Hartley was the first CVM/Romeldale ewe bred and born here on Peeper Hollow Farm. Born with twin brother, Hanson, on Valentine’s Day of 2008, she is a good example of the many considerations that go into keeping a sheep.

Hartley was born to Aimee, who was one of our first Romeldale purchases. Aimee was an older girl whose history included the birthing of many lambs, but whose fiber was much too coarse for the breed. I knew that with the right ram, I could bring the average fiber diameter (AFD) down in her lambs, so she came to us to produce lambs, including Hartley.

Sure enough, unlike her mother’s AFD of 30 microns, Hartley blessed us with an AFD of 25.6: just slightly out of the breed standard range of 20-25 microns. Also unlike her mother, Hartley was obviously a CVM (with the patterned face, dark belly, and dark strip from chin to brisket that reflects the CVM), so both her lambs and her fiber would be in high demand. She found a place here on our farm.

By the shearing of 2011, however, it was obvious to me that Hartley’s days were numbered on our farm. She was giving us twins each year, but her fiber was not living up to its potential: I was having to remove or “skirt off” most of the fiber from the rear legs (or “britch”) before rolling her fleece to sell. If you look at the photos below, you can see that the one on the left is the “normal” fleece from her side, just in front of the back legs. Most of the fiber is parallel and of the same fine crimp pattern. The photo on the right is one I took of the fiber at the britch before I skirted it off: you can see how this looks to have “wiry” fiber interspersed through the sample. This coarser, wiry fiber is called kemp – it makes that portion of her wool unusable to the majority of our customers, so it is removed during skirting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last year's (2011) shearing was the first time I noticed a good amount of kemp in the britch area of Hartley’s fleece, so she was put on the list for culling last fall. As the shearing date for our cull ewes drew closer, I decided that, perhaps, I would give her one more year – for various reasons, I needed a few extra Romeldale sheep this year, so I decided to keep her in the flock for another year.

As it turns out, that may have been a very good decision: Hartley scanned with quads this year. Now, it may be that she will only give us three lambs in the end: scans for three or more fetuses are notoriously poor in identifying the number of lambs. Yet as a ‘last hurrah,’ Hartley has certainly given me much to think about. Her lambs have always been high quality, and the fact that we will have three or four of them this year makes me wonder if the extra lambs aren’t a good trade-off for the kemp in the britch that needs to be removed each year.

I suppose that, in the end, it will come down to her daughter, Kaylen, born last March and due to deliver her own lamb just days after her birthday. If Kaylen’s fleece continues to be as high quality as it is this year, then it seems like the kemp problem will end with Hartley, if I am careful as to the sire of her lambs. In that case, she may end up with a longer stay than we first thought: when we consider our bottom line, the lambs will make up for the issue with her fleece. If all of her lambs inherit the same kemp that she has, then perhaps it is just as well that she head on down the road. The last thing we need is a bunch of sheep with kemp at their britch. The bottom line, however, is that she needs to produce to stay, and this year it seems her lambs will do that for her. How it ends up, only time will tell.

I’ve been busy skirting fleeces for the past several days – in between washing sheep coats and the sheets in which we bundle the fleeces. In the process, I’ve discovered something that, according to common understanding within the industry, just doesn’t happen: I have a good number of banded fleeces. Let me explain.

Commonly fleeces grow at a particular rate and in a particular color. In some breeds like the Romeldale/CVM, the color can darken as they age, but this darkening usually occurs slowly over time so that there is no distinct delineation between the original color and the new darker color. Sometimes when there is a mineral deficiency, fleece can reflect a stark change in color called banding. Usually the band is lighter than the rest of the fiber, and it's usually also weaker: the lack of the critical mineral changes the structure of the wool and creates a “weakness” both in color and in strength. Obviously, this is something to be avoided.

This year, however, my Romeldale/CVM flock’s fleeces are banded – but not structurally weak. Unlike typical banding, when you might see one distinct band through the fiber during the particular period of stress, my flock’s fleeces look more like the rings of a tree, changing to another color every half-inch or so. The common belief would be that this fiber is weakened, but it is not – it is strong. So what caused this unusual banding in so many fleeces? Honestly, I don’t know. I know I can rule out parasites and illness: there is no reason to believe that the whole flock was ill, and we made sure to keep internal parasites under control. So what else could have caused this interesting phenomena?

It has been suggested that perhaps the cause is the leaching of some mineral from the soil due to our very wet summer last year. Our sheep rotate among eight different pastures, grazing a wide variety of foodstuffs. In one pasture, they eat predominantly bluegrass and clover; in another they browse among the receding brushline and take advantage of the shade plants there; in a third they graze a variety of water-loving plants, as the ground is flooded most of the year. Each pasture has its own flora, but this doesn’t seem to have a bearing on the banding I am seeing: the bands seem to be wide enough that they would encompass more than one and less than two rotations through the full round of pastures.

