Sheep

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 7, 2020 by Stephany Wilkes

New Year, New Pricing, New Services, New Everything

It’s 2020, and — when I wasn’t fighting AB5 tooth and nail, to save my business — I took some time over the holidays to figure out a better way to get compensated for the totality of the work I do on shearing jobs. To that end, I have completely overhauled and reworked my pricing for 2020, and added some new services and policies. These are the first major changes I’ve made in over seven years of shearing, and long overdue. I haven’t raised my shearing rates in that time.

New and cherished clients alike, please read this so you can decide whether or not to hire me accordingly.

Super-short version of this post: I have a flat, hourly, on-site rate of $100 no matter what we’re doing that day, whether it’s building a catch pen, teaching a school workshop, or actually shearing. It’s all the same. This is as honest and simple a formula I could create, to reflect what my shearing jobs have actually been like since 2013. The fact is, much of what I actually do is not shearing. I also have two new policies (no more post-job payment, and a new full-sheep policy), and one new service: private and small-group shearing instruction.

2020 Pricing Details

This new flat-rate model includes everything. There is no more customized ranch call based on distance, time, and mileage calculations, and trying to price all that out separately; no more per-head shearing plus per-hoof and/or horn trimming; no more piecemeal anything.

This new model doesn’t change much for most people. A $100/hour flat rate sounds like a lot, but interestingly, when I looked at my shearing spreadsheet from 2018 and 2019, I realized that most of my customers would not see a substantive jump in price. Most folks will see a $25-50 increase (for the first time ever), and a few folks will see an increase of $75, but in the latter cases, I honestly wasn’t charging enough to begin with. Of course, as a self-employed person, about 50% of anything is taxes.

I charge by the quarter hour (in 15-minute increments). This way, if we use only 15 minutes of one hour, you don’t get charged for a full hour.

This pricing model does not apply to commercial shearing, which is not most of my shearing. That is an entirely different context: $3-5/head until however many of us finish shearing the 3,000 or 10,000 or however many sheep.

Why I Changed My Pricing Model

I write this less to explain myself (never feel obligated to explain the decisions you need to make for your business, folks), than to shine some honesty and transparency on what small-flock shearing and running a business is really like.

My prior pricing was extremely inefficient: it required a lot of time and ultimately produced little difference. I had a minimum charge of $150, but spent unpaid hours on the phone, on email, and driving, and then created custom estimates that considered the entire time a job would probably take, including drive time, set up, break down, and so on.

It took a lot of time to put together all those custom quotes, broken down by every tiny thing and going back and forth, but in the end, when it all shakes out, everybody ends up paying about the same anyway.

And those were just the estimates, which rarely matched reality. Now, before you think I’m complaining, I am not: Unpredictability is simply the way of sheep things. It’s like the Law Of Sheep — and, by the way, has done wonders for my willingness to roll with the punches. I no longer believe I can control anything or anybody; the best I can do is guide it sometimes, and it’s really only a matter of how gently or roughly I do so.

Oftentimes, I’d shear a few sheep, and then maybe some lost goats showed up from somewhere, or perhaps the power went out so I had to find a fuse box, or a fire started and shearing day turned into load-up-and-run-like-hell day, and so on and so forth, according to the Law Of Sheep.

In order to have a business, and stay in business (which the federal and California state governments make harder by the year), I have to price my work fairly to account for all of it, and lo, I have struggled with how to do that. I have struggled because a fair price requires admitting a not fun, not cool thing, which is that actual shearing is not what I do most of the time.

Shearing is the fastest (and best, and most fun, and SUPER RAD) part, in the way that 90% of life is just showing up, and 10% is shearing. On most jobs, for instance, I spend far more time driving and getting set up than I do actually shearing. (This is why I’ve come to love commercial jobs, because all we do is shear all day, yeehaw and AMEN!)

