Sheep Shearing

Last Saturday, Emily and I went to one of the city parks, which is also an old farm.  The playground has farm themed play structures, you can rent a plot of land in their community farm, and they have some animals in some old farm buildings, which are about 100 feet from the playground.

This is from last fall, so the sheep only has about half the fleece it had last week

One of the types of animals they have are sheep, and this last Saturday they sheared the sheep.  A local sheep farmer comes and shears the animals, and they have a pancake breakfast beforehand, and you can buy sheep feed to give to the animals.

This is also from last fall; the sheep like to go stand as far away from the humans as possible.

We got their early, and got some seats right in front.  Emily was very antsy before it started, and kept on trying to leave.  But once they dragged the first sheep out, she was hooked.  (And I do mean dragged; they grab the sheep near its head and near its rear, and force it along.)  The sheep farmer then manhandles the sheep around so they are sitting on their bums, and starts shearing them on their tummy, and works his way all around the animal, moving the sheep around as he does so.  The sheep are surprisingly complacent about the whole thing.  Sometimes they jerk if the razor pokes them (it was like a large version of what you would use to cut human hair), but they didn't move besides that.  And we only heard one "baa" the whole time. Sheep do not seem very ambitious.

I drew a picture on the ipad, since I did not have a camera with me.

Most of the wool comes off the sheep in one giant swath, which probably makes it easier to shove into the big plastic bags they used (about 30 gallon sized bags).  We watched a couple sheep get sheared, fed some sheep, visited the old farmhouse, played on the playground, and watched another sheep get his haircut, and then fed the goats (Emily didn't think feeding the sheep was very fun). 

This picture is also from last fall, but I don't think the goats looked much different.

They gave us some wool from a couple of the different sheep.  The first two sheep had white wool, and the last one we saw had gray wool.

The gray wool is on the left, and I grabbed some that was mostly clean.  The white wool is on the right, and the ends are dirty, which is how all the outside of the wool looks.  Except some of it is dirtier.

I asked, and the wool from one sheep makes about one sweater.  So, not too much wool.  Apparently, farmers in the United States don't make much from the wool their sheep produce.  Most of the money comes from the lambs that those sheep make.  The farmer who did the shearing said that most sheep bear twins, although this year most of his sheep had triplets, which meant he had to bottle feed some, because sheep can only feed two lambs.  Apparently, you will probably not get rich being a sheep farmer, but you can make enough to live.

We also learned that most of the wool from the United States gets shipped overseas to be made into things, after it is processed here.  So, if you buy woolen clothing that was made in Asia, the wool might be from the US.  But, some farmers take their wool to Frankenmuth, which is a German settlement north of here in Michigan (and one of our tourist destinations), where they process wool and make it into things.  Apparently, this is not cheap.  But you can get your own wool back if you want, which is very cool.