Spring 2024 lambing is complete 23 total.
Spring 2024 lambing is complete 23 total.
Primrose Path Farm is owned by Terrisa Turner and Germaine Eley. We have a little under 8 acres located in Edwardsville, IL, approximately 30 minutes Northeast of St Louis, MO. The farm started in 1990 as a Paso Fino horse breeding, showing, and training facility. We retired from the horse industry in 2006.
In 2015, a friend and his wife had a meeting with us. They asked us if we would grow wool for them. That is where our venture into sheep farming began.
We started out with 5 black Border Leicester ewes and a borrowed ram from our neighbor. After a year we added 3 Wensleydale ewes. We loved the long glorious locks of the Wensleydales but they were a bigger sheep than the Border Leicesters.
It was after our second breeding season that we realized we wanted a smaller breed sheep that had a friendly disposition. After doing some research online we decided on Finnsheep. We loved the versatility of the breed, the wide variety of colors, the quality of their wool, their friendly disposition and their smaller size. We sold off our Border Leicester and Wensleydale stock and bought 3 Finnsheep ewes and 1 ram.
Over the next couple years, we added additional stock from various farms around the country. At first all our lambs were badgerface. Let me tell you when you have 24 badgerfaced lambs it’s hard to tell them apart. With Finns being so small we wait a while before ear tagging so it’s a job in itself keeping track of each individual lamb.
We currently have 11 ewes, 3 rams, a wether and 19, 2024 lambs. We worked to add variety in color while maintaining excellent confirmation in our stock. Our focus is on confirmation, fleece quality, and overall health, not size. Smaller sheep are not unusual in our flock.
We raise our flock as naturally as possible. Our sheep are strictly on pasture the majority of the year, followed by alfalfa hay as pasture growth declines. We have loose minerals and sodium bicarbonate available at all times. We rarely do a whole flock worming opting instead to monitor parasite load using the Famacha method and fecal testing. Our farm chooses not to vaccinate our flock. We have never had an issue and don’t find it necessary for us at this time. Our philosophy is, this is what we do on our farm, once our stock leaves our farm, you do what works for you.
We are working toward having an all RR scrapie resistant stock but every once in a while, you get an accidental one-night stand that results in some outstanding lambs that are not RR and there you go.
Lambing is an education all its own from matching rams with ewes, tracking bloodlines, record keeping, and birthing. Everything had always gone smoothly until it didn’t. Pulling my first lamb with Donna Putnam on the phone walking me through it was a truly glorious and empowering moment. Now I can glove up and go in with confidence and do what needs to be done. Dealing with bottle lambs and figuring out the feeding schedule and requirements was another area to tackle, learning the benefits of bucket feeding…….whew.
Then, there is vetting. There are no “sheep” vets in our area. It up to us, as it is many shepherds, to do our own vetting whether it is diagnosing illness, administering medications, punch tagging ears for testing, or pushing in a prolapse. We have a full vet cabinet of supplies with everything from ear tagging supplies, supplements, wormers, gloves, a microscope etc. My next goal is to learn to draw blood myself. Sheep farming is a never-ending education.
In the last couple years, we have worked on insuring we are also breeding for quality wool. We currently shear twice a year which results in a shorter staple length but I prefer the tidier appearance of a shorter wool. This is our first Winter using coats on some of our flock and I am very excited with the results I am seeing. It’s been a learning curve to educate myself on quality, pricing, skirting, shipping, and building a clientele. We sell our fleeces to individual fiber artists across the US and Canada. This year we even sold one to a resident of Denmark who was in the states visiting. I can’t wait to see the Nordic pattern sweater she plans on making from the wool.
We are so grateful we took up our friends idea to grow wool for them. We are amazed by how much we've learned and done. Equally surprising is how much there still is to learn and we wouldn't trade our experiences for anything.
On a side note, the friend who got us started in sheep farming has yet to buy any wool from us. Hahaha………
Primrose Path Farm
3502 Black Oak Lane Edwardsville, IL 62025
Copyright © 2024 Primrose Path Farm - All Rights Reserved.
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