What am I doing for all these hours when I am not shearing? I may be effectively building a permanent shearing area, especially on my initial visits to new customers: drilling and hanging a 2×4 at the right height and correct distance from a wall for my machine; buying and mounting some big lights to shine on the shearing floor in a dark barn; all sorts of things.

I have built pens, because the dimensions I give for a “small pen,” into which I can reach and easily grab a sheep, is not the same size as the “small pen” OTHER people have in mind, and then I’m running around in, say, a rather large horse pen burning all my energy — and risking injury — to catch and wrassle sheep.

I may skirt, grade, bag and/or bale fleeces. I have provided a lot of ad hoc instruction on humane sheep handling: how to flip sheep gently (a very useful thing, when you need to get a good look at certain areas); how to halter break sheep; how to shear sheep on a milking stand. I have stitched up a variety of animals that had been bitten by dogs, or that got hung up on fence, since I had the proper tools and experience to clean the wound and do it. I have also taught farmers how to do that.

A few farmers, despite my 48-hours-ahead reminder calls and emails, are not ready for me when I arrive. I have driven hours only to arrive at an empty area with nobody around, and stood around waiting, looking for sheep. Some fine fiber and show sheep have coats that have to be removed. Lambs may need to be separated from ewes, or a farm may have two or more groups of sheep to shear that require my setting up and breaking down in different locations on the same farm, during the same job. All of this adds time to the job, and I don’t want to feel rushed.

And if I’m not paying myself enough, because I have to finish by a certain time in order to race off to another job so I can make more money on the ranch call, then I start to feel rushed and worried by all this unexpected work. With a new flat-rate model, I have no reason to feel rushed, because I’m not losing money every second I’m not shearing.

Finally, and especially in the past three seasons, I am encountering more and more sheep that are excessively large (300 pounds) or difficult to shear, i.e. with many years worth of wool growth; not accustomed to any handling; and full of food and water — hence one of 2020’s other policy changes.

New Policies: No Full Sheep and Payment In Full

Full-Sheep Policy

This may be the least popular change, but it is something I need to take a hard line on. Why? Because shearers cannot afford to have either themselves or the act of shearing blamed as the “cause” of sheep suffering and death, when the true cause was the sheep being full of food and water.

So here’s the new full-sheep policy: If I encounter more than one or two full, struggling sheep who are in obvious distress (wheezing through their teeth, literally fighting for breath, kicking and pooping and urinating profusely, all the obvious signs), I will stop shearing, leave, and we will have to reschedule for a time when the sheep have been kept off of food and water. Before I leave, I will ask to be paid, at the new flat rate of $100/hour, for not just on-farm time (which would be minimal in this case), but for the time I spent driving to and from the farm.

It is easy to avoid this. I always call and email people at least 48 hours in advance of the job to remind them to take the sheep off of food and water. And, if you cannot get your sheep in and stop them from eating, JUST TELL ME. No shame, no blame. We can reschedule for another day. Calling me and canceling is so, SO much better than shearing full sheep, for them and for me. It is truly no big deal — in fact, consider it a gift to your flock and your shearer.

What does “off feed and water” really mean?

It means sheep must be off of all food (all food = no grass, no grain, and no hay) for 12 hours prior to shearing, AKA, a solid overnight time period. I generally advise folks to feed the sheep no later than the late afternoon, and then take all food and water away by about 5 PM if we’re to start shearing between 8-10 AM. As I always say: We humans fast overnight without any harm, and sheep can, too. Keeping sheep off feed for 12 hours is no different then not eating before surgery or a blood test, and we do it for many of the same reasons.

95% of my customers do this already, so they are not affected.

Yes, grass counts! I have arrived to many a job — even after my no-feed reminder — to find sheep grazing, and the flock owner telling me “they are off feed because it’s just grass, not grain.” Grass is fresh in the spring, and thus hot and heavy in the rumen, so yes, being full of grass makes sheep harder to shear. This increases the time needed to shear, and — under the new pricing model — your costs.

