Sheep Days
I was working as assistant manager and cowboy for Otter Creek Grazing when the lease came due on the ranch I'd rented out to neighbors before college. I wanted to do my own thing. I finagled an ag loan, bought a half-band of ewes in the fall, got them bred, and started running sheep on the side while keeping my job.
One of my good friends came from a sheep outfit — his dad had trailed their bands across the basin since he was a boy, built a real operation, and two sons followed him into it. One of those sons got me started.
Sheep take a different kind of management than cattle. More intense. More unforgiving. There used to be real money in it — shear them in spring, sell the wool, and the wool check covered your winter feed costs. Whatever the lambs brought made the ranch business work. Men bought land that way in the thirties, forties, fifties. By the time I got in, the margins had thinned, but sheep were still less capital-intensive than cattle. A harder way to live, but a possible one.
I ran that outfit for four or five years, kept my job for two of them. At the end of that second year, my employers told me plainly: work for them or work for myself. The situation had already made the decision. I went out on my own.
The heart of the whole operation was shed lambing — and if you want to give yourself problems you haven't thought of yet, put five hundred ewes in a small space in March and help them have their lambs. You can't range lamb in Wyoming in March. One storm wipes you out. So you bring them in, and that's where it starts.
Early on it's manageable. But once you've got newborns, lambs two weeks old, and everything in between all needing something different at the same time — that's when the real weight lands on you. Something always breaks. Something always goes sideways. You are making decisions, some of them with life on the line, one right after another without stopping.
Animal husbandry. I don't know where the term came from, but I know what it meant to me — putting out fires, constantly, in a small shed, in the cold, until the work was done or the sun came up. Whichever came last. The work was never finished until lambing was all over with.
When it was over it came time to head for the hills. Turn them out to spring grass. We didn't have a herder, so I'd ride out from the barns every morning and do a check — a few hours out and back on horseback — then come back and try to get other work done. Fields prepped for planting, ditches cleaned, trying to get ready to start irrigating hayfields. For a few short weeks while the mountain pastures greened up.
Then we gathered them and trailed to the mountains where they'd spend the summer. And all while that was going on, trying to get around and repair fences, keep irrigation water spread out on the hayfields at the home ranch, put up hay. Really needing to be in two or three places at once. That's the life. You're a little scattered out. Some guys make it work better than others. I struggled trying to get a system set up that I could manage.
I think I was only in it six years total. Maybe five. And looking back, there was one decision in there that ended it.
The replacements to your herd — just like replacement of the culls in a cow herd — is kind of a big deal. I hadn't got to the point where I could keep ewe lambs from my own flock to replace the ones that dropped out every year through death or culling. And I had a high cull rate because I was running old ewes. You can mouth an animal to tell how old they are — look at their teeth and make a judgement. When the teeth start separating, when they're starting to lose them, they're getting old. Possibly to the point they won't raise you a lamb. When they get to be five to seven years old, you might get a couple more years out of them depending on body condition and your management plan. But the turnover rate for someone running aged ewes is higher.
After I'd been in it a couple of years, I bought some replacement ewes at a sale barn. That got me by for one year. Then we decided we needed to expand to make things work. A ranch was selling out — had their entire herd, all ages, for sale. I saw it as my chance to expand and solve what was getting to be a real problem.
So I went over and looked through his bunch and decided to buy them. When we were loading them up, there was one with a bad foot. We turned it over and looked at it, and the seller — he was actually an order buyer, a kind of go-between — looked at her feet and said, "This is a little bit of foot rot, no big deal, we'll throw her in for free."
So I agreed. Not thinking it was a big deal.
Turned out to be a really big deal.
It was a particularly virulent form of the disease, and it eventually made its way through not only those sheep, but every one I had. Every animal in the herd, even the lambs. They'd limp around. Some had it in all four feet, some in one, some in two. You know, the whole gamut.
The ones hit worst would just lay there. Feet too bad to walk. Couldn't walk to water, couldn't walk to get feed. If you can't do that, you're pretty much dead — and a lot of them were.
For two years we ran them through foot baths. We'd get them all in, turn them all over, dump medicine of some kind — iodine, whatever, we tried everything — onto their hooves, trim them up, then do it all over again in a few weeks. Their hooves got maggots in them. It was just the most awful thing.
What became of that is, I lost so many ewes, had so much trouble with it, that I eventually sold the ones I had left and got out of the sheep business. All because of that one decision. That one moment when we turned that ewe over and that guy said, oh, it's just a little foot rot, not a big deal.
I thought about that a lot afterward.
It's remarkable to me how one decision can put you out of business. Just one. Doesn't have to be a series of them. One bad decision, not dealt with the right way at the right time, and you are looking for something else to do.
There's more I could probably tell you about the sheep business. Maybe someday. But that's another story.
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