United Suffolk Sheep Association

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June/July 2004

As I write this, it’s April 30.  It’s planting time, meaning long hours in the fields.  Sitting on a tractor with all of the conveniences of one’s home is always a pleasure for me.  Another treat for me is the wonderful smell of the rich soil.  The trees are in full bloom, everything is green, and the fresh smell of the air is a pure joy; you can almost taste it.  Our main farms are in seed corn country.  In fact, I’m sure that there is more corn raised for seed in our area than any place in America.  I laugh at the crop farmers complaining about the long hours they spend on tractors getting the crops in the ground.  I tell them about back in the 1930’s when we did the work with horses, and they can’t believe my stories of plowing and fitting the ground with three to six horse teams (to say nothing of breaking young horses to drive!).  As I look back in time and into my boyhood, I find it amazing how everything has changed and how the great improvements have made farming so much easier.  I think those harder times built in us a sense of moral standards.  Perhaps they have dwindled today as technology has grown and separated us from our heritage.  With that being said, farming has become so very complicated and large.  I feel that there is far more stress in our lives, and while we take in large sums of money, I’m not sure that we are any better off than we were years ago. 

            Another interesting part of our lives here at Buckham Farms is the lambing of almost 400 commercial ewes, plus 165 ewe lambs.  These ewes start lambing May 1^st, and all ewes will lamb on pasture.  We started doing this four years ago, and it was a simple procedure.  Two years ago, we had coyote trouble and did not do it last year.  At this time, we feel that we have the coyotes under control.  These ewes lamb on the very outskirts of Kalamazoo.  A huge Wal-Mart is not more than a stone’s throw away from some of our pasture fields which now have a four-lane road separating them.  Ten thousand cars a day use this street; at times, it’s nothing to see twenty cars parked watching the sheep.  We are trying to think of a way to cash in on all of these people interested in watching the sheep and their lambs.  I have told many times about driving our purebred flock the two miles to where I live.  We no longer will be able to do this, but I’m sure that this could be a great way to make some real money.  I’m sure that with an ad in our local paper, we could get ten thousand people or more to line the road as we pass by.  We need a promoter to set this up and start collecting some big money. 

            In the Kalamazoo area, we are no longer known as the Buckhams; we are the “sheep people.”  My granddaughter Kristi who used to help me with most of my articles and is now a senior at Michigan State is always worried that I’ll never make it to heaven or the Pearly Gates.  So whenever possible, she takes me to church which is about a mile across the fields.  This huge, beautiful church is packed with people.  I think that she enjoys introducing me to her friends and hearing them say, “Okay, you are the sheep people.”  The word “sheep” or “lamb” is a very popular word in church.  One day at Easter time, I counted the times that it was used in the songs and the sermon.  To my surprise, the two words were used 37 times.  I think this was a record.  When I go to this great church, I always worry that I do not get the message or the proper feeling.  I did last Sunday as one of the long phrases was “Thank you for being mine.”  I looked at Kristi, a thing of pure beauty with great intelligence, and thanked her for letting me share her youth and love.  You can be sure that I thanked her for being mine.  As I came out of the church with Kristi, I felt special.  The church had a wonderful message that day, and life was a glorious thing.

            Now my granddaughter Emily does all of my typing and editing.  She has to use her pure brilliance to decipher my thoughts.  Probably the only reason that I do this is to share her time.  She jokes that she is my “highly overpaid secretary and editor in chief,” but she enjoys this time as much as I do. 

            I’m not going to make any reflection on our great breed of Suffolk sheep in this article.  I sometimes think that just maybe we need a break from all of this sheep talk; it should not consume our lives.  I read the ad on the pack page of our attractive Suffolk News where Jim Heggemeier and Tom Burke, two icons of our breed, were advertising a Heggemeier ram weighing 500 pounds or more.  I’ve been wondering how long it would take us to hit the 500 pound mark.  Now that Jim and Tom have hit this figure, is 600 pounds the next goal?  As one who has sheared more sheep than I like to think about, I bet $5.00 that Jim can’t shear this big sucker without the help of his wife, Jody, to help muscle this old ram into proper position.  I’ll leave this situation to you frame breeders and talk instead about sheep dogs, in this case, the Border Collie. 

