Sheep Seasons
“It was love at first sight,” Ashland sheep farmer Kent Erskine told me as we watched two ewes and their ten-day old lambs frolic in his pasture. “I liked sheep right out of the gate,” he said. “I liked the way they go about life—they don’t have an attitude, they just do what they do and they do it well. They don’t give a damn what we think.”
In the urban Northeast, I’d never given much thought to sheep. When I arrived in Southern Oregon last spring, my friend Kathy, who had lured me here, was hip deep in sheep, determined to film a year in the life of Kent’s herd: 18 ewes, 19 lambs, and one ram. She was working on her 2019 entry into Ashland Independent Film Festival’s “Locals Only” Lineup.
This March, I finally met Kent and his herd, face-to-face, on his 50-acres of pastureland above Ashland.
We started to walk the property, but the mother sheep and their babies kept our attention. One of the lambs was trying to climb a tree and mom wasn’t having it. They exchanged a volley of baas. Kent translated: “Listen to me!” “No, listen to me!” “No listen to me!”
“Sheep aren’t normally talkative,” Kent said, “unless it’s a mom with her lamb fighting for who’s the decider.”
Kent and his wife Donna, who owns a wool shop in town, moved to Ashland from Marin County in 1974, drawn to the affordable small farms tucked in the mountains all the way up and down the state. In ’79, five years after moving to the Rogue Valley, they traded dairy goats for sheep. They joined, in Kent’s words, “this whole group who had taken up the torch of raising wool, of all colors, types, and stripes, on their Oregon farms.”
Raising sheep, Kent and Donna knew, would never make them rich. (“Ruminants,” Kent quipped, “are not remunerative.”) “It was a lifestyle choice, a desire for simplicity,” he said.
Does selling the wool and meat pay for my time? That’s the wrong question to ask, it’s like asking what’s the financial return on volunteering. I raise sheep for how it makes me feel, not for the money.
Kent suddenly looked up at the sky over the foothills. “Are those Sandhill cranes on their way to Siberia,” he wondered. “It’s the right time of year for that.”
Then he glanced at two hugely pregnant ewes laboring across the pasture. “They look like aircraft carriers,” he chuckled.
Kent, Kathy and I entered the stables where the ewes and lambs slept and where the ram (who had killed his partner ram several years back) kept to himself, his two weeks of merriment now a distant memory. Our conversation turned to genetics.
Raising sheep is all about genetics, I quickly learned. “We haven’t brought a new ewe in here for 40 years,” Kent said. “We’ve brought in new rams, occasionally, but we really aren’t interested in bringing in a whole lot of new genetics. You build up your numbers, cull hard, get rid of the problems, and settle in.”
Kent remembers that when they first moved to Silver Cloud Farm and hadn’t buttoned up all the fences sheep-tight, there was one sheep that would head straight out the far side, through the fence, and across the road.
“I guess you’d call him a free-thinker. I thought to myself, here’s a solution: Load ‘er up!”
The more traits you try to select for, Kent cautions, the less improvement you get in any one of them.
But one thing we always keep an eye for is good mothers. If they’re good mothers, then they’re good sheep. Anyone who has lambing problems or the lambs are too big or who is just plain irritable, whatever it is, we try to move them out of the gene pool and simplify our lives going forward.
We pass the corner of the stable where Pat, Kathy’s editor, had filmed the shearing of the sheep, big and small. The first time I saw the footage, I couldn’t believe how limp the sheep were as the electric razor grazed their skin. I asked Kent for the secret.
Well, they’re submissive unless they think they have a “purchase”—[that is] that they can get their feet on the floor. That changes everything. They’ll try to get away for all their worth. It can get kind of ugly. Part of it, of course, is good shearing style, which has been worked out with tens of millions of sheep over hundreds of years. But, truth be known, we’ve bred real, wild, cantankerous genes out of the sheep. If they aren’t somewhat tractable and somewhat functional in a herd, they get left behind.
Kent pauses, then says: “My friends in New Zealand say a ram is worth 20 times what a ewe is, in terms of its effect on the herd genetics. You can buy a lot of cheap ewes, but you better buy the best ram you can find.”
When we step outside again, the afternoon sun has dimmed but the new lambs remain in high spirit. One suddenly leaps straight up on all fours, like popping corn.
Kent spies a newcomer in the early spring sky, back from its winter retreat: a solitary vulture.
I ask about the current health of the wool market. “Thanks to the inventions of nylon, synthetic fiber, and ‘fleece,’ the entire international wool market is depressed,” he begins.
If we could roll the clock back, we should have trademarked the word ‘fleece’ for sheep wool, before the synthetic fiber market coopted the word. What you have now are the same prices for a pound of wool as you had in 1930. And once people stopped caring about wool, they stopped raising good wool, processing good wool, presorting it and selling it. Long gone are the days when you sent the wool to the mill and it came out finished.
Today, by and large, the wool is grown in Australia [or in New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, or South Africa], scoured in China, spun in Italy, dyed in England, and made into fabric somewhere else. Like the country’s textile business, the wool industry has been blown away and sent all over the damn place.
In 1920, there were 16 million sheep in Oregon. Now there are 160,000.
The wind across the pasture had picked up and Kent, Kathy, and I went inside to warm up.
I asked Kent what’s next. I knew that his best herd dog, Jazz, had died six weeks ago. When we had inspected his one remaining ram, Kent wondered whether he was past his prime. The one sheep he’d ever named, Puddles, had succumbed to heat and smoke at summer’s end. With a reduced herd on his 50-acre pastureland, Kent has turned some of it over to a neighbor’s cows.
I guess you’d say I’m in a phase out period. I don’t know what that means. Decision pending.
I’ve been farming for 40 years and I know the seasons by heart. November and December, after the breeding is over, that’s the least demanding. The sheep are out in the pasture. Life is simple. I get to catch up a little bit. The rest of the year, I’m trying to irrigate, trying to keep the fences up, trying to keep the lambs growing.
If I could take a sheep sabbatical and loan my herd to someone for a year and see how it feels to be without them, that would be perfect.
I thought back to Kathy’s film, showing later this week at the Ashland Independent Film Festival, and the scene where Kent affectionately bottle-feeds a lamb whose mother’s infected teat meant she couldn’t nurse. “There you go,” he said, as he cradled the lamb on his lap.
I heard his voice when he called his 18 ewes and 19 lambs into the stable for extra food. “Come here, sheeeee-p-p-p,” he’d say. “Come on girls.”
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