Stephany Wilkes

January 17, 2023 by Stephany Wilkes

How To Get Started In Sheep Shearing

If you’d like to try sheep shearing, where do you start?

Not on YouTube or TikTok. Shearing cannot be taught solely or even primarily via video. That would be like trying to learn figure skating by video, without ever having set foot on ice. Video cannot convey weight, power, force, momentum, resistance, balance, temperature, and duration, much less all of these simultaneously. A video cannot convey how gentle a physical motion is, that may appear rough (or vice versa).

A black-and-white spotted sheep with horns leans against a sheep shearer's bent left knee in brown pants — *In this position, the shearer needs to feel the position of the sheep’s spine and ensure the skin on the sheep’s neck is not slack, among other things.*

You must go to shearing school, or at least apprentice, and ideally go to shearing school and then apprentice, on at least a few jobs with other shearers. Shearing school will introduce and connect you with other shearers, and these folks will open doors to what is actually a very small world, even globally. You will make friends for life.

How To Find Sheep Shearing Schools

The American Sheep Industry Association (ASI) website is the best place to begin, and specifically with their newsletter. Each week’s ASI newsletter includes a list of Upcoming Events, which includes shearing schools. Most shearing schools in the U.S. take place in spring (because sheep get sheared before hot summer arrives), last for three to five days, and cost $250-$500. Scholarships and financial assistance are often available. If these are not explicitly mentioned, ask!

*A small selection of the list of shearing schools mentioned each week in the ASI newsletter. Get it!*

In addition to the ASI Newsletter, sheep and wool growers’ associations, and agricultural schools and extensions often sponsor sheep shearing schools. Some of these organizations also maintain directories of sheep shearers for their members to find, to which you can add yourself later. If you live in Montana, for example, you may want to join (or at least subscribe to the newsletter of) the Montana Wool Growers Association (MWGA), even if you are not a wool grower yourself. This will introduce you to sheep-related events, trainings, and other shearers with whom you might work.

A Black woman in dreadlocks, blue shirt, and black overalls holds a white sheep laying on its side, a preparation step before she shears the sheep's belly wool off — My friend, Beatrice, assisted by shearing instructor Gary. Beatrice has just finished guiding the sheep to the floor so that she can get the ewe into position to shear her belly wool off. This move may appear rough or uncomfortable in a photo, but is quite gentle when done properly, because it uses movements sheep make naturally.

You can also search online for “shearing school” + the name of your state, but the results are not always great. Algorithms favor mainstream popularity and many not handle niche content well or accurately. If you don’t find a reasonably nearby shearing school via a search engine, do not be discouraged.

A few days of shearing school will tell you if it’s something you want to do, and can physically do, going forward. Get through shearing school first and then think about what’s next.

Sheep shearing is a full-body experience. Your legs have to hold and move a sheep that weighs 100-250 pounds while one hand pulls its skin taut and helps control and move it, all while shearing with the other hand (and sweating like mad while your back screams). Animal handling and equipment selection and set-up are 90% of safe, humane shearing you can be proud of. You do not want to hurt an animal or yourself, and it’s easy to do both if you haven’t learned from experts, hands on. The shearing strokes are the easy part, the fun part, the pay-off for all the hard, consistent, frustrating work you put in elsewhere.

April 7, 2021 by Stephany Wilkes

Get Thee a Handypiece Pro

The best tool solves all the right problems. And when it solves most, if not all, of your and your customers’ problems; when shearers buy it for each other, and then that shearer buys one for another to pay it forward because it’s just that life changing; then that tool has earned a dedicated blog post, at the very least. I am talking about the Handypiece Pro, the truly portable, go-everywhere, battery-powered sheep shearing machine. I first held one at McWilliams Shearing (the only U.S. retailer that I am aware of) when I was in Montana in December 2018 and wish I’d bought one sooner. (No, this is not a sponsored post or anything like that. I’m just a person, not a paid influencer.)

