Thanks for sharing this wonderful article, Kristin. I especially liked the photo of your mom at the end. A question occurred to me when I read that you "bagged" the ewes by hand since you couldn't see their udders from a distance through their long winter wool. I've never thought about this before, but did you shear your sheep just before you auctioned them off to become meals? Or did the buyers do that, and benefit from the "windfall" of the textile fiber that they could sell along with the meat?
Yes, Gary, you 'bag' a ewe by reaching between her back legs and feeling for her udder. My brother Jeff was quite good at this and we had many off-color jokes about whether it was a man's job or a woman's job. As for shearing the lambs when they reached slaughter weight, we seldom did that, or we invited people learning to shear to practice on the lambs to relieve them of some wool going into the summer. The price of raw wool (it's called "wool in grease" right off the sheep) crashed in the early nineties and has never recovered enough to break even after paying the shearer. The crash was a combination of the closing of wool mills in the US and a major expansion in wool flocks in the southern hemisphere and China. In recent years, our US wool clip has been shipped in grease to China, barnyard dirt and all. The mills pay even less for lambs' wool -- that first shearing -- than the ewe's fleece because the fiber length (the "staple length") is usually less than 4 inches (less than 12 months' growth) and the fiber is tapered, so it's harder to spin. Or so they say.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful article, Kristin. I especially liked the photo of your mom at the end. A question occurred to me when I read that you "bagged" the ewes by hand since you couldn't see their udders from a distance through their long winter wool. I've never thought about this before, but did you shear your sheep just before you auctioned them off to become meals? Or did the buyers do that, and benefit from the "windfall" of the textile fiber that they could sell along with the meat?
Yes, Gary, you 'bag' a ewe by reaching between her back legs and feeling for her udder. My brother Jeff was quite good at this and we had many off-color jokes about whether it was a man's job or a woman's job. As for shearing the lambs when they reached slaughter weight, we seldom did that, or we invited people learning to shear to practice on the lambs to relieve them of some wool going into the summer. The price of raw wool (it's called "wool in grease" right off the sheep) crashed in the early nineties and has never recovered enough to break even after paying the shearer. The crash was a combination of the closing of wool mills in the US and a major expansion in wool flocks in the southern hemisphere and China. In recent years, our US wool clip has been shipped in grease to China, barnyard dirt and all. The mills pay even less for lambs' wool -- that first shearing -- than the ewe's fleece because the fiber length (the "staple length") is usually less than 4 inches (less than 12 months' growth) and the fiber is tapered, so it's harder to spin. Or so they say.