Sheep Shearing

April 7, 2021 by Stephany Wilkes Leave a Comment

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 2 Comments

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 Leave a Comment

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.

January 7, 2020 by Stephany Wilkes 4 Comments

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!