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Becoming a good shepherd
Friday June 27 2008 By Ted Brown, Staff Writer Last weekend, the Brown Farm turned a page,  and started a new chapter.
And with this chapter, comes a new title for me. Seems I’m now a shepherd. (Hmm, guess that makes The Sidekick a ‘shepherdess’.)
You see last Saturday a load of lambs arrived at the Brown Farm, which will be used as breeding stock to establish a brand new flock.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m new to sheep. I grew up with dairy cattle for the first 38 years of my life and more recently have had beef cattle around (which are really just fat dairy cows with a major attitude).
But sheep are a bit different. They’re small. They’re gentle. And this flock has already been a great learning experience.
I do know sheep are not ‘new’ to the farm. Tucked away in burlap bags up in the barn are a few old sheep fleeces, that have been stored there for eons. That tells me there were sheep on the farm at some point, generations ago, when all farmers maintained a variety of livestock.
But sheep are new for me.
I’ve done lots of research and talked to several ‘sheep’ people, so I do know what to expect— in theory at least.
It seems sheep are a lot like ‘little’ dairy cows. They’re ruminants (four stomachs), they give birth, they provide milk for their offspring and they graze or eat hay and grain to do it all.
But they have a side that’s kinda neat.
They seem to have unique little personalities.
When entering the stable, I’m reminded of the Serta ‘team’ of sheep in the mattress commercials, as they all look up to see who has entered.
And I swear they whisper back and forth when I’m working around them in the barn.
One evening I was building them a little feed box (oh yeah, everything about a sheep is ‘little’) and one of them poked her head through an opening in the pen. She was watching me.
As I assembled the feeder box, I’m certain I heard her whisper to the others. “Psst, he’s building a mineral feeder, pass it on.”
As I mounted a salt lick in their pen, rumblings buzzed through the flock. “Is that a salt lick?” “Psst, girls, it looks like he’s putting up a salt lick.” “Yup, it sure looks like one, what do you think?” “Could be, but it’s a different shape than the one at our last place.” “Let me see!” “No, I wanna see!” “No, it’s my turn to see!”
And so on.
Mind you, ‘flock mentality’ does exist. When I walk into the barn, they all stand up. If I stand there for 10 minutes, they all lay down.
Unloading them from the trailer when they arrived, they refused to come out until we pulled a single one out, and then the rest followed her to the pen, like (what else?) a flock of sheep.
While I’ve been building feeders, The Sidekick has been naming them all. Keep in mind, these are registered purebreds, each with a registered name and number. But The Sidekick has been assigning them their own names, like ‘Ewe’nice, ‘Baaa’sheba, and another is called ‘Ewe’genie.
In spite of the fact we’re working with them every day, feeding and watching over them, I figure the real test of being a good shepherd will come next spring, when the flock starts delivering their own crop of new lambs.
After a couple weeks of sleep deprivation to make sure those lambs all arrive safely, I’m sure The Sidekick and I will have undergone a total baptism by fire.
And then and only then, will we have earned the title of being ‘real’ shepherds.
(Ted Brown can be reached at
tbrown@independentfreepress.com)

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