Shear Determination: What Got Me To (and Through) Shearing School

I own a yarn shop in a fairly rural area north of Seattle, Washington, so I know plenty of community members with fiber animals. In early 2021, I started fielding regular requests for help finding sheep shearers. I was perplexed. This hadn’t happened previously, so where had this demand originated? The answer seems to have been the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns brought opportunities for property improvements and companion animals; sheep offered the possibility for both. Not everyone was familiar with the seasonal chores associated with sheep, though, and new sheep owners were inquiring about the necessity of regular shearing.

After putting those pieces together, I started looking into where elements of our fibershed were getting disconnected. Small farms sometimes pool resources to hire a shearer at a central location for a weekend, but if you’re not involved with 4H or Future Farmers of America, you may not know how to find out about those events. Commercial shearers often won’t book shearing for two or three sheep because it’s not worth their time. Many sheep owners think that if you don’t want yarn from the wool, it’s worthless—into the burn pile or landfill it goes.