Why are full sheep such a concern? Sheep that have food in their rumen (multiple stomachs) fight a lot more. They do this because, when we turn them over to shear them, the weight of their full rumen (which can weigh six gallons and then some) presses up against their diaphragm.

Please consider how heavy six full gallons of milk or water are, or even fill up those containers. Now, lay on your back and ask someone to set the six gallons all over your chest and torso, for just a rough approximation of the sensation. This is not fun.

Wormy sheep will struggle even more, to handle the increased pressure on their heart and lungs, so they have a higher likelihood of dying on the shearing floor.

Full sheep make the shearing job a lot harder. They fight and kick not because they are “bad,” but because they are uncomfortable. Their discomfort makes shearing more dangerous for me, and for them. They can kick the handpiece clear off the drop (flying handpiece = super dangerous); they can thrash around and break horns (and our teeth), and hit their heads (and ours). I do my best to find more comfortable positions for them, but it’s not possible for me to make sheep as comfortable as they would be if they were EMPTY. Empty sheep are happy sheep.

Say it loud, say it proud, paint it on the barn:
EMPTY SHEEP ARE HAPPY SHEEP!

But what about lambing ewes? Do not worry about pregnant ewes, or ewes that have lambed. Keeping sheep off feed overnight does NOT impact lamb growth in utero, nor does it affect milk production in a lactating ewe.

And, on that point, a note about timing: Shearing one month before lambing is the ideal time for most ewes. Shearing one month after the last ewe has lambed is the second-best option. In addition, I generally limit pre- and post-lambing shearing to no more (less?) than two weeks before or after delivery. I have sheared more than one ewe into labor and that’s not ideal — and no, labor-induction shearing is NOT a new service for 2020.

Payment Timing Policy

I accept cash, check, PayPal, and Venmo as forms of payment. Payment is now due in full at the end of the job. If you know in advance that you will not be able to pay me in full on shearing day, I am happy to work out a payment program in advance.

Thanks to more streamlined/not custom pricing, I will no longer need to invoice after jobs to accurately reflect that day’s work. Now it’s just N hours on farm, x $100/hour = the total cost.

New Service: Private and Small Group Shearing Instruction

You’ve asked, I’m listening, and I’m happy to teach and support folks who wish to shear their sheep themselves and are just looking for some pointers on equipment, a safe shearing set-up, humane handling, and so on. The same rate applies, so getting a small group together to cover my rate will make it more affordable for all, and hopefully give us a few more sheep to work with.

A few notes on this (I have more details coming soon): You and/or your group must provide the sheep and shearing location. I have no sheep, nor any place to shear. My new, flat-rate pricing applies, but the things we will cover will be custom, depending on breed and size of sheep you have; prior shearing experience, if any; the equipment you intend to use; and much more.

In addition, this specific, limited form of instruction CANNOT make anyone a pro at the New Zealand method of shearing, which we do to shear sheep at high volume and to commercial wool standards. It WILL help you make a well informed decision as to whether or not you want to shear your own sheep, and the home methods available to you for doing so. It WILL help you choose and set up your equipment in as safe as manner as possible, to reduce the likelihood of injury to you and your sheep. And, it WILL help you handle your sheep more humanely, and in ways that are safer for you, your body, and your sheep.

Thank You!

Thank you, as ever, for your support and entrusting your animals to me for all these years. You have kept me out working with sheep, and out of a desk job, and for that I am truly grateful.

Stay tuned for more important posts about 2020, including 1) how to be well prepared for your shearers, whomever they are, and 2) why I might refer you to another shearer, and why that is a wonderful thing that makes the wool world a better place. Thanks for reading!

December 7, 2019 by Stephany Wilkes

A Sweater Vest Elegy For a Shepherd

Or rather, the employment of a shepherd; Jim himself is still with us. Structurally, an elegy expresses sorrow, sings praises, and offers solace, and an appropriate format (poem, prose) is chosen. This is the letter I sent with Jim’s vest.

