Or an Update on Flying Mule Sheep Company...
I would have to go back through old photos, but I believe I’ve lambed out ewes (even if it was only 2 or 3) for each of the last 25 years. At least. Lambing season has been part of the annual rhythm of my life for a quarter of a century or more. But it won’t be in 2025. At least not with ewes I own.
All businesses evolve; Flying Mule Sheep Company is no different. The first ewe we owned was an injured sheep that Sami nursed back to health in her final years of vet school. We brought that ewe to Penryn when we moved there in 1994. We also started buying feeder lambs - one for us, and additional lambs for our family. When we moved to Auburn in 2001, we started a small breeding flock. I can remember buying a our first ram from a ranch in Lincoln, where Home Depot is now.
In 2005, we partnered with our friends Allen and Nancy Edwards on buying some feeder lambs to finish on their place in Colfax, purchasing 12 Barbados lambs from a breeder in El Dorado County. We thought the 8-foot fences were to keep mountain lions out - turns out, they were to keep the nearly wild sheep in. When we unloaded at Allen’s, the first two jumped over my head and disappeared. We never saw them again, although Allen says people would come to their home for several years after this and say they’d seen wild bighorn sheep in the American River canyon! They were the last Barbados sheep we owned!
In 2006, we bought our first 27 breeding ewes and another ram. We started leasing property for grazing. Eventually, we lambed out as many as 275 ewes. Lambing season became a second Christmas for me - I loved the daily gift of new life that lasted for 6 weeks each spring.
I fully embraced sheep ranching. I joined the board of the California Wool Growers Association (California’s oldest livestock organization), eventually serving as President from 2018 to 2020. Even before I became a cooperative extension advisor in 2017, I started holding workshops to teach beginning shepherds about lambing, grazing, and sheep husbandry.
When my sheep partner Roger Ingram decided to move to Texas, I bought out his interest in Flying Mule Sheep Company (in July 2023). Since I was working full-time, I decided to downsize a bit - but I still grazed our sheep on annual rangeland west of Auburn in the winter, and on irrigated pasture closer to Auburn in the summer.
Then Sami was diagnosed with glioblastoma in February 2023. And everything - EVERYTHING! - changed.
After Sami’s second craniotomy in February 2023, I decided to take up my friend Ryan Indart’s offer to lamb out most of my ewes - I sent all but a handful to Fresno County. When Sami spent 3 weeks in hospitals in San Francisco in June, my old partner Roger took over irrigation duties. And when the sheep that Ryan cared for came back in July, I weaned the lambs and sold most of the ewes.
Fast forward to the winter of 2023-24. I’d kept a handful of ewes, which I’d bred to the single ram I’d kept that fall. Their lambs were born in February, and weaned in May 2024. By that time, I’d decided that I was going to move back closer to my family, to help care for my Mom (who’d been diagnosed with dementia). I moved to Calaveras County in August. And brought my remaining sheep (4 ewes, 4 ewe lambs, and 9 feeders) to Mountain Ranch in September.
This week, after three months of grazing my sheep at my new place - and after trying to find someone who can care for them when I have to travel - I’ll take the last of my breeding ewes to the sale in Escalon. Next spring, for the first time in a quarter century (at least), I won’t have any lambs. No bummers. No three-times-a-day checks on the drop bunch. No middle of the stormy night walks through the ewes to make sure everyone’s okay. I’ve decided that for the time being, I’ll buy feeder lambs each spring and graze them at my new place until the feed dries out in late May or June. But I won’t have sheep - at least in 2025 - from early summer through the following early spring.
As I grew older - and as I became more experienced in lambing out ewes - I often thought about the fact that I had a limited number of years of lambing left. I don’t think I’m done lambing - I know that once I get settled in my new place - and in my new life - that I’ll get back into the breeding sheep business. But for now, after Friday, I won’t have any breeding ewes. And next February, I suspect, I’ll miss the sound of new lambs and mama sheep.
I'm incredibly proud of the flock we built. After any years of paying attention to maternal ability, ewe productivity, and lamb quality, we built a flock that fit our environment. Perhaps the highest compliment I've ever been paid was having the friends whose daughter bought my ewes in 2023 (friends who are great stockpeople) tell me, "The lambs from your ewes were amazing." As I've written before, breeding livestock, to me, is the equivalent to an artist's body of work. My sheep are my body of work. Work that was 25 years in the making. Work that I don't feel quite ready to quit.
This afternoon, I brought the sheep into my corrals and sorted off the feeders I wanted to keep. Like many of the things I’ve had to do over the last 23 months, it was a task that I didn’t look forward to, but one I knew I had to do. The work itself was something I’ve done hundreds (if not thousands) of times since we started Flying Mule Sheep Company; the consequences of what I was doing felt different. My dog worked well, the sheep looked good. But the handful of ewes I’d kept were the best ewes we had; watching them walk off the trailer tomorrow at the sales yard will be difficult; only other ranchers can truly appreciate how difficult.
And so tonight, as I sit by my wood stove after finishing this chore, I’m both sad and grateful. Grateful to the sheep and to the way my family’s life was fitted to the rhythms of the sheep year - breeding in the fall, coasting through the winter, lambing in the spring, weaning in the summer, flushing the ewes in the early fall, harvesting lambs as we started the cycle again. I’m grateful for the years when the rains came early and the feed grew strong. I won’t miss the stress of late rains and short grass during lambing, but I will miss the sound of a ewe nickering to her new babies. I’m sad to know that I won’t have lambs here at my new place next February, but I’m grateful my daughters had a chance to experience the tie to the landscape that our sheep provided (even on a small scale). I’m sad to be severing that tie, even if it’s only for a year.
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