OPINION: Predators are everywhere
A sheep farmer covers the pros and cons of sheep farming while promising not to embellish
I was talking to sheep farmer Tom Joad and told him I was getting flack for my columns.
“You mean no one stole Stompin’ Tom Connors’ hat?”
“No, that’s true.”
“The guy in Spencerville didn’t trade his wife for a car?
“No, that’s true too.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“I can get carried away with the details. I don’t remember the dialogue quite right. So, things get exaggerated. I guess I embellish.”
“Embellish?”
“Yeah, I embellish.”
“Who doesn’t embellish?”
“Well, I want to restrain myself, which is why I came to you. You’re a straight shooter and you’ve said sheep farming is the best way into the livestock business, especially if you’re young and don’t have deep pockets. It sounds like a good story, easy to tell. No bull.”
“Okay, no embellishment,” Tom said, leaning forward on his creaky porch bench, squinting at me like I was a suspicious tax auditor. He was flannel clad and wore a faded grey toque, wears it year-round. He’s about 55 and has a white-streaked beard that looks styled by a hedge trimmer.
“Look, sheep farming might be easy to get into but there are about 14 ways to go bankrupt,” he began.
“No embellishment?”
“I’ll keep it to a minimum. As I was saying there are about 18 ways to go bankrupt. The first way is thinking there’s money in wool. I mean you spend an entire day wrestling a 150 lb. woolly linebacker that pees on you, kicks like a mule, and stares into your soul. You end up with a greasy, burr-infested, manure-flecked pile of fluff and the buyer offers you 50 cents a kilo that doesn’t get you a cup of coffee. But worse you have the crushing realization that the sheep just cost you more in chiropractor bills than the wool will ever be worth.
That raised my eyebrows. “How many you need to be full-time into meat?”
“One hundred ewes, maybe 150. Okay, 250 if you run everything through the books. Be sure you get a breed that allows you to lamb throughout the year. Otherwise, you go nuts from lack of sleep. You can run out of room if you get two dozen lambs at once. You know, sheep farming is like running a daycare. If you don’t supervise them, they’ll fall into a hole, ingest foreign objects, find a way to get lost.”
I couldn’t unraise my eyebrows. They were stuck, so I just nodded.
“Then there’s disease to worry about so you have to separate the flock into different barns. You need to have meds on the shelf. And then there’s the predators. Oh… the predators.”
“Coyotes?”
“No, animal activists.”
“Really?”
“There’s a group of vegan witches who live down the road. They used to cast spells on the farm and post all sorts of online hate. I made the mistake of hiring one of them to do chores last year.”
“Why would you hire a vegan witch?”
“I didn’t know. She lied. Said she loved lamb chops. She lasted four days — fake-tortured one of the animals and took photos of it. Posted it on Youtube and said I did it.”
“You call the animal police?”
“No, she did. Couldn’t prove a damned thing. No charges, then she comes after me for wrongful dismissal.”
“How’s that?”
“She never showed up for work again but I still sent her a notice of dismissal. Told her she was fired because she was terrifying the flock because she was so ugly.”
“You said that?”
“There was a Cambridge study almost 10 years ago that found sheep recognize faces and remember them a lot longer than people remember their new year’s resolutions. So, they can see ugly and well, objectively speaking…”
“This doesn’t look good.”
“Here’s the upside. Barbecued lamb chops three-quarter-inches thick are about the tastiest thing you’ll ever eat. It sells itself. Socrates loved lamb. The ancient philosopher coined the phrase ‘We eat to live, not live to eat’ to restrain the appetite. But his kids didn’t listen. They were terribly fat.”
“Are there other predators to watch for?
“There’s the mechanic. He’s a predator. Charges me $250 just to come down my driveway and look inside my tractor. That’s before he actually does any work on it. Did I say there was money in this business?”
“So, it’s a labour of love?”
“Some days. Other days it’s a dilemma. Price of everything is going up but the price of sheep hasn’t budged for six years. Want to buy some sheep?”
This is not exactly going to attract people to the business.
“You have to love the life, the peace and quiet, rolling hills and accept that paradise comes with a serious manure management problem.”
Tom leaned forward, eyes sparkling with the pure joy of a man who was relishing the sound of his own voice and who could not stop himself if you paid him in gold bullion. “Here’s the thing,” he said, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “I don’t have trouble with the vegan witch since Kingston.”
“What happened in Kingston?”
“I was walking by Morrison’s Restaurant right downtown and there she was in a booth in the front window eating a burger with bacon. We locked eyes, she looked down and I never heard from her again.”
Tom slapped his knee, then after a pause long enough to see he was comfortable with silence, he added: “I should probably give you the number of guys that are really making money at this.”
As I drove away with raised eyebrows, I saw Tom in the rearview mirror, waving good-bye and wearing a grin so wide I could almost count all his teeth.
Farmers in these parts, I had to remind myself. They can’t help it. The truth is just too small for the stories they need to tell.
Theodore “Tad” Peckish is an Ontario farmer writing under a pseudonym in order “to avoid getting myself and anyone else into trouble.”