The upshot: If I were starting out as a small-flock shearer today (vs. in 2013), this is the only piece of equipment I would buy, because it addresses ALL my needs and solves ALL the problems other equipment did not.

A huge thank you to Gynna Clemes for these photos from shearing day at her place, so I could finally get this post written!

What is the Handypiece Pro?

All sets of shearing equipment have four primary parts: 1) a source of power; 2) a handpiece (what the shearer holds); 3) something that connects the handpiece to the source of power; and 4) combs and cutters that go on the handpiece.

The Handypiece Pro is different because its source of power is a battery, and a substantial one at that (a 12 volt 10.5Ah Lithium Polymer battery) with a low current draw. That combination — big battery power, low draw — means you can get through a day’s work on a single battery charge (i.e. crutching 200-300 sheep or shearing ~50, depending on your speed), in areas without power and without a gas-powered generator. Which is life changing.

You also wear all the pieces on a belt. When they said portable, they actually meant it.

Look closely at the photo above and you will see three distinct things hanging on the belt, which is included with the Handypiece kit. At far right, you can see the purple Lister handpiece sticking up from the brown holster bag. To the left of that, beneath a leather strap with a snap to keep it secure, is the battery in its bag. And, to the left of that, just in front of my left hand, is the power switch and speed control. That is how I turn the Handypiece on and off, and either speed it up or slow it down, depending on the fleece situation and conditions before me.

The Features section of the Handypiece website goes into more detail on all of this.

The black thing around my midsection is not part of the Handypiece Pro, but a wool back warmer that is another critical piece of equipment (for me, anyway), as are the Red Ants Pants, made in Montana. All good shearing supplies come from Montana (and happy 406 Day up there, y’all).

There’s something about reaching into a holster for a handpiece that makes shearing feel even more bad a*s than it already is. A hawk screams, a tumbleweed blows through the dusty sheep chute, and the masked shearing bandit walks into a bar… Say hello to my little friend!

No more setting your handpiece on the floor. It goes in its holster now.

At risk of stating the obvious: You can walk onto the job and start shearing. I have a LOT more to say about that, so hold that thought.

In order to turn the Handypiece Pro on, you first connect the battery to the power switch. Then, you flip the switch on. This two-step process prevents accidental on/off. The black cord shown in the photo connects the Lister handpiece to the power.

Cord draped over the back of my neck and down my right arm, to keep it out of the way.

To keep the cord out of the way, and to prevent the sheep’s legs from getting caught up in it, I drape the cord over the back of my neck and down my right arm, something I copied from the videos on the Handypiece website. This more closely mimics a traditional set up in which a handpiece is connected to a drive shaft, which connects the handpiece to a motor, which is plugged into power.

Note: Sheep horns do occasionally manage to hook into the cord near my left chest area.

Critical Differences

It is the specific ways in which the Handypiece is different that matter the most, because it gives shearers the best of all worlds in terms of weight, portability, and heat. Typical portable handpieces require trade-offs between heavier weight and higher heat in exchange for portability. And, unless you’re using manual shearing scissors, you still need power.

Before I had a Handypiece Pro, I (like other small-flock shearers) had two sets of not-ideal choices for every job:
* EITHER a lighter, cooler, more comfortable and nimble handpiece, attached to a heavy, external, not very portable motor that required more set-up time and a stable structure to support it;
* OR a heavier, hotter, less comfortable, yet more portable handpiece, that required little to no set-up time but did require periodic cooling time.

Let’s unpack these tradeoffs, because I think they affect shearing usability more than almost anything else. Established shearers know all this and can skip right over this part.

Thanks to Jenifer Kent for this photo, taken for my May article in Grit Magazine about how to shear sheep on a stand.

Here is a photo of my Oster Shearmaster in action. I’m not here to knock it. It’s an affordable way to get started at just over $300. It weighs 8.4 pounds, though, not least because the motor is inside the handpiece. The Handypiece Pro, by contrast, is fully FIVE POUNDS LIGHTER, at 3 pounds (1.4 kg).