            My twin brother Fred and I bought a high-powered Border Collie probably 50 years ago.  We had the silly idea that we could train this high-strung beast and make him drive or round-up sheep.  I might add that we paid $150 for this beautiful dog which was a lot of money back then, and we probably weren’t that prosperous at the time.  He was just a pup, and we were told to let him get used to sheep so we put him in with 500 western lambs that we had purchased in the early fall.  In those days, the western sheep usually had ticks.  For those of you who haven’t seen ticks on a sheep, they are about the size of the ladybugs that we have today.  After two weeks, we saw that the dog was not doing well.  Come to find out, he was crawling in ticks.  We took care of this problem by shearing the lambs and the dog.  The dog loved the lambs and soon began acting like a real sheep dog.  He would get down like the great dogs do, had great eye contact, and we thought that we had the perfect dog.  In the spring, we let him out with 75 purebred yearling ewes.  This is when the trouble started.  The dog would spend all day just circling the sheep, so we finally tied him up which he didn’t like, nor did we.  We soon learned that we were dumb as stones when it came to handling this great dog.  Patience or time we did not have, so we let him back out with the ewes.  The next thing we knew, he was not only circling the sheep but starting to bite them.  We finally go so mad at this wonderful, intelligent dog that we got a gun and shot him.  I often think about this sad story and have come the conclusion that this great dog was just too smart for two busy farm boys to train. 

            My son, Jeff, had the idea that we needed a sheep dog about fifteen years ago.  Steve George’s father had a litter of pups, so of course he had to have one.  He purchased a female and was going to raise pups, plus have a good working dog.  He did get the dog to stop and get down, plus a few other things, but as for herding sheep, she fell in love with them.  Not only did she love them, she thought she was a ram and never did breed.  She made a wonderful pet and lived for years.  The kids all loved her.

            After these two feeble experiences with Border Collies, Jeff comes to the conclusion that we must have another sheep dog.  I couldn’t get it through his head that our purebreds would follow us anywhere with a pail of grain, and if this didn’t work with the commercial ewes, we had a good four-wheeler that could round them up.  To make a long story short, he buys a dog that’s ugly as sin that he and the seller were sure would work.  I would hate to tell you the dollars he has invested in this dog, and I don’t want to know.  He has taken her to be trained twice and the last time tried to get her bred which didn’t work.  At this time, he thinks that he has the dog under control, and she is starting to be of some help.  The thing that nobody ever seems to mention is that the sheep need to be trained just like the dog to make the system work.  Two weeks ago, he borrows a stud dog to get her bred again.  Things are really looking good, so he puts her in our big livestock trailer and forgets to shut the door tight.  As he was coming the two miles to where I live… the dog jumps out.  He immediately goes back to find her and comes up with no dog.  Come to find out, the dog catcher picks her up, and they finally find her at the pound, and she’s okay now.  But the morale of this long, rambling story: get a good horse or have a lot of grandkids. 

            I’ll close this long-winded article with the most important thing that two people can do, that is of course, getting married.  I’ve written in my articles many times that I’m an expert on this subject because I’ve been married so long.  At this time, I’m not so sure.  My dear, loving wife still gets up at the crack of dawn, gets breakfast, then gets me up every single morning.  This morning, she woke me up with the cheery words, “Happy 55^th Wedding Anniversary, dear.”  In my busy world, I didn’t even know what day it was, let alone our wedding day.  I’m not sure that this special days means as much to us as it once did.  Our four children, fourteen grandchildren, the land that we have acquired and the livestock that walk on it, plus our many friends, are maybe the most important things in our lives at this time.  We know each other so well.  The love and friendship that we have is something that we just know is there and always has been.  Today, as always, she wants my respect, a kind word or thank you, and to be appreciated for the hundred things that she does for me.