Straight from the Farmer: Sheep Dairyman Part Two

By Matt Gelbwaks, FACT Mentor, and Katie Meade, Humane Farming Program Associate

Photos and interview provided by Matt Gelbwaks, Blackeyed Susan Sheep Dairy, Mont Vernon, NH. Instagram @blackeyedsusansheepdairy 

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year? Do you have any new plans for next year? If so, what are they?

We built out our dairy over the pandemic years, which seemed to be a great idea as it gave a lot of people something to do. Last year was our first full year in operation in the new facility and it was a learning year. We learned that almost everyone involved in the build-out (including us) didn’t really know as much as they thought they did and the biggest challenge over the year has been finding ways to work with our new infrastructure and identifying areas that don’t work and won't work and accepting that we need to make changes. We became the first full-scale sheep dairy in the state and so even the state inspectors didn’t know how to measure and certify the sheep. Lots of what we do is analogous to cow dairies, so they have baselines and references to go by, but the nuances with sheep have posed difficulties (for instance, our sheep dairy only operates from April until October and then we are dark and so some of the 6-month cadence inspections are problematic).

I have another list on my phone of things that HAVE to change before next lambing or milking season. Some things are purely a matter of convenience, others are do or die for the sheep and the lambs. We are making some changes as we go, but others are just too invasive to do while we are trying to operate, so they will wait until we are done milking for the season. Another issue we had last year is one that affects all farmers…soft hearts. We looked at our prospect list (yearlings) and our cull list coming out of last milking season and made the (incorrect) decision that we could keep and milk the majority. We came into this milking season with 60 ewes which created a whole bunch of unanticipated problems: too much milk, more lambs than you can shake a stick at, more milk than we could store, and the by far an away worse issue – not enough time to spend the right amount with each of the animals to ensure health and well being. We missed some important indicators and they were expensive in a number of ways. 

Our number one plan to develop coming out of this milking season will be downsizing to the appropriate flock size so that everyone can be a superstar. We are not sure what the number will be, but we will figure that out and figure out a plan to get there. The far and away hardest part of enacting the plan will be letting the animals below the line go. When you spend 6 hours a day with a group, be they animals or people, you develop attachments and even though you know letting them go is the right thing to do, it is still hard. Just so that you don’t think we are all soft, the bulk of the culls go to one or another local USDA abattoir for both retail and our own use. We eat a lot of lamb, it is great!

 When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what gets you back on track? 

We have a huge old ash tree in the middle of our pasture. It has been there for at least 125 years (there is an old photo at the town’s historical society that shows the house with the tree from 1901). It is dying. The ash borers have done a number on it and it has declined substantially in the past couple of years. There are maybe 5 more in its lifespan.

Right now, however, it is the gathering point for the sheep on their way back to the barn. When I just need a couple moments to gather my thoughts and regain perspective, I go out and sit under the tree. There are always at least a couple of ewes who will come over to visit when they see me there. There is no better reset I find than to sit under the tree, scratching behind the ears of a sheep or two. Refreshed, I can always go back to the tasks at hand, more balanced and with a better mindset.

Name a failure that turned out to be a great learning opportunity or benefitted you later on.

I took a bunch of time off from my last dairying experience until this one (we’ve been milking sheep for over a decade now, but prior to that was as a kid in the last century…). Back then, I had always wanted to be a vet and James Herriot was a hero to me, so I was always keen on the veterinary and animal husbandry aspects of the farm. I knew a lot and did a lot of that stuff throughout high school and college, even though everything else pointed me away from agriculture. Coming back into it, I had a lot of those moments where I knew what the issue was, but couldn’t remember how to treat it or didn’t trust myself to do the treatments. We also could not find a vet in our area who knew sheep and knew dairy…it was always one or the other. 

We had been breeding dairy sheep for a while – three or four generations – and finally had one that was everything we wanted, personality and performance wise. When she lambed the second time, she came down with what I was sure was milk fever (I had seen it once as a kid in a cow). The treatment is a LOT of calcium really quickly, like intravenous. I could not convince the vet that that was the problem and during the course of time that it took them to do all their tests, she faded away and died. They ultimately came back and concurred with my diagnosis and apologized…

What I learned was that I know a lot and often more than most others, since I am in and around these animals in this situation. I have found mentors, mostly far away, who I can ask hard questions of (and Google is often my friend, but not always). I am now more confident and more willing to act on my gut. I also discovered that no matter how much or little I know, I often know more than others who are still just coming up to speed. This experience taught me to be free with my knowledge, caveat it as appropriate, but offering help and reassurance becomes the most valuable thing I can pass along.

