from Wendell Berry

"We cannot live harmlessly at our own expense; we depend on other creatures and survive by their deaths.  To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation.  The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. . .in such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

We have always known that what we do here on the farm is beyond important, that we are involved with something we cannot entirely understand and that we must do what we do with all the respect and reverence we can muster.  Berry says it better.