Dear Jim,

I was gutted to learn, in late May, about the changes at Hopland, none for the better in my admittedly from-a-distance opinion. Like most everything these days, I learned of the flock auction and the elimination of your position on social media, just two weeks after this year’s shearing school. There it was, over my morning cup of coffee: a Facebook event inviting me to a sheep sale, a flock reduction from 500 breeding ewes to 125, as if this auction were not a swift kick in the gut but an event like any other — a craft fair, a fiber festival — I’d want to attend. As if loss of vocation were not a factor.

Worse, the auction was too soon in the future to stop it: in less than a week, on June 3. Everyone – the Gilberts, the Irwins, Jordan, Alex, Gary, everyone — was devastated, sick to our stomachs, furious, liberally cursing the UC Regents and Janet Napolitano. We knew that as go the sheep, so goes the shepherd and, possibly, flock quantity sufficient to field a shearing school, the only one in California.

*Shepherd Jim Lewers at work in Hopland, January 2018*

Had I my own land, I would have done what everyone should have: show up and bid well over the asking price for the sheep you bred and shepherded so well and carefully for so long, because that is what people are supposed to do in such unfortunate events, and know to do in other, better-mannered sheep places (Iowa, Montana, Shetland). But I have no place, and was in Modoc County teaching 4-H kids how to trim hooves, among other things. Even so, I regret not finding a way to attend the auction to convey my sorrow to you in person, and share yours. I don’t know if you were there, though I expect you must have been. What would have been worse: being there and having to witness that sheep sale, or not being there at all? As with too many things, if you can’t fix it, you just gotta stand it, the hardest thing.

There is a great deal wrong with our culture right now, and the apparent failure of UC budget bureaucrats to recognize how rare you are — an American shepherd, practically unheard of these days! — and how valuable your skills is among them. Now, I don’t know you or your daily work terribly well, but I thank you for your dedicated flock and grazing management that helped save the HREC campus from the 2018 wildfire. I see and count the terrible things you prevented from happening: the people who did not die in an inferno, and the lawsuits to follow; the insurance claims and policy increases from incinerated buildings; the reconstruction costs of buildings like LEED-certified Shippey Hall.

We have not spent much time together, but you taught Hopland students a great deal in those brief windows between sheep, standing in that barn aisle between the tray of decontamination fluid, the sink, and the shearing floor. You blew my mind with stories of when non-lethal predator control works, and doesn’t, and why something that works on one county and landscape won’t necessarily work in another. Many people refuse to acknowledge and hold such complexity, preferring easy, belief-reinforcing answers to very difficult problems. I always liked your refusal to give those.

You taught me about herding and livestock guardian dogs (Bodie!), and showed what they were capable of. If anyone had told me that one command could send a herding dog far out of view, have them return with a flock, and then split that flock into groups, I’d have called them a liar. Thanks for the show. You educated me on Q fever, described how bacteria spread it to humans from animals including sheep, and then appropriately restricted my access in the lambing barn. I’m grateful, because Q fever is hell for shearers who have gotten it. They describe six to eight weeks fully laid up in bed, these strong people, with a severe flu-like illness and, worse, persistent and long-term health problems.

Please know that we all saw how you loved those sheep, even if we cannot fathom how much. You are a true steward. You helped make a lot of shearers. Your impact is lasting, not just on the landscape but on all of the people who have passed through that big barn in which you taught, helped, and supported us…and filled the pens with seemingly endless sheep, over and over again. That’s all right; it was good for us.

I wish I had more words of consolation to offer, but all I feel is outrage and frustration that I’ll just have to shear out of myself. In lieu of that, I thought I’d make something that might console better than my awkward typing ever could: this sweater vest, 100% Mendocino County Targhee like your ewes, sheared by Matt Gilbert (who I’m told was called “barefoot Matt” when he learned to shear at Hopland as a shoeless whippersnapper). It was processed and spun up the road in Ukiah, by Sarah Gilbert, and the yarn is some of the very first to come off the pin drafter and onto the spinner.

