SPRING MILLS — Many people may recognize this passage: “(G)ive the first fruits of your grain, new wine and olive oil and the first wool from shearing of your sheep.” This Bible passage about sacrifice to God was written about 3,400 years ago. The passage is from Deuteronomy 18:4.
Sheep herding goes back further than that. In fact, humans using sheep as a farm animal goes back between 9,000 and 11,000 years. The Mesopotamians domesticated wild mouflons, which are the predecessor of modern sheep breeds. They supplied meat, milk and their hides to the early people. Use of their wool came later.
Fast forward a couple of thousand years and the harvest of wool from the sheep can be seen and celebrated just down the valley on the Tamarack Farm of Spring Mills. Once a year, in March, Mike Arthur and Janice Jenkins round up eight volunteers and employees and they shear their 180 to 190 sheep.
In October, they shear some of their sheep a second time — not all of the flock gets sheared again, depending on their breed.
The reason for harvest in March is to get the wool before the ewes have their lambs. Last year the flock provided 92 lambs. Arthur and his wife kept 22 for the farm as breeding stock and the rest were sold.
The owners hire a professional sheep shearer who comes north from Maryland. This professional, Kevin Hickman, spends part of his year traveling around the United States from farm to farm. He and his wife have been shearing sheep for Tamarack Farm for more than 10 years. When not shearing sheep for others, they tend to their own animals on their own farm. Because the sheep shearing takes up most of the day, Arthur and Jenkins also provide a big lunch for the workers.
The flock provides 600 to 800 pounds of wool each year. Some of the wool is sold, some is made into yarn and some is discarded because it is too hard to clean. Jenkins dies the yarn in order to turn it into products for sale. The farmers take their products to several local and out-of-state fiber festivals each year to sell to the public. They also sell their farm’s products from their home.
Arthur is a retired Penn State professor of geosciences. Both of the owners grew up in rural farm country. They purchased the 30-acre farm in 1991 and started their first flock of sheep in 1994. Theirs is not the only farm that raises sheep in Penns Valley. Many of the valleys’ farms, both Amish and English, have sheep. Tamarack Farm raises three different breeds of sheep because the characteristics of each breed’s wool are different from the other two and the wool is used in different products.