A heavier handpiece weight and larger circumference makes it more unwieldy, and for a much harder day on your hand and arms (hello, jelly arms). The motor being inside the handpiece makes things hotter, sooner (especially on 90-100 degree days), and the heat travels into the comb and cutter, which the sheep can feel. This means you have to stop working to let the handpiece cool down, probably more often than you want to.

Really think about that time-is-money bit on the business end of all this. When you’re not shearing, you’re not making money. You are standing around waiting for the handpiece to cool off. You’re earning less because you are spending more time at the job than you otherwise would (time you cannot spend earning money elsewhere), for free. I got to the point where I didn’t want to shear more than two or three sheep with the Oster. That’s just me.

Rachel’s stunning fleece (she’s a BFL x Jacob) and my much smaller grip. Don’t @ me about being out of position: Rachel is calm as long as she’s laying on her side. Sometimes the sheep tells you how it’s going to be sheared, and going with that can make your life a lot easier.

By contrast, note the smaller grip circumference shown above. The power source being external to the handpiece means it takes quite a while to get hot.

Prior to the Handypiece Pro, however, using a lighter handpiece like this (my Heininger) required me to set up an external motor (mine is a Lister QR) to power it. That motor weighs 22 pounds. It needs a stand or other stable structure (2×4 attached to two good posts, real solid fence, or similar) to support it. These are neither a given nor easy to come by. To wit…

Carrie and I in another world, February 2020, below a typical shearing motor set up

The photo above illustrates what is, far and away, my most common shearing set up: a fairly stable fence, with a couple of solid boards put together and ratchet-strapped to said fence, and the 22-pound shearing motor hung on top of the board, at the correct height (because it must hang at a specific height due to the length of the drive shaft that connects the motor to the handpiece).

This set-up is as good as it gets. Unlike the situation shown above, there is not always a barn, or any shade structure, or a fence, safe power, and light to see by. (I personally know three shearers who have been shocked by ungrounded or other poor power situations. They’re lucky they were able to get the handpiece away from them and didn’t die from electrocution.)

More often, you end up carrying a 22-pound motor through mud on your head, all over a farm, slipping and trying not to die or drop it on your foot or throw your back out, scouting around for a place to hang it or BUILDING a place to hang it. I started carrying spare 2x4s and a drill so I could improve set-ups from one year to the next.

I’ve never set my motor up in under 30 minutes (if you actually time it, walking loads back and forth from the parking, etc.), and it was often as much as an hour if I had to build and finagle things, connect four extension cords and run them through the next valley, etc.

I have set my 22-pound motor on a truck bed and sheared the sheep below it. Possible, resourceful even, but not ideal. Other shearers with welding and other skills have constructed impressive portable rigs, that either stand on their own sort of tripod base, or attach to a pick-up truck and swing out. I admire it but, as someone who does not have those skills already, believe that time and money is better invested in a Handypiece Pro.

Speaking of…

Let’s Talk About Money…

A complete Handypiece Pro kit, delivered, will run you about $1,000 USD. An Oster Shearmaster and similar tools cost $325-$500. A Nexus motor, drive shaft, and starter handpiece (my Heininger) cost about $1,500. Combs, cutters, and the rest of your kit are on top of that.

And I think you need both, which puts you at $2,000. You don’t always need the big rig, and sometimes there is truly NOTHING to hang it from. A shearer may not be ready or able to invest $1,500 after a few days of shearing school, so will probably spend $325 before they’re sure they will continue shearing. After a season or two, they have the ability and funds to justify the $1,500+.

Or, you could spend $1,000 on a Handypiece Pro and never buy anything else, except a supplementary battery. If you almost always or only ever shear 50 sheep or fewer in a day, like I do, you can save $1,000 and not have so much equipment around to store.

About Time

That $1,000 saved isn’t all, because you will also save 30-60 minutes on set-up at every job, and get paid the same. Do the math on that over the course of a season. I often spent 2-4x as much time setting up as I did actually shearing (DEEP SADNESS HERE).

