Sam on the allure of sheep on landscape

“But it’s really interesting to me at Shelburne farms, where we’re open to the public, and we get so many people, you get all these people that come in just, they just sit and watch the sheep graze. There’s something inherently peaceful and pastoral, about the sheep on the landscape and just sort of grazing, you’ll get these people that just sit there for hours and watch them, you know, they have, they seem to have a, they seem to fit in the landscape. And lots of English Romantic poets wrote a lot of poems about, you know, the romanticism of the sheep on the landscape. So yeah, I think they have a place and I also, but I also think they have a role in producing good quality food from land that would otherwise not be productive to you know that. I mean, it’s productive in other ways, but it’s grassland. And it’s, you know, it’s sequestering carbon, providing wildlife habitat, you know, it serves a lot of roles in a healthy farm ecosystem. And the sheep helped maintain that.”

Cat on why sheep make good educative animals

“And I would say, a lot of farm based education sites have sheep, because, you know, as long as they’re raised with education in mind, they’re an incredible asset to your farm based programming. Absolutely. Is that just because of the fiber connections? Or like, they’re good with kids? Yes, they’re, you know, I mentioned how ours become education sheep. So they’re just, they’re very calm, very relaxed, unlike, I can only speak for our goats, not other people’s goats, but it’s a very different experience entering the goat yard than entering the sheep pasture, like the sheep are just much more calm and relaxed, more of just like a really peaceful, tranquil experience. Like going into goat yard is just a little more rowdy. So yeah, but absolutely the fiber connection, you know, even if kids can’t connect to eating sheep, you know, not a lot of us around here, eat lamb. But we all probably have something made out of wool. And if not, we have something that’s created out of fiber. So it is a great connector.”

Carol on woolen arts mimicking the landscape

“So I think one of my strengths and interest areas is color and wool. And I remember teaching a large class in Connecticut, in Enfield, the Nutmeg Spinning Guild. The class that I was teaching was multi color carding and I remember saying to them, all you have to do to gain an understanding of how to do this is look outside. You know the grass is green. The mountains in the distance are purple. The sky will be blue. The sunset will be pink. The leaves will be red and yellow. And the flower garden is right there. And all the different colors that you can imagine are growing together, and they’re beautiful. So you can do that too when you blend wools together or knit different color yarns together.” 

Rebecca on seeing the world through the eyes of sheep

“You know, my first and fundamental spiritual relationship is the natural world. And so the sheep are obviously, rooting us there. And another way we’ve changed in relationship to the land, is how we think about things as common as grass. So I remember one time we were driving around, and Cynthia was like, look at that field, that looks yummy. And we both do that we both like we, we could never become like them. But we see the world through their eyes as much as a human can. And so I look at grass. I’m like hmm, tasty, not tasty.”

Rebecca on how sheep ground her in a time of climate grief

“I think I’ll answer in one way you probably wouldn’t expect, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind is they keep me sane. So in terms of personal sustainability, with the devastation of climate change, and I have to think about climate change every single effing day. And it, it can just slay you. As you know, I think you both know, and most, a lot of students in environmental studies are having a really rough emotional time for perfectly good reasons. So being outside every day, I joke that my scholarly productivity has gone down with every new sheep I get. And so it goes. They keep me going, Cynthia keeps me going. Like there’s some key humans and animals who keep me going. So as far as the emotional part of sustainability and climate change, which I’m interested in and think people need to talk about more, you know, you can have this eco grief, climate grief, and then you can be out here, loving this fragile world, you know, while also knowing like, we’ve had some hot days, and sheep really suffer in the heat. So as things get worse, I mean, there could be a time when we’re like, we shouldn’t care for sheep, or just that it’s too emotionally challenging if it’s too hot and we worry about them too much.”

Tammy on how her art and education work connects people to land

“Yeah, that was an interesting project because it brought a lot of attention to something that’s just really part of our life and our work, which is talking about climate change and sustainability and how to how, like, I believe that we each can make a difference, right. So that’s, that’s how I go about life. And so even though I have a small farm, I’ve got 20 acres, that’s 20 acres, people in the cities, you know, that don’t have don’t have even, you know, a window box. So I’ve got 20 acres that I can do something good on to help make the world a better place. And if I can, I can influence people to think about how not to pollute how not to use chemical dyes and how to fix things when they’re broken instead of throwing them away or how to graze without fossil fuels and and manage animals and have relationships with them, then I think that that will hopefully make a difference in somebody’s or some, some many-body’s lives.”