In New Hampshire: Sheep and Shear Ecstasy

By Jack White

"Oh. just look at his eyes. Let's take him home," coos a blonde woman. Clad in an Antartex lambskin jacket draped over the L.L. Bean genuine hand-knit imported Icelandic fleece sweater, she is cootchy-cooing into the face of a freshly shorn Shropshire ewe. "But, honey," groans her husband, waving a brand-new shepherd's crook in the direction of the sheep's hindquarters, "it's a she, not a he."

Of course most of the folks who turned up at the second annual Sheep and Wool Festival of the New Hampshire Sheep Breeders Association can distinguish a ram from a ewe. Even so, plenty of them are parading around in costumes that instantly identify them as devotees of what is known in woolgathering circles as "sheep chic": sheepskin vests and coats, shepherds' jackets and lambskin caps.

Most sheep chicers are recent escapees from the suburbs, who get their folk wisdom from Blair & Ketchum's Country Journal. But their money and enthusiasm, along with a certain craving for hand-spun yarn and naturally colored fleece, lend impetus to the recent renaissance in New Hampshire sheep raising.

They flock to the festival in four-wheel-drive pickups, station wagons and huge recreational vehicles for a couple of days of shopping for items that range from electrified fences and worm medicine to a $200 "rocking sheep" covered in natural fleece. Wolfing down golf-ball-size chunks of fresh lamb barbecue (at $3.50 a plate), they watch as skilled artisans turn piles of fleece into yarn with Rumpelstiltskin-like skill. After hours spent looking over the thickset Dorsets and Suffolks, fine-haired Merinos, goatish Barbado black bellies and exotic Karakuls on display, people whose only past experience with sheep also involved mint jelly begin to make knowing comments about various breeds.

And some of them take notes on the sheep wisdom being dispensed by experts. "If you comb the fecal matter out of your fleeces, they will bring higher prices," Bob Stewart, a professional wool buyer for Homestead Woolen Mills, explains to a small crowd, while everyone furiously scribbles down every word.

There are practically as many varieties of sheep chicers as there are of sheep. Take Bob Warn and his wife Pat. A 67-year-old retired Air Force officer, Warn moved from suburban New Jersey to northern New Hampshire a year ago, plunked down several hundred dollars to fence a one-acre pasture and started taking orders for next year's spring lambs. Their "flock" of two newly purchased Southdown Dorset crossbred ewes hasn't even been delivered yet. "First I want to learn to spin," explains Pat, a thin, exuberant woman clutching a sheaf of notes from the fleece-grading lecture. "Then I want to learn to weave. I've been to the library to get all these books."

The very picture of an old New Hampshire sheep farmer, complete with white Lincolnesque beard and a bun of graying hair tucked under a shepherd's cap, turns out to be Bob Richardson, a former candymaker from the Atlantic City, N.J., area. Richardson gave up the trade to become a sawmill worker after some health food fanatics convinced him that candy is poison. Now he lives in Rumney, N.H. (pop. 820) with his three sheep. Says he: "A neighbor had these two, and they were going to be slaughtered if they weren't sold. So we bought them. We didn't know it, but the ewe had been bred and so now we have three. I hope it stops there."

If you keep sheep and want to keep them in order, the thing to have is a sheep dog. The man to get one from at the Sheep Breeders Festival is Maurice MacGregor of Pittsfield, Mass., a bulky emigrant from Northern Ireland who sells border collie pups (at $150 for an eight-week-old pup and $1,000 for a fully trained adult). Selling sheep dogs is his business and many of his sales are made at sheep-dog trials.

MacGregor's clinching argument is a runty border collie with one white eye named Rob Roy. As a cluster of prospective customers watch, MacGregor launches Rob Roy at five skittish Cheviots standing at the far end of a corral 300 yds. long. Using skills his ancestors employed to cut weak animals out of the flock, Rob Roy takes off like a shot, slows to a crawl, inches up to the Cheviots and fixes their apparent leader with a mesmeric stare. As MacGregor yells directions ("way to me, way to me,") meaning circle to the right, Rob Roy nudges the flock of Cheviots our way. They have a tendency to fly apart and reconverge like a big blob of mercury dropped on the floor. But Rob Roy finally herds them through three gates, across a narrow bridge and into a pen. All the while an English collie, Rob's distant cousin, watches through the fence with no apparent interest. "The English collie has been ruined," declares MacGregor. "He's got a long pointy nose and no room for brains. You've got to have a dog with a short nose and a good wide head, like Rob Roy here."

There is, of course, a serious side to New Hampshire sheep breeding. A century ago, about 80% of the land was open pasture. Half a million sheep grazed New Hampshire's rocky hillsides. But when the Western prairies opened up it was possible to raise flocks of 20,000 or more animals. The New England industry went into a decline. Roughly a decade ago, when the thirst for things natural took hold in protest against the increasingly plastic quality of American life, sheep began making a comeback. Today there are roughly 6,000 sheep in New Hampshire mostly in small flocks of ten or 15 animals "When you consider that there are some single farms in the Midwest with 6,000 sheep, we're no big deal," says David Kennard, 30, an organizer of the festival. Still, to Kennard, a wiry, intense man who speaks with the precision of a schoolteacher, sheep raising makes sense in New Hampshire. "Sheep do excellently on hillsides that can't be used for any thing else," says Kennard. "The rough rule of thumb is that one acre of good pasture will support five sheep. With three or four acres you can have 15 or 20."

Sheep are cheap, too, at least compared with other large livestock. A good animal can be bought for $40. In summer they help keep mowing costs down. Regularly bred ewes add one or two lambs a year, which can be either sold for meat or used to increase the flock. The shepherd can expect to obtain about 10 Ibs. of fleece per sheep a year, which can either be spun or sold for an average price of $1 per Ib.

Few New Englanders make money on sheep. But, as Fred Courser, 63, a professional shearer who has barbered 10,000 sheep in his lifetime points out: "Sheep are something anybody can have on a farm without paying all outdoors for. You can feed 'em on grass and hay, and you don't have to grain 'em. If you have the wool, you can spin it and clothe yourself. You can even eat 'em if you have to."

Courser has just placed third in the sheep-shearing contest won by rangy Richard Levis of East Kingston. During the contest each sheep is as nervous as a kid getting his first haircut. But shearers imperturbably plunk the animals down on their backsides. Then, clutching a forefoot in one hand and huge barber clippers in the other, they race through the shearing, rolling fleece off the sheep's belly like carpenters planing wood. Afterward, spectators see that careless shearers gouge into the tender skin, leaving traces of blood. "If it looks like Raggedy Ann you know one of these young shearers has done it," says Courser, snapping the gallus of his overalls. "You want to get the fleece off 'em without having too much hamburger when you're done."

The festival's show-stopper is some thing called a sheep-to-shawl race. Teams consisting of a shearer, four spinners and a weaver compete in converting the hair of an unshorn sheep into a woolen shawl, 24 by 60 inches, in less than three hours.

The race begins when anxious spinners scoop up the fleece almost before it is off the sheep and stampede 50 yds. to their spinning wheels in a big corral. Spectators press in as the spinners cunningly twist the fleece into yarn, then turn it over to the weavers, who throw shuttles of yarn back and forth across the warps of their looms with metronomic regularity. "More gray, more gray," barks Debbie Abbott, captain of the defending champion, team Minnie and the Hampmonters. Without missing a beat, her spinners turn to. The resulting shawl, complete and ready for auction in less than 2 1/2 hrs., is sold for $75. Straight from producer to consumer.

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