Sheep Industry News June 2024

YE Spotlight

TUCKER & EMILY WEST CRAWFORDVILLE, GEORGIA

Five years ago, Tucker and Emily West didn’t know what to think about sheep. They’d raised cows, goats and chick ens, but sheep were an enigma to the young couple. They put their concerns aside and purchased 10 ewes to tackle pastures overgrown with fescue. And the rest – as they say – is history. The cows and goats are gone now, replaced by roughly 500 sheep on the couple’s Liberty Farms Livestock operation in Crawfordville, Ga.

OTHER PRODUCERS TOLD US WE SHOULD TRY SHEEP. But I was kind of scared of them. I really didn’t know what to do with sheep. But we bought 10 in the winter of 2019. We put them on those fescue fields, they ate them down, gained weight and did great. I thought, there’s something to these sheep. Now, we’re 100 percent sheep on the pastures. The first load I sold, I sent off 60 head to a processing house in north Georgia. We did good on them, for what they were. But it got me to thinking that there had to be some more money to be made. A LOT OF PEOPLE WERE SELLING BEEF AT THE FARMER'S MARKETS, but there wasn’t a lot of lamb. Labor Day 2021, we sold our first packaged lamb at the farmer’s market. We thought we’d process two or three lambs to see how it went. But we decided to do a pre-order to see how much interest was there. We posted it on Facebook and had so much interest that we processed five lambs and sold every bit of it – from one Facebook post. That’s when we realized that social media could play a huge role in what we wanted to do. In our business, social media is just as important as me going out and feeding the sheep every day. That’s the kind of impact it has had for us. WE HAD A FAMILY FRIEND WHO IS TECH SAVVY AND SHE HELPED EMILY GET STARTED with the website and social media. Emily just took off with it from there. We do a lot of brainstorming, a lot of trial and error. Let’s see if this works, and if it doesn’t we don’t do it again. There’s definitely things we can improve on in how we handle social media. We hired an ag-based marketing group in south Georgia to do a complete audit of our website and social media. We got an 11-page document back about what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong, how we could improve and get noticed more. IF I WASN'T FOR THE FARM, I WOULDN'T HAVE SOCIAL MEDIA. But we saw the impact it could have early on. We raise broiler chickens and Emily did a post about the steroid and hormone issue in chickens. It blew up and we reached more than 300,000 people with that post. We live in the most sparsely popu

lated county in Georgia. There’s only 1,700 people in the whole county. There’s no way we could reach hundreds of thousands of people without social media. We felt like it was a tool we could use to market our products, so we created the website and Insta gram and Facebook accounts and saw a lot of growth in our meat sales. It’s helped us build a connection between the farm and the consumers without physically having them on the farm every day. WE RUN A KATAHDIN EWE BASE. We use Dorpers as terminal sires, but breed with Katahdin rams for our replacement ewes. We also sell some Dorper-Katahdin cross replacement ewes to other producers. We personally like the straight Katahdin ewe better, from a durability standpoint. They’ve got great maternal traits and can survive on lesser-quality forages than a lot of sheep. We turn them out on some our wooded areas, and they can forage those spots and still make great milk and produce good lambs. WE'RE A DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER OPERATION. We have our own U.S. Department of Agriculture label. We get the lambs processed and bring the meat home to sell online and through a farmer’s market. We also sell to some restaurants and some small grocery accounts. We’re also trying to get into the replacement ewe side of things. We see a demand for that in this state. We also buy feeder lambs. There are a lot of ethnic markets in Florida that want what I think of as a lightweight lamb compared to most of what we produce. So, we put loads together to send down there. THE NEXT BIG THING WE'RE LOOKING AT IS A PROCESSING PLANT. We’ve talked about a partnership with a beef producer, but that’s something we’re going to have to have at some point to continue to grow our meat business. We’ve even talked about building just a fabricating facility, where we get the lambs har vested and then bring the carcasses back to cut up on our own. It’s much cheaper to get into that than building a kill floor. WE'VE BEEN BLESSED as far as finding our way into this at a young age. We don’t have kids at this point, so we can put a lot of time into it.

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