Reducing set-up and breakdown time also makes it easier to do two jobs in the same area in one day, and not be late or working into the night because of unpredictable or janky situations. That’s more money, too. For years, I resisted booking two-job days (even if I was quite close to a second job) because I could never predict how long the entire set-up situation would take, or how physically draining it might be. Would I have enough energy for Job #2 after whatever might be required at Job #1? Who could say? You need ALL your energy for shearing and hoof trimming.

Reduced Frustration Is Huge, Too

I won’t lie: I got frustrated with bad set-ups. Despite my sending photos showing simple, good set-ups, and extended (hour-long) phone conversations and email exchanges on how to build a good set-up (which is unpaid time), I’d show up to a job and have nothing.

Good shearing set-ups don’t have to be complicated. This is four hog-wire panels, one horse or garage mat, and we’re on the flat driveway between my car and the raised beds. Great!

So I did other things to try to make up for folks not being set up. In late 2019, after great deliberation, I changed my 2020 pricing model to a flat rate of $100/hour (instead of the usual ranch call + per-head price), so I could get paid no matter what work I was doing on a job. It rewarded what I saw as “good behavior.” Folks who set-up paid less for shearing than usual, and folks who were not paid more. That went out the window as fast as it came because, with COVID, I had to do ALL the work myself. It wasn’t fair to pass COVID costs onto customers.

But I was wrong. I was solving for the wrong problem. Ultimately, getting set up to shear a handful of sheep once a year, who belong to people who often also have off-farm day jobs, is a vastly different context than shearing hundreds of sheep that get sheared every year, and reside in a place with experienced ranch hands and infrastructure.

The Handypiece Pro solves my problems AND theirs at the same time, for $1,000.

Observations, Tweaks And Hacks

I started using the Handypiece in October, and have not been able to stop it from spinning around my waist somewhat. The handpiece holster rotates toward the back, and the battery and power switch toward the front.

Gynna made a terrific suggestion after watching the Handypiece in action at her shearing day: mounting the Handypiece onto a shooting or carpenter’s harness instead, which would prevent rotation and balance the weight of the items on the belt.

And what did another Handypiece shearer send me a photo of just a few days later? That very idea, implemented (which I hadn’t even mentioned). The same problem inspired the same solution.

The Handypiece items mounted to a carpenter’s harness, instead of the default belt.

I am now shopping around for a harness that will fit me well, to do the same.

One final note: Do not throw batteries around or drop them. That is dangerous, explosively so.

Now go forth and shear, in less than half the time.

January 1, 2021 by Stephany Wilkes

2020: Only the Good Stuff

Let’s start with the big ones, first among them: these two.

We are alive. All of our immediate family is alive, even those who had COVID-19, even those who spent time in the ICU because of it. We are so grateful there was room in the ICU for them.

I am self-employed, and one of the two main things I do to earn money enables me to work alone, in open air. Could I be any luckier? No.

Getting ready to shear at the foot of Mt. Shasta in May 2020.

We got a minivan. It is life changing what with a 93-pound dog, shearing gear, and occasional, large, unexpected surprise bags of wool going to or from the mill. Life without large dogs and minivans is no longer an acceptable option.

I found the minivan just in time, too. It turned out to be a great year to have a minivan in which to completely self-isolate. Due to the pandemic, I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) stay inside customers’ houses, and was able to sleep quite comfortably in the minivan. I made window screens and curtains, got a two-burner camping stove and roof-rack awning on Craigslist, and I was good to go. I will add a simple folding cot or bed (beneath which I can store things) in the future, as that will go a long way toward sleeping comfort. No matter the padding, metal is a lot harder than ground.

Many bathrooms reopened after the spring lockdown, but not all gas stations allow access. I will continue to carry the trusty Folgers pee can and Gamma-lid sealed poop bucket (shown above) on all future ventures, just in case.

