts that artery there's massive exsanguination that happens right away
so it within seconds the consciousness of the animal is gone because there's no blood pressure
to the brain anymore still technically alive for a moment but it's no longer registering because
it has no blood in the brain it's just gone most important tool here today is this which is a crazy
sharp knife we don't want to saw right because that's just cruel we'll try and get him first
there so so notice we don't have flight this guy's calm we're just holding on to him this is
you know he doesn't like this but we're good he's not running anywhere he's not trying to flee um
so we have a calm animal here so the next step is we want to take the animal off the
ground or off its feet rather so now we've completely eliminated its ability for flight
so this animal will remain he'll kick a little bit but he's not freaking out right
uh ray do you want to come around this side here so i generally like to have a second person
because i'm i don't do this all the time so i'm not like super skilled there are guys who can just
do this by themselves right you want to just take those and maybe put a knee on his back end there
right here is like the adam's apple if you were the larynx so we're aiming for right under that
right here and this guy back here he's cool he's not running around he's not freaked out and
we want to do this with full force to do this gently is to is not doing the animal any favors
it was a peaceful kill and he went quick and virtually no death rows so no no drama now are you
chaining the hide yeah so the way this is supposed to work again we've never done this is i may be
doing this wrong but i watch this on youtube so it's got to be right i put this we put it around
i'll feed this through the this ring here
right in it right there yeah just get as good as as much of the height as you can in the circle and
then as we raise the hoist this will get tighter and tighter and theoretically tear the height off
up front so that way it's not just tightening there yeah
we were getting a bit of an uneven hide pull most likely because i hadn't quite
chained the hide in the right place i hadn't removed the puzzle or a combination of the two
so we hit stage two we took the the pulley there and it goes all the way down to the bottom
now it goes around that pulley and then that's wrapping around the hide and are you ready crank
it's definitely not as pretty as if you do it by hand like we have the fly twitch muscle the the
flank over here the flank muscle um ripped you know it's you don't get the pretty result
but function yeah for sure like it was faster
at least 50 faster maybe more than doing it by hand yeah i mean look i'm not even doing anything
he's just he's got his weight against my left leg here like we're we're friends right like this
which of course on the emotional side like we talked about those make this a little bit more
challenging like last year there was no attachment these guys are just the best lambs i've had
you're making this hard on me man you're too calm yeah
the second hide came off much better than the first probably because i removed the pistol and
other male parts this time first so we lost the twitch muscle yeah so again this would all be
white and it would have that twitch muscle on the outside of it if we hadn't done it this way
this was definitely the fastest and smoothest lamb harvest i've had here on the grass-fed homestead
hide removal is the bottleneck of the process but with the redneck hitch hoist
skinning was comparatively a breeze i do need to come up with a better solution for my hog harvest
next year but i will most certainly be using the hitchhoist again for my lambs though it doesn't
have the twitch fly twitch muscles on it it looks nicer like it didn't get its belly ripped open
this is generally the way it goes to you each one looks a little bit better than the
last one we just finished up the second lamb as far as the harvest goes we're done we just need
to do a little cleanup but first ray you did a pig harvest with me last year yep this is your first
sheep yeah okay what did you think about this experience versus pigs in general
i mean i just like the the the skinning part it's a lot easier
obviously i mean sculpting and scraping has its benefits but skinning especially with this type of
animal it's uh just a lot easier i did a deer once and it's a lot easier than just getting a pig too
because i had to skin some of my pigs so i would say that the sheep harvest is infinitely simpler
easier than a pig and with both of them though i came away with a whole lot more knowledge
and education and i'm just very grateful to you for it final thoughts here jim yeah very
similar to carrie i starting from zero the learning curve is just absolutely steep so
i learned a ton over the last couple of few days with you here and very appreciative
the lambs hung in the shop for a few days and then it was time for butchery these were small
lambs so there wasn't an overwhelming abundance of meat but still a good portion for my small family
do
bye you