It does seem to be tied to the diameter of the fiber, however. I see much more banding in the smaller-diameter fleeces than in the coarser fiber. When I say more banding, this is not to say that the bands are closer together – only that they are more obvious to the eye; more pronounced in the stark color delineations. The coarser the fiber, the less obvious to the eye the bands become until at about twenty-six microns, they seem to be so faint as to be hardly discernible.

Whatever caused the lovely color changes in our fiber this year is still a mystery. What I do know is that our sheep are healthy and happy, and I have a lot of very interesting fiber from my CVM/Romeldale sheep to market to our handspinners. It is things like this that continue to keep my “job” interesting!

 

We've all had the experience at one time or another of a friend who gets a new haircut that so changes his or her look that it hardly seems to be the same person. A shepherdess has this experience at least once each year when the flock is sheared - suddenly, so many of one's friends look so different!

You would think that after all these years, I would get used to the post-shearing look, but no - there is really nothing that can prepare me for the pre- to post-shearing change. Even to me, they now look a bit funny.

Take Jareau, for example: she is nearly two years old so this was her second shearing. She isn't a large ewe, but shears heavily so I've given her to the age of three to fully mature. I know that a small, heavily shearing ewe will look quite different once sheared, but honestly, when I look at her now, I don't even recognize her. The photos below show Jareau before her cut (left) and after  (right). I suspect you can see what I mean when I say that she is hardly recognizable with the exception of the eartag!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jareau's situation is merely a matter of not looking like her old self, but shearing is fraught with other issues. I suddenly have several ewes who all look like each other! Genoa and January are perfect examples. Genoa is January's mother, and both are white. Normally, it is fairly easy for me to tell them apart, but now, suddenly, they look nearly identical - and very similar to Fiona, as well.

Both Genoa and January have the same shape, the same face structure, and the same coloring. Both are pregnant this year with triplets. Thank goodness, they have different types of coats on since shearing. Besides the coats, the only way for me - or anyone else for that matter - to tell them apart is by looking at their eartags or looking for the black spot on January's nose (below, left) - the one spot that her mother Genoa doesn't have (below, right)!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, most of my days are currently focused on skirting the resultant forty-three fleeces. And I've been sick with pneumonia, so the progress has been slow. Despite my illness, I still have to go out to my flock each day to check things over and to feed, and it is during this times with the flock that really drives home just how different things are post-shearing. No longer do I place the bales with comments like, "Hartley, keep your head out of the way!" or "January, where did you find all the mud?" Instead, my comments go more like, "Who the heck are you, and why are you getting in the way of this bale?" or "Whoever you are, your coat is crooked - here, let me fix it for you!"

The amazing thing is that their fleeces are already growing back - so much so that I can see and feel the difference. The day we sheared, we had many ewes who had no obvious fiber when they were finished: we saw and felt only soft, pink skin. All of those girls now, only four days later, are covered with a thin layer of wool. Granted, it isn't much, but it is enough to put your fingers into - in four days! Like with us, it won't be long before their "haircuts" grow out and they are once again more recognizable to me - probably sooner than it took my last bad cut to grow out!

Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny in Marion, Iowa. We were up with the chickens, preparing for what we knew would be a big day. There is only one day a year when we shear over forty sheep (usually the last weekend of January), and we knew that it would take until well after dark.

What we didn't know was that Holly had a surprise waiting for us in the barn. Rick went out first as I finished preparations inside, and was greeted by Holly and her twin ram lambs, Larry and Lenny, looking back at him. We had known that she looked to be close and was likely bred by the 'escape artists' that I had corralled in the barn back in late August (see blog dated Aug. 31). She was another of the girls scanned by the ultrasound tech as possibly being due early, so I had been keeping an eye on her.

Friday night before we turned in, I decided that I really didn't trust her delivery to wait for shearing, so I penned her separately from the rest of the flock. We pen the entire group within the barn early the day before shearing so that their fleeces can dry, so I added an individual pen for Holly adjoining the big pen.

Sure enough, when Rick went out in the morning, there were the three of them waiting to greet him just inside the barn doorway. I know that the normal reaction is likely, "Aaw, how sweet!" and although that did run through my mind, I must admit that I was also thinking, "Darn, how are we going to deal with this?!"

First of all, this created a logistical issue: rather than catching and shearing sheep from one big pen, we now had five small pens and the large one from which to take sheep - and we also had to make sure that the right sheep went back in with the right lambs! This isn't so much as issue for me, but we had thirteen volunteers here that day to help with shearing!