The Handypiece is life changing. It is a battery-powered shearing handpiece, which reduces set-up time to almost zero and enables many hours of shearing in areas without power. I have a lot more to say about this, but if I were starting out with small flocks today, I think I would buy this instead of a motor and drop, given the nature of most work I do.

I leveled up my wildfire livestock evacuation game. I volunteered with a local livestock evacuation group during the CZU Complex Fires this year. They are well organized, committed, and friendly. In 2021, I will complete my FEMA Incident Command System (ICS) and related training and, upon doing so, will identify the training that will follow, whether that’s in ham radio, trailer driving, horse handling or something else.

I learned a lot about how useful ham radio is this year, as there is no such thing as mobile reception in many areas (which I well knew from shearing). The minivan earned its keep: It can fit a lot of donated feed troughs and other goodies inside, and it was a joy to deliver feed-store items and check on animals left in the evacuation zones.

I received my first yarn made from sheep I sheared, and knit a sweater with it. Some folks seem to think I do these things all the time, or make all our clothes this way, but let me be the first to assure you that is NOT the case… and is not really a goal of mine, either. But every so often, I am shearing and the fleeces are spectacular and too good to go to waste, and it is rewarding to have this sweater from them. The sheep are as local as they come, within a 10-minute drive, in South San Francisco near SFO airport.

Shetland sheared by me, spun at Mendocino Wool & Fiber, in the Oxbow Cardigan pattern by Andrea Mowry.

The Fibershed Marketplace had a record sales year. No credit to me and entirely due to Gynna Clemes, who marketed the heck out of our co-op members’ wares. For the unfamiliar, the Fibershed Marketplace is an Etsy-style platform, owned and operated by and for the members of our Northern California Fibershed Cooperative. I am the Co-op’s inaugural (bot not forever) president.

At the beginning of this year, staring a pandemic and economic depression in the face, I had no idea what we would do without in-person sales events. Our online sales more than made up for it and exceeded all hopes. If there is any time I want farmers and artisans to earn as much income as possible, it is RIGHT NOW.

More writing got out into the world, even though I did not work as hard as I should have at it, and never felt terribly creative while doing it.

I said no to a book that I didn’t really want to write. In the scheme of impeachment, election nightmares, months-long wildfires, and a raging pandemic that has killed devastating numbers of people, it doesn’t seem right to say that this was one of the harder things I had to do in 2020, but it was.

When you are a first-time author, you don’t feel like you can be picky. It reminds me very much of being a beginning shearer, when I took any and every job I could — even though, in retrospect, it was not always the best idea. I learned that lesson once and had to hold on to it this year. When a publisher says they’re sorry they passed on your first book (me: “Can you repeat that at least 100 times, please?”), and asks if you might be interested in writing a book about a related topic that you not only know something about, but even have existing material you cut from your first book, it feels as good as done.

And yet, and yet… I did not really want to write it. It takes years to get a book out, even if you can manage to knock out an initial draft in one year (still very hard). Worst of all, though, it felt disingenuous and borderline misleading, and that is not my thing. See, at the same time I was having this second-book conversation, I was also drafting business plans and spreadsheets to explore the idea of our co-op doing the very thing that this rather idealistic, regenerative-ag-product-y book would have suggested…and for the life of me, I could not make the numbers work to create a sufficiently profitable endeavor for us to engage in. Which is the real story, of course, and one I may yet write.

I do not have it in me to write a book espousing or suggesting things that big fashion manufacturers should do when I can’t make it work myself, however much I might want it to be true. I was incredibly sad about this but then realized I wasn’t thinking much about it, and that’s how I knew I made the right decision. I was neither worried about writing a book for the wrong reasons (which I had been before), nor was I missing it or having new ideas for it. And that’s telling. When I am working on a book, I am LIVING that book. My brain spends at least 50% of its time in the imaginary world of that book (not when I’m shearing, though, promise). And it wasn’t happening. So it’s not. And that is as it should be.