The coda to the story is that the ewe with milk fever had had twins, we still have both and her ewe lamb now out-produces our neighbor’s jersey. We learned how to feed for sheep at these levels and how to care for them…it is a whole nother level of artistry that has taken us several years to gain and each year, on the path, we discover places where we are still messing up.  We will be forever learning. 

What advice do you have for an aspiring Dairy farmer?

It has been said many times, nothing is better for aspiration than someone to aspire to be or to be better than. Find a mentor and engage them frequently. 

Mental issues are now becoming the most talked about aspect in all walks of farming life. When you spend hours of your day surrounded by animals you care for (physically and emotionally) and who rely and trust you, it is mentally taxing when things don’t go according to plan. Talk to your mentor about things that work and don’t work and questions that you have, but also about how you feel about what is happening and where your head is as you are going. Sometimes it is better to talk outside your immediate circle, sometimes not…but keep it an option.

What do you wish you knew about dairy farming- but nobody told you?

It’s not at all like in the movies. 

As the old saying goes, farming is just 125% problem-solving. In dairy farming, the reality is that it is closer to 137%. All dairy animals are similar in some respects – one of the key differences between cow and sheep though is that sheep are seasonal producers – our milking season is April to October and then we have a quiet season until lambing in March. Cows produce year round and though they only produce 9-10 months at a time, most farms stagger their calves so that they always have a majority of the cows milking. We lamb everyone in one window and then milk for 6 months, and then cycle the ewes so that they will lamb again in the spring.

What I’ve always known is that dairy farming is easy…breed the animals, once they calve/lamb/kid, start milking, sell the milk or make cheese, and start over again. The two things no one told me was that 1) you get emotionally attached to the animals and their pain becomes yours, and 2) dairy farming is easy, good dairy farming is wicked hard.

When I was a kid, we milked 40 Jersey cows. We made an acceptable living, but even back then everyone said, and it was true if you didn’t do some kind of value-add, you could never make it pay unless you had hundreds and hundreds of animals, and all that entailed. We lasted only until the cheese company said that unless they could get a tractor trailer up to the milkhouse, it was no longer worth their while and they would stop coming. Back then (and really still now), everyone’s solution to more milk was more animals because that was easier than better producers.

We committed to more milk from the same number of animals, and that is hard. Not because it is harder work, but because you have to be focused all the time and you can not EVER relax your attention to detail. At the production levels we are getting to (which are not even crazy high), we basically count their calorie intake, the type of calories they intake, what they do with those calories, and what they do with those calories when they are done with them (ewwwww). A miscount today can be fatal tomorrow, and then when you go back to the first thing no one told you, the emotional toll becomes overbearing. 

There is another old saying in the sheep farming industry: “Sheep don’t so much need a reason to die, just a place”.  What they are really saying is that for all their resiliency, they are very fragile beasts. High-producing dairy sheep are great examples of this – their metabolism is so much like a spinning top – get it going and leave it alone and it spins beautifully…anything that bumps it ever so slightly and it veers off and usually crashes spectacularly. If you are not really really attentive, any gradual decline is missed and instead all you see is the spectacular flame out at the end. And good farmers always feel responsible, regardless of whether it is warranted. 

 What resources do you recommend to farmers interested in the dairying life?

There are lots and lots of resources for cow dairy farming, from support groups to institutional research programs to farm bureau extension programs. Goat, sheep, or even buffalo dairying is less well supported, but still very analogous. I can not stress enough, the best resource is a warm and welcoming mentor. They have been down the path before you and can help keep you out of the sinkholes on the road to success. They will know the regional and national organizations, the list serves, online chat groups, offline/old school meet-ups, tricks of the trade, and even rubrics on how to pick the best vet for you and your animals. 

 What do you wish consumers knew or asked about dairy farming and/or dairy products?

We are a niche within a niche – people who buy our products are mostly educated on what we are offering as they seek us out specifically for being an alternative to cow and goat milk. No one has ever asked us whether sheep's milk is safe, raw or pasteurized, because they already know. We talk to other local cow dairies and they decry how frequently people come in concerned about the safety of the milk. Without speculating on why people have this concern and therefore not needing to try to talk them out of it, what I wished they knew was to ask the farmer if they use their own milk. Anyone who keeps animals for milk, and uses it themselves, never takes chances – self-preservation and all that. It is easy to cut corners and take chances when you never see the consumers and don’t have to deal with the risk themselves. 

All you need to ask of your farmer is – “do you use the milk yourself and if so, what do you do with it?” Their answer will tell you a lot – from how clean their product is to how they treat their animals!