A Summer of Shearing: Retrospective
Since I attended shearing school September of 2023, I decided I would like to take on shearing my entire flock of 120 ewes and 5 rams (approximately)
Why would I think this was a good idea after having shorn just 4 sheep on my own and 7 or 8 lambs at shearing school with help? The world may never know what I was thinking, but I sure dug myself a deep hole and I was going to by “lying in it” all summer.
Shearing a flock of sheep is no small feat. Professional shearers create their shearing schedule months and months in advance. By the time I was learning how to shear in fall of 2023 it was probably already too late to get on the list for a pro shearer to do my flock. Add on top of that the fact that I am an accountant and my busiest season (doing taxes) falls right over the time when most people shear their flocks, I was really setting myself up for a world of hurt and no possible way for a rescue.
But do not underestimate my stubbornness. I can and I will do anything I put my mind to, no matter how many tears and screams of frustration we meet along the way. Trust me, there were a lot of tears.
We started off strong. Still wearing winter clothes I worked through 20 ish sheep in one weekend with the help of Jared, my fiancé, and our parents. These ladies were part of a group of roughly 50 regnant ewes that I was racing the clock to get shorn before they got too pregnant to safely flip upsidedown. Unfortunately, I was only about a third of the way through that group when the weekend ended and put a stop to our progress. On top of that, the little all in one shearers I was using were starting to give out and become incredibly unreliable. I would switch them on and about 60% of the time they would not start moving until I got them in exactly the right position or angle. All around a very frustrating experience.
Over the next two months I would occasionally fit in a sheep or four in the evenings or weekends, but now I was battling overtime at work as tax season heated up. I got so fed up with my little shearing machine that I decided to go big or go home and get a professional rig. This is where the motor is its own separate unit that attaches to the handpiece by a long thick cord called a worm drive. But unfortunately this was not a magic bullet and came with a massive learning curve. This was the type of machine we used at shearing school but setting it up on your own in a non-optimal situation is a whole different ball game. This is where most of the tears came in.
I culdn’t have done any of this without Jared’s help. He was always there with me helping to flip the sheep, pulling the cord to turn on and off the machine so I had one less thing to worry about, and just being incredibly patient throughout.
Heading into the heat of the summer I was feeling awful for the sheep I had not yet shorn. I made sure they always had shade in the pastures, but with 5 or 6 inches of wool hanging off them the heat was inescapable. I had about 70 ewes left to go and all 5 of my rams still to do. We started pulling groups of 5 or so sheep into the barn at a time to make sure they were nice and dry to set up for a day of shearing. we chipped away slowly, incredibly slowly, but once again we ran into lambing time in August. Flipping heavily pregnant sheep is just too hard on them. So then we focused on the rams, no small task. Weighing in at 300 to 350 pounds a piece and almost u to my neck after flipping them, I could barely even reach to shear them.
We will say that I finally finished the last sheep I was going to shear this year on October 29th. Her name was Poli since she had come down with Polio earlier in the year. At this point she was fully recovered but I didn’t want to chance stressing her system by breeding her again, so I was going to send her down the chain to the market and needed her to look great. October is WAYYYY too late to be finishing u shearing, already frosting in the morning. But all in all I got through just about 100 or so sheep this season and learned a lot along the way.
However hard it may be, I think for 2025 I will be taking a few days off from work around a weekend to knock out a large portion of the flock in the correct season. And in the early summer, despite what I would rather be doing instead, just suck it up and spend a few weekends completing the rest of the task so I don’t have to struggle with it all year.