End of an Era

Perhaps 7 years ago, my wife and I started raising sheep. We'd had a few head of cattle, some goats, chickens and a horse here and there but nothing serious. We wanted to do something for some extra income and some friends influenced us to consider sheep. We'd had one brief experience with sheep, "sheep-sitting" for some other friends when they moved away for about a year. That didn't go too well and we ended up not keeping them for very long.

But then we moved to a place with 34 acres and some grass so we dove in. We started small and small. A few sheep and some smaller sheep. And "hair" sheep, meaning they didn't grow wool in the traditional way. This meant we didn't have to worry about shearing.

After maybe a year or two of this we sold these to some other "newbies" and moved on to bigger real sheep.

We gave it a really good try. I worked hard on fences and all sorts of grunt labor and my wife learned how to do shots, give medicine - all the brainy stuff you need to know. Along the way we learned a lot, had some fun and even won a Grand Champion prize at the Ozark Empire fair in 2007.

But we never made any real money. In fact all we did was spend money. This past year was especially tough. We lost about half our lambs - some died in birthing, others didn't live very long but the end result is our flock didn't grow and we had very little to sell. Meanwhile gas and feed prices made it even more costly to keep them.

Earlier this summer we also lost our champion ram - he died from some illness we never quite figured out.

So we decided to sell off what we had left and get out of the sheep business.

It was especially hard on my wife since this was a big part of her life on the farm.

She got some degree of satisfaction this weekend when one of our sheep that she had sold to another lady - won Grand Champion in her class at Ozark Empire Fair. This ewe was one born on our place and raised by my wife and groomed etc. so the credit for the win is mostly hers.

For now we plan to take the coming winter off from raising animals and next spring look at the economy, gas prices, feed costs etc. and decide what to do from there.

But for now we aren't really sheep ranchers. Not sure what we are actually - more later.