Sheep Industry News May 2022

Meet The Exec. Board

John Noh, Idaho Region VII

Fourth-generation rancher John Noh was elected in January as the Region VII representative to the ASI Executive Board to fill the spot previously held by Montana's Randy Tunby. As a teenager, he envisioned career choices that would have taken him away from the ranch. But his time away at college only cemented his passion for working with sheep and cattle, and 30 years later he's happy that he found his way back to family ranch.

I SPENT MY WHOLE YOUTH AROUND SHEEP and cattle, and I never really felt like this was something I was going to do. I was going to be a school teacher or a lawyer or a fireman or police officer – those kind of things. After spending quite a bit of time at the University of Idaho and working here off and on during sum mers and Christmas break, I came home and really fell in love with it. I found a way to make it work so that the operation paid for me to be here. Dad (Laird Noh) is still president and chief ex ecutive officer of Noh Sheep Company, and I'm the vice president and manager. I worked for dad from 1993 to 2003 or 2004. He and my mother are still involved and have made some great deci sions that affect the whole business. He’s 83 now and has stepped away quite a bit the last three or four years. He was past president of the National Lamb Feeders Association. WE HAVEN’T MADE A LOT OF BIG CHANGES, just some smaller things that I picked up when I was younger. We have an ample amount of range land in the summer for our sheep, so we move them more often in the summer. We put more of a focus on nutrition. I firmly believe that sheep were built to have twins and the only thing really holding them back is nutrition. In a shed lambing operation like we have, if you can put the right nutrition in front of them at the right time, you can increase your produc tivity immensely. I picked up the emphasis on nutrition just from watching and observing the sheep. I LEARNED A HARD LESSON DURING LAMBING one year. We try to stay out with at least half of the sheep on range land in the winter. The ewe lambs and older ewes we bring in on alfalfa fields. There was one year when we had tremendous amounts of feed in the winter. In normal years we would supplement with protein cubes, but I looked and said there was a lot of feed there. Of course, the sheep were full-wooled and looked good. We came in and sheared and started to lamb and those ewes were just in terrible condition. We had a lot of low birth weights. We’d get a storm and have dead lambs. Had health problems with the ewes. I looked at it and said we can’t repeat that. I went to some presenta tions with ASI’s Young Entrepreneurs – I wasn’t a young producer

at the time, but I went to some of the presentations – and learned a lot about nutrition. Once we focused a little better on that, I saw my birth weights go up and my mortality rates go down, and my shipping weights increased. I think – I can’t prove it – but I think that the longevity of my ewes increased, and we had a lot less lambing problems. It just all clicked that this is something we need to focus on. I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED IN ASI and tried to be in volved to the best of my ability (including three years as president of the Idaho Wool Growers Association). It’s hard to make the time to do everything that needs to be done. But we all pick and choose and do the best we can. I hope I can do as good a job as Randy did of representing Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. I'm co-chair of the Legislative Action Council this year because I've always been politically active and paid attention to politics. My dad was in the Idaho State Senate for 25 years and served with Jim Risch, Mike Crapo and Mike Simpson (all of whom went on to serve Idaho's U.S. congressional delegation). I grew up around those folks as a young man. I'VE ATTENDED THE ASI SPRING TRIP to Washington, D.C., twice in the past. I enjoyed it much more when it was in May. Things are slowed down for most everybody by then and I could take the time to focus on the job at hand instead of rushing home and worrying about what wrecks have happened in the lambing barn while I was gone. I understand that historically March is the time for marking up appropriations. But the way the government works now, they don’t even pass a budget. So, I’m going to be lob bying ASI to move the trip to late March or April. WE NEED TO FOCUS ON REACHING MID-SIZE CITIES with American lamb, places like Boise, Idaho, Minneapolis, Austin, Oklahoma City. We’ve focused on the big markets, now we need to find a way to focus on the middle markets and sell more lamb. We have to figure out a way to stabilize our industry. We’ve got a product that is so thinly traded that a difference of 30,000 to 40,000 animals can cause major price swings.

This is a series of articles spotlighting members of ASI’s Executive Board.

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