Besides that, the day that a ewe delivers her lambs is a day when there are many changes occurring in her body as hormones rush through and convert her system from a state of gestation to one of lactation. In the process, the mammary artery becomes engorged as her bag begins to churn out milk for the lambs. It can be quite risky to shear the belly of these ewes: one nick of that very raised artery can cause her to bleed to death! And I had three ewes (see below) who had delivered within the previous twenty-four hours!

All went well, however, and all of the ewes were sheared without issue. Our shearer, Mason Kolbet, and his wife, Ashlie, take their time and handle the sheep very gently. I actually was involved in an online conversation just last week in which someone mentioned that you should never shear pregnant sheep within five or six weeks of delivery - and we always shear within two! Thank goodness, we've never had a bad incident arise because of our shearing date - but, again, I'm sure that is in large part due to the care and consideration that our flock is shown by our volunteers as they approach the shearing floor, and our great shearers, who do everything they can to keep the ewes calm and comfortable.

So, now my dining room awaits me with its twenty-eight fleeces, ready to be skirted - and let's not forget the other fifteen in the basement, spread out to dry before skirting. It's a big job that I would normally have already started, but I've been going non-stop while battling pneumonia for the past week. I think I might take the rest of today off and start in on those fleeces first thing in the morning. It seems like that might be the smart thing to do!

Lambing Update: Hazel delivered twin ram lambs, Lewis (10.2 lbs.) and Luke (11.0 lbs.) on Friday, 1-27-2012. On the same day, Heidi delivered a single ewe lamb, Layla, weighing 10.8 lbs. Holly gave us twin ram lambs, Larry (10.8 lbs) and Lenny (11.0 lbs.), early on Saturday, 1-28-2012.

Getting ready for shearing tomorrow involves many a task. We didn’t start out this way: when we had only three sheep, we called the shearer, he came, and he sheared the sheep, leaving the fleeces in three individual piles in the barn.

We found, however, that the barn cats like nestling into the warm, newly-vacated wool, contaminating it with cat hair, so the next year, we made our first improvement: we used old bed linens to bundle each fleece separately. This way, they were protected not only from cat hair, but also from the fiber of other fleeces and the many bits of hay and straw so prevalent in our barn.

At that time, I could tell which fleece was which just by looking at them: Eli’s fleece was gray and black, Ginny’s was only gray, and Vanna’s was white – it was easy with only three. By the time we were up to nearly a dozen fleeces, it was not so easy to keep them all straight. That’s when I started making a card for each fleece that listed the name and number of the sheep to whom the fleece belonged. We began to staple the card to the corner of the sheet that held the fleece so that I could tell at a glance whose fleece was safely hidden within.

This was also around the time when we began calling for help on shearing day. We were not only dealing with the sheets and name cards, but we were also uncoating the sheep just before they went onto the shearing floor, and then coating them again as they came off. It was just too much for two people to do, so we began to invite interested people to come and take a job: they could work for a bit and then watch for a bit, helping us at the same time that they enjoyed seeing something they normally would not experience. It seemed to work well, and over the years, we have expanded our “team” from four people the first year to fifteen people this year. Each person has a specific task that is their responsibility for the day. They can switch off with others if the switch is mutually acceptable but, in the end, I count on each and every one of our team members to make shearing happen.

A few years ago I found that since we shear about two weeks before the first lambs come, this is a convenient time to begin giving vaccination booster shots (which are to be given two to four weeks before the lambs are born to give the lambs immunity as well). I started making a list of the first ewes due to deliver so that the “coating team” could also give vaccinations to those who need them.

One of the important aspects of our management is the fiber testing of each of our breeding animals. This testing is most easily done on shearing day, but that is adding one more task to an already complicated day. In order to keep things running smoothly, I get the sampling bags all ready in advance. Each yearling ewe will provide us with two samples: one from her side and one from the britch (or top of back leg). In addition, random adult ewes will again provide samples from their sides so that I can compare those with their yearling testing. I make sure that I have all the bags labeled and in order by eartag number on shearing day.

Finally, the last bit of preparation is to get the food ready. With fifteen people working on our farm for an entire day, we want to make sure everyone is well fed. I will spend today in the kitchen, cooking the chicken-noodle soup that will be hot in the kitchen (along with four different fresh breads) as each team member finds his or her way into the house for a break. The coffeemaker will be churning out fresh coffee, and the fridge is already full of soda pop. Several different kinds of cookies will also be available all day. When we finally finish shearing and all of the ewes are fed, we will celebrate what we have accomplished and return to the house for one last time to enjoy pizza and soda pop – and homemade wine for those who would like a glass.

There is a lot of preparation that goes into making shearing day run smoothly. I’m sure that even with this description, I’ve missed one or more parts of the prep process. It does give you an idea, though, of how busy things get on our farm, even days before we shear, culminating in one full day of hard work, good conversation, and lots of laughter. It’s a full day, but one I look forward to every year; and it’s almost here once again. How exciting!