Premium Rare Breed Lamb Made with Xara Your Eastern Ontario Source for Premium Rare Breed Lamb Our 2010 lambs sold out very quickly.  We were very pleased with our lambs who made it to market weight of 100-110 lbs in 5-6 months.   We thank our clients and hope they enjoy many a Hawk Hill lamb meal. We are especially pleased with so many repeat customers. We kept a pure Tunis ram for our freezer and we certainly are enjoying it. We had 15 ewes lambing in May of 2011: 8 North Country Cheviots, 3 Tunis and 4 Tunis/Cheviot crosses.  Out of these we had 24 lambs in all -Tunis, Tunis/Cheviot cross,  and Cheviot/Hampshire cross lambs.  Each have their own characteristics and our repeat clients are testing the different breeds to find their preference.  We have nearly 20 people on the reservation list so book early if you do not want to be disappointed. We will have 19 ewes lambing in May 2012 and probably will be maintaining a ewe flock of 20 to 25 ewes.  That will translate into 34-43 lambs available per year starting in 2012.  With the development of our flock, we are also setting up an on-farm food safety and traceability program to address increasing food safety concerns. We have gone through our initial veterinary inspection for enrollment in the sheep health program and have worked with a livestock nutritionist to ensure optimum nutrition.  This is our way of ensuring that you get the best meat is to ensure our animals are healthy and happy.  There is sufficient evidence to show that stress free animals produce better meat. We offered our 2011 lamb at $7 per pound hanging weight for a whole or half carcass.  Slaughter and grain costs have increased dramatically over the last year. The price on custom orders will depend on cuts requested. There will be an additional charge for deboning cuts. Download our Order Form and Cut Chart. Some useful information regarding lamb cuts: Ordering whole or half a lamb for the first time can be a pretty confusing experience.  We have worked with our butchers and researched through cookbooks for some basic information that will help you through the process.  If you are still confused, don't hesitate to contact us to ask more questions. Ground lamb:  Close to one pound of meat is retained in commercial meat grinders during processing and that meat is totally lost.  We recommend that you grind any lamb needed at home.  Probably the simplest method is to partially thaw stewing meat and run it in short pulses through your food processor.  It won't be perfect but your loss is reduced significantly. Stew meat:  The best cut for stewing meat is the shoulder.  The hind leg has less fat and when used as stew meat leaves a tougher, less flavorful stew.  We recommend that you have the shoulder as a  bone in roast and cut the stew meat yourself or as a boneless shoulder and cut it yourself.  However if you have boneless shoulder ask for the bones back because cooking the bones in your stew greatly enhances the flavor. Brochette cubes:  The best cut for brochette cubes is the hind leg.  There is too much connective tissue in other cuts to give you the cube size you require. Organ meat:  If you don't like liver because all you have had is beef liver, try lamb liver at least once.  It's delicate flavor is so totally different than anything you have had before. Bones:  Ask for the bones back as there is many a good soup meal to be had from lamb bones.  To fully develop the flavor from bones they must first be roasted in the oven and then used to make soup.  Boiling uncooked lamb bones in water produces very little lamb flavor.  Questions and Answers regarding lamb sales Q. How much meat is in a lamb? A: Our lambs dress out at 45-50lbs hanging weight with a packaged (cut and wrapped) weight of about 70% of the hanging weight Q. What is the difference between live weight, hanging weight and cut and wrapped weight? A. An excellent description is found on the South Dakota State University site. The greatest loss is between live weight and hanging weight and we absorb that loss, not our clients. Q. Why are prices not for cut and wrapped lamb? A. In order to give our clients the greatest flexibility in the cuts available to them we use hanging weight as our baseline.