I knit it up into a vest, thinking a sweater might be too warm, and I have no idea if the sizing is right. I tried, because I wanted it to be a surprise. Matt was my fit model, and who knows how close of one, and the rest I estimated from photos of you. If it’s too large or too long or too anything, I can easily fix it; just say the word. The wool was white, but I could see that getting dirty pretty easily knowing you, so I thought I’d dye it gray with eucalyptus and iron, to match the color of the work overalls I so often saw you in.

The vest comes too late for your last day at Hopland but, if nothing else, it’s finally sweater vest weather, isn’t it? I hope your grass has germinated. The combination of late rains and cold temperatures have had me worried but, in some places, I’ve seen tiny green spikes and future sheep feed. If you ever need a hand building fence or mucking out pens, give me a shout.

With gratitude, for everything,
Stephany

November 15, 2019 by Stephany Wilkes

Why the FDA Should Not Make Livestock Antibiotics Prescription Only

Hat tip to Emily Chamelin Hickman for leading the charge.

Sheep work has changed my mind about a lot of things, including antibiotics. I have sheared too many animals that were very sick, and very much in need of antibiotics like those my doctor might prescribe for an infection (the same antibiotics that are available — and cheap — over the counter in many other places I’ve traveled). I found the livestock suffering I have witnessed nearly unbearable.

As a result, I could never be “against” antibiotics, and I do what I technically should not: I administer them. As a shearer, it’s often convenient for me to do so but, more importantly, I am physically capable of doing so, safely, in a way that may no longer be possible for my more elderly customers.

The FDA wants to make all antibiotics prescription only. This shows, once again, that regulators who do not work with animals simply do not understand the many ways in which this is a terrible idea. It is cruel legislation designed to make the public feel good about “less antibiotic use,” while actually increasing the suffering of all livestock. Those of us who actually work with livestock KNOW that antibiotic withholding times are followed and enforced.

Further, I believe the FDA feels a-okay about making this move BECAUSE it disproportionately affects small farmers, per usual. The confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), of course, can afford the vet costs. That’s what this supports, if you pause to think about it.

Let’s ground ourselves in reality for a minute. Many rural areas simply do not have vets who will treat livestock. Remember: sheep, goats, cattle and all livestock are large and often difficult to transport, most especially when they are ill. Indeed, transporting them when very ill may be a terrible idea for that animal, and worsen their condition. Sheep, in particular, are tough, and have a way of not showing anything is wrong until they’re at death’s door. Time is of the essence when it comes to animal treatment.

This FDA law does not address the fact of having ZERO access to the necessary vets to prescribe the antibiotics needed to heal what is, yes, a valuable animal, but also one who does not deserve needless suffering. Farm income will be hurt if people who are not vets cannot access necessary livestock antibiotics.

Let’s say a livestock vet IS available. Well, that presents a whole different set of problems. With small ruminants like sheep, the cost of that vet consultation to prescribe medicine will cost more than the value of the animal. Once again, animals who deserve better will suffer: people will, understandably, opt not to treat those animals because of the cost and hassle of 1) trying to find a vet willing to come out and 2) the high cost of a farm visit by a vet.

Like it or not, sometimes the lowly shearer and hoof trimmer is the one who is best suited to administer antibiotics a caring farmer was able to obtain – thank heaven.

Those of us who work like this, in places like these, have perspective the FDA does not. Please believe us.

Please do not support animal harm. Please submit a comment, and ask the FDA to toss this terrible recommendation for the sake of humane animal welfare. Surely we can do more by educating the public in regard to small farms and antibiotic withholding times.

Even if you do not own livestock, please go online and comment on this today, to this effect. I promise that, in so doing, you will help the welfare of thousands of small farmers and livestock — exactly the sort of non-CAFO animals and contexts we WANT to see more of.

Thank you.