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What does it take to grow a sheep farm from only 12 head to more than 400 head in just five years?
For Eli and Mackenzie Strawser, it comes down to one word: determination.
"Go with your gut. Hard work pays off. Determination, too. And never look back," Eli says.
Their Turning Point Land and Livestock Services in Herndon, Pa., is meeting the growing ethnic market for lambs in the region. In fact, it was a Muslim friend of one of Eli’s father’s co-workers who sparked he and Mackenzie’s interest in sheep.
“One thing led to another, and a friend of my dad had a co-worker who was Muslim that was looking for lambs,” Eli says. "They have a group that gets together every year and come on farms to get lambs. But it was this group of people, and that's what started us to raise lambs.”
All lambs, all year
Meat and breeding stock are the couple’s main markets.
The lambs are sold to either butcher shops or direct to customers who come to the farm and pick up their lambs, or have the animals delivered to them.
While many farms breed for traditional late-winter and fall lambing — mainly for Easter and Christmas — Mackenzie and Eli breed for year-round lambing.
"And that was part of our business plan; that was part of our strategy,” Eli says. "A lot of people lamb in spring and fall, but a lot of people don't have lambs year-round. And that is why we do what we do.”
“We're doing [breeding] groups of 80 every other month, but every ewe is lambing every eight months," Mackenzie says.
They raise more than 400 head of Polypay ewes that produce more than 1,000 lambs a year. They started with 12 Hampshire ewes in 2019, Mackenzie says, but switched to Polypays — a breed developed in the 1960s at the U.S. Sheep Experimentation Station in Dubois, Idaho — because of their superior feed conversion, carcass quality and prolific lambing.
They house the animals on four rented farms within a 5-mile radius of their home farm, which has 150 head.
All forages are homegrown, and it was at first a hay-grain diet, but they have switched to a total mixed ration of protein pellets, corn silage, shelled corn and minerals.
“I think the ewes are performing better than whenever they were on a hay and grain diet, and it's cheaper for us to feed it," Mackenzie says.
Fast growth brings challenges
Growing a farm is hard. And when you’re young — Eli is 28, and Mackenzie is 27 — it can be daunting.
Now, throw in a relatively unknown, risky market, and that made starting the business hard.
"To start without anything, starting from scratch and building it from the ground up is very difficult,” Eli says. “When we first started, no banks wanted to touch sheep. They didn't want to loan any money," he says.
Even their families were skeptical at first.
"We were actually going to name it Black Sheep Farms at one point because every person in the family, her family and mine, didn’t think it would work out," Eli says.
But they were determined to make a life on the farm for themselves. Eli grew up on a farm that finished hogs and fattened cattle. Mackenzie has been raising animals in 4-H and FFA since she was 8 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State in animal science and agribusiness management.
“We both kind of agreed that we didn't want our kids growing up in a babysitter-day care kind of environment. So, we started with the sheep, and it kept growing and growing," Eli says. "And that was what Kenzie decided she wanted to do full time."
Still, the quick growth of the farm is something neither of them expected.
"We always wanted to be big, but we never thought it would happen this fast," Mackenzie says. "We joked for years that eventually someday we were going to have 1,000 ewes, and people thought we were absolutely insane."
They have faced several challenges along the way. A big challenge has been air quality in the lambing area. There isn’t good enough ventilation, and their lambs often have issues with pneumonia and barn cough.
They have tried fixing the issue by putting up curtains on the north- and south-facing sides of the barn and buying floor fans, but this is only a temporary fix and one that isn’t ideal.
At a recent Farmers on the Rise event sponsored by Horizon Farm Credit, the couple were one of 10 beginning farm operations that got a $10,000 grant