Mary on the connections she makes with farmers through shearing and butchering
“And there’s something about going to people’s houses once or twice a year and being like, so how’s your year? Although they will unload a lot of stuff, and so, we often have pretty deep, good conversations about life. Especially with butchering, because I can talk a lot more while I’m butchering. And then shearing, it’s like, I’ll talk in between or after. But we’re talking a lot about, well, life and death and decisions about like, with livestock, it’s like, most of the farmers feel like they have made the decision for the animals to be alive. So it’s important to also think about their end of life. And those are just really hard things to talk about in our culture. And to, you know, there’s, you’re always relating livestock to humans, trying to figure out what’s appropriate and what’s not to feel. And so it brings up a lot of stuff to talk about. So these are really intimate relationships? Yeah, like when I talked to other shearers, like, shearers out west, and they’ll, they’ll be like, I had one shearer, tell me like, I don’t envy you shearers in the Northeast, you’re not just a shearer, you’re like, their therapist, their best friends, you know, their vet, you’re doing all these other things. And I was like, Oh, you don’t do that? You just go and shear?”
Tammy on how sheep farmers support each other
“Sheep farmers are generally small, like in New England, are working on smaller farms and it is generally a passion project, because it’s not like we’re raising dairy animals for the most part, there are some sheep dairies but, or you know, like, it’s not like cattle or equine agriculture pursuits that are pretty steeped in resources. Like there are more grants, there are more vets, you know, as far as care for your animals, like a lot of times sheep farmers are doing it for themselves. Just because we don’t have the medical assistance that other animals do. Like if you have a dog or a cat, you can find dog and cat vets pretty easily and if you raise cows or if you raise a horses, you know there are there are cattle or cow vets there are horse veterinarian, equine vets. But there are no sheep vets per se. It’s always like a side biz of whomever you’ve found for a vet. We have a really great vet now, she’s about an hour and a half away, that understands camelids and you know ovine species pretty well, and caprine species but not, you know, and others species as well. But it took many, many years of us doing it for ourselves. So that kind of thing is what you find with all these other sheep farmers. We’ve had to figure things out, we have to rely on each other. The Vermont Sheep and Goat Association is something I joined way back in, you know, 2000 When we were first thinking about it, and I’m still a member, and you know, there’s a listserv and we’d all kind of ping questions out because like oh, have you had this happened on your farm? And really depend on our community to help us to raise these animals and also help us to find ways to market the products from the animals. So if you’re trying to do it by yourself it’s not only is it lonely, but you’re, you’re more in a bubble and you’re not necessarily going to do as well for your sheep farming as when you are part of this really great community. So most of the sheep farms that I’m in, you know that I’m in touch with like that, I would run to bring a bottle of antibiotics to or they could come to me or whatever, are like within a one and one and a half hour drive.”
Don on being a part of the Back to the Land Movement in the 70s
“I’ll say, my wife and I bought this farm and moved here from 1972. So that marks us as being part of the Back to the Land Movement, which was, I guess, going back to the land, happens every generation or so in American cultural history, but it happened in a big way in that moment. And so a lot of over educated, under skilled kids like ourselves, were buying farms in places like Vermont. And we kind of said, okay, this is what we’re gonna do with our lives, now, let’s figure it out. And once we got here, we looked around, and it was all dairy farming and we quickly realized that that was very time intensive, and capital intensive. And we wanted to find something that wouldn’t take that much of a commitment. And studying the history of the state, we learned about this, fabled past with sheep, and sheep seemed, you know, small enough to push around. And at the same time, there were several hundred other people like ourselves, who all had about the same idea. So we took what had been a moribund organization called the Vermont Sheep Breeders Association, and revitalized it and convinced the state university, which had an extension program, to hire a small livestock specialist faculty to teach us how to raise sheep, and also about goats and rabbits and other things. But it was the specialty that they didn’t have. And we didn’t know what to do, and we got them to hire somebody to teach us. And by the time I became that organization’s president around 1978 roughly, we had around 400 members. And we thought that we were laying the pieces in place for a truly commercial sheep industry in Vermont. And it didn’t happen, but for a time it was, it was a hot ticket.”
Michael on the Vermont Sheep and Goat Association
“Yes, the Vermont Sheep and Goat Association is, it’s been around a long time. And the festival, the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival was a child of that organization. And then eventually it became big enough that they spun that off as their own entity. So it’s its own nonprofit now and Vermont, the VSGA, is its is a nonprofit still. And they provide lots of really wonderful things. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Vermont, yarn sourcebook. Yep, that’s coming from them. That’s Elaine Fortin, she was my good buddy there on the Vermont Sheep and Goat Association, we had a lot of fun. And I did enjoy my time on that organization, but when I stopped doing custom processing, it seemed like it made less sense to me to be a member of that organization, even though I love it and support it. And I’m still on their listserv or so I see all the emails about oh my god, something’s happening with my sheep. What’s wrong with it? Yeah, it’s just thirsty. Whatever. It’s pretty fun. This actually came up a few times. I guess a lot of people are on it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s great. Recently, if you if, if you need an idea of what the that community is, like, a gentleman from here in Vermont, just posted, we’ve got these three pregnant Gotland ewes and we’re scared, we’re freaking out, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. And we just want to give them away to somebody who can deal with this whole thing. And I bet you two dozen people on that listserv said you know what, we all felt the same way. We encourage you to go through with this. Here’s people that can help you, call a vet, I’m close call me, I’m close. Call me all these people are like, call me call me call me. I will help you get through this. Your first lambing is an experience that you need to have some support, but at the same time, you shouldn’t be looking forward to it not being afraid of it.”