I have an office outside of the house. Big-city rents are down, so dreaming the impossible dream worked out, for once. A writer friend and I got a primo-to-us office in downtown San Francisco for a song. The mental health and focus rewards have already been great. I’ve had my own business(es) for 5.5 years and have worked from my house the entire time, but I am utterly incapable of ignoring my dog and housework is always a justifiable distraction from putting words on the page. The office creates hours of real focus and low rent means I have to work just a few hours each month to pay my share. Read: SO WORTH IT.

I finished a draft of a novel. “Draft” is an enormously generous term at this stage, more on the level of words someone might read in court to take your family away than a cohesive story. Even so, there is undeniably a thing that, when printed out, resembles a nascent book.

A lot of prior work paid off. In many ways, my dear husband and I live on the fringes of society, values and behavior wise. Despite my talk of minivans and Handypieces herein, we think consumerism is the devil himself and have always lived far below our means, tried to make or grow or trade for (meat, socks) what we can, and be in this world but not of it, as the saying goes.

Well. There was nothing like this year for a pat on the back, a little nod that we’ve been on the right track, that all the work is more than worth it. We had a chest freezer full of meat I traded shearing work for, and were walking potatoes and chard around from our garden to neighbors when shelves were bare at the grocery store. It has made me refocus our 2021 planning for an even more productive and better-timed garden bounty in the coming year.

I settled most of my grandmother’s estate. Which sounds like more than it should, as my people are not wealthy, but was also SO MUCH HARDER than it should have been.

My grandmother died in February, just as the pandemic began and thank you, merciful Lord, for that. I can induce tears in seconds by simply thinking about trying to talk to her through a window while she was dying. I would have been insane, gone, beyond all help. I can just hear her, not knowing where I was, unable to turn her head, not knowing why I would be outside and not coming in. I have cried so much thinking of families in this position this year.

About two weeks before she died. Yes, that’s a Sierra Nevada with lunch. I miss her every day.

We got some significant home improvement projects done, including a lite refacing of the falling-apart, 40-years-old-this-year kitchen. That’s a good run on cheap vinyl. We honed our DIY skills, and I can now replace our window trims and moldings competently if not exactly with aplomb.

Heck, we even cleaned out and organized the garage. Most of those containers are empty and reserved for minivan-based travel.

Lots more to do in here, but hurray for a clean and organized garage.

I love San Francisco more than I used to. With folks moving out and rents dropping, it feels much more like the city I moved to 14 years ago, and full of possibility. That feels wrong to say, because I don’t mean to revel in anyone’s misfortune that may have forced them to move on when they didn’t want to. That said, in my neighborhood, many folks who left were those who readily admitted they were here to extract as much money as they could in the short term, and then move on with a stash to less expensive places, or back home to raise their kids, that sort of thing. That’s a strategy, and a sound one, but those were existing plans that the pandemic simply accelerated.

We are left with more space and quiet, and the reset this place desperately seemed to need. The traffic was impossible — so much so that it was literally becoming impossible for me to shear anywhere in the East or South Bay on a weekday, because I would sit in traffic for a duration for which no one could expect to pay, thereby not making many jobs worthwhile. Many days, my husband and I looked at each other and said, “Something’s got to give.” It did and it’s not all bad.

Related to this, I have let go of an idea to which I’d become attached without realizing it: thinking about where I would move next, some imagined world in which I have sheep simply because everyone asks when I will get sheep, even if I really just want to shear them. Isn’t that enough? Yes.

Actual photo of our street on the strangest wildfire day yet.

My neighbors are verifiably the best. My neighborhood has always been my favorite thing about San Francisco and it’s only become more true in this pandemic. We live in a halcyon situation. Our block is the type that people associate more with a tiny town in the 1940s, perhaps, or don’t even believe exists – certainly not in San Francisco. Neighbors have sets of keys and/or codes to each other’s houses, so that we can put packages inside or run in to grab the car keys to move someone’s car, if they forgot on street sweeping day.

But the pandemic took it to the next level. Someone would get a 50-pound bag of flour from a bakery that wasn’t going to be open, and divided it into two-pound bags and walked it around to houses. I sewed masks out of fabric that people had bought on travels and didn’t know what to do with. Our block email list became a mini buy-nothing group because people were extra inspired not to go to stores: does anyone have some paint, spare plywood, etc?

I got do some virtual fiber and book events, even if the real-world ones (and the income they would have brought) were canceled.

We only saw people outside our house a few times, masked and outdoors at great distance, but those few occasions saved us.

Socially-distanced natural dye day at Warner Mountain Weavers.

April 28, 2020 by Stephany Wilkes

My Covid-19 Sheep Shearing Protocol

“What are you doing about shearing?” is a question I get daily, these pandemic days. This post is my lengthy answer. In the US, shearers are broadly considered ag workers, and ag workers are considered essential workers. But that’s the beginning of the issue, not the end. I’m essential. Now what?

In the shearing community, you will find the full spectrum of ways of dealing with various forms of shelter-in-place orders, from changing nothing and traveling across multiple states per usual, to changing just about everything to biohazard mode. I’m in the latter camp.

I love sheep, but I’d be lying if I said I wanted to die for them. Do I want to die to preserve my business or, worse, be disabled (long term or permanently) with cardiovascular effects that would end my shearing days anyway? No. That said, sheep need to be sheared. I figure my small-flock shearing situations are safer than a trip to the grocery store, if I am careful.

I do love soap and being clean. I’ve got that much going for me.

I promise to wash my hands. Even as a dirt bag shearer, I really love to be clean. Here is some of my favorite goat milk soap from Wild Oat Hollow. Soap, soap, soap, we love soap, viruses hate it, we love soap.

The first thing I did was to self quarantine early, before our local or state government said I had to. Anticipating (incorrectly) an earlier lockdown, my husband and I began our self quarantine on February 27. I canceled an early March trip to Montana, absolute and utter heartbreak because I not-so-secretly want to live there, like too many Californians, I suppose. I hope it has worked. I have shown no signs of sickness these 61 days.

Next, I rescheduled all of my late March to late April shearing jobs to see what we would learn about the virus in the meantime, and to think about what to do in terms of my shearing process and policies. I wanted to be a good neighbor: Frankly, I would want to die if I infected a customer and, through them, a whole rural community.

All of this is no small task and, hardest of all, I did it knowing it would be so much hotter one month later. (It is.) Every year I say it’s too hot, too soon, earlier.

My practices come mostly from what’s known about how the virus spreads, and how long it lives on various surfaces, but here are the ones I’ve come up with so far.

Covid-19 Sheep Shearing Policies

1) I have and am enforcing a strict ZERO CONTACT shearing policy.

Flock owners must maintain a distance of at least 10 feet, given how much I am sweating and moving around. I will not eat shared food (not that I don’t love it, but this years I’ll have all my own food and water). No neighbors or family observers allowed, no demos, and no community skirting, because people shouldn’t touch wool I have just touched and sweat on profusely. If neighbors start appearing, either they leave or I do. I have no way of knowing who these people are or how safe they have been. Think skeleton crew this year.

To help facilitate this, I ask flock owners be available by text and/or phone in case I have questions or need to reach them. This way, I don’t have to shout or knock on the door. I also appreciate signs, balloons, or sidewalk chalk instructions pointing me to where I need to be and/or where the sheep are, etc.

I am wearing a mask in public, and I will wear one if/when I need to be in nearer proximity of a flock owner, but I do not want to have to shear in one. I have tried it. It is very hard and very hot.

It would be nice for folks to be in screaming distance, in case I have an accident and need someone to call 911 for any worst-case scenario stuff.

Folks can have the virus and be asymptomatic for a long time. I can’t afford to trust anyone, and they can’t afford to trust me. Treat me like I have the virus.

2) Sheep must be TIGHTLY penned. Pack ’em in shoulder to shoulder (which sheep like anyway).

Like this:

NOT like this:

This is NOT what I mean by “tightly penned.” This is loosely penned. No bueno.

And I do mean: Sheep packed TIGHTLY together in a small space, so they cannot run, so I can reach in and get one. I do not want to be touching gates and walls and stressing animals out any more than necessary while working alone. If I cannot catch them without help, I cannot shear them.

In keeping with our 2020 skeleton crew philosophy, I will do all the work (catching, shearing, release or return to pen, wool handling, and cleanup). This makes my day a lot harder. How much harder? Twice as hard. At one job last year, people handed me sheep and I sheared the whole flock myself by 3 PM. This year, at the same job, no one handed us sheep and they were loosely penned and able to run. It took the same amount of time for TWO of us to shear what I sheared last year.

3) Every barn is a biohazard.

I will wipe down any and every gate, fence, etc. I need to touch. This is because the virus lives on metal for days.

I ask folks to identify (via a posted note, text message in advance, or area drawn in chalk, etc.) a target area for me to drop and/or bag sheared fleeces. Ideally, this will be an area where that fleece can be left for approximately three to four days, sufficient time to let any virus from my sweaty hands die. Alternatively, folks should wear gloves and remove the fleece to a skirting table or other area where it can then be left; or skirt the fleece with a mask and gloves on, get the fleece into a wash solution, and then wash or discard the mask and gloves. My sweat is ALL over that thing.

I bring all my own soap and hand sanitizer. Since soap and water work better than hand sanitizer, I will bring a gallon of hand-washing water and a bar of soap. I just ask for permission to let a little of that fall on the ground beside my minivan. I will change clothes in my vehicle.

Here is more goat milk soap I like, from Milk & Honey 1860. Soap, soap, soap, be pro-soap, everyone should love soap and washing hands.

The tricky bit is bathrooms, and I will probably need that at least once. I will wipe your bathroom down with wipes before and after.

4). No more cash payment. I accept payment via PayPal, Venmo, or a check sent in the mail.

5) I promise full honesty about my health, and request the same, complete openness and transparency with regard to any symptoms of COVID-19. This goes both ways.

We can reschedule your shearing. DO NOT worry about telling me you don’t feel well, or had a family member bust out of quarantine without a mask and ruin it for everyone. I will come back. It’s not like there’s much traffic or much going on in my life right now. The sheep will be okay with shade and water.

6) I have elongated the time between jobs.

This, by far, is the hardest thing I have done. I am no longer visiting multiple farms in a day, which increases my mileage costs and drive time, and means I basically break even. So it goes this year.

I wanted it to allow a full two weeks between jobs but, with how many jobs I had to reschedule, how hot it is, and the condition of the animals, I can’t shear all the sheep that need doing and leave a full 14-day quarantine period between each and every job. ONE full week between jobs is the best I can do and survive as a business.

I promise to avoid all possible stops en route to a farm, for myself but also farmers and rural communities. I promise I have not done any crew work since January. I have not been in shearing trailers in close quarters.

I’m sure I seem like the OCD shearer now, but I am taking the virus seriously. One of our family members, aged 38, had it early on and almost died for about five days straight. We know now that most people who go into ICU with the virus are not coming out alive.

7) Transmission to sheep is unknown. I am not liable for any Covid-19 transmission to animals.

To the best of my knowledge, the only real data we have on this is that seven tigers at a Brooklyn zoo appear to have gotten the virus from an infected zookeeper, while that zookeeper was asymptomatic. This doesn’t tell us anything about people and livestock, of course. Livestock are SO different from cats, which get all sorts of things livestock can’t. The news did give me pause, however. Until we can all be tested and understand human-to-animal transmission (if any) fully, the best I can do is point out a possible risk and leave shearing up to the owner.

This is a truly unprecedented situation. Let’s do our best.

Questions or suggestions? Leave them below. I would love to learn what other farms and flocks are doing in these times.