How good it is that the first lamb to be sold at the Lexington Farmers Market is excellent in all ways. The mild, beautiful, buttery meat is likely to make converts of many of us who do not eat lamb regularly.
That will be good for us, good for Garden of Eden Farms — the spunky pioneer lamb vendor at the Lexington Farmers Market — good for Kentucky, and good for the world.
That may seem like big talk about cute little creatures, but consider this. Sheep eat grass and turn that grass into protein that we humans can eat, an awesome transformation. According to the farm website, Garden of Eden sheep are completely grass-fed. Sheep on Kentucky pasture – that’s land use that makes good sense for preventing erosion, slowing global over-warming, and farming sustainably without undue inputs and excessive costs.
This approach to meat production avoids the craziness of growing grains, which sustain human life on their own, and then force-feeding them to animals that primarily evolved to digest grass, resulting in meats for humans that contain unhealthy forms of fat, at great expense to the environment and to our physical well-being. Pastured animals and animal products like eggs, milk, and cheese make excellent sense, and our options for buying these beneficial foods in central Kentucky gradually continue to expand.
I have not met Eden Myers of Garden of Eden Farms in Mt. Sterling, but I applaud her commitment to premium quality grass-fed lamb and other sustainably grown foods. I particularly look forward to the fruition of her plans to build a cheese-making plant. Her website’s unfiltered stories of her work at Garden of Eden and her detailed descriptions of lamb-raising make excellent reading and help build shared understanding of what growers know and do in order to produce our food sustainably.
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This is Savory Kentucky Bite number 8 of 116 Savory Bites created in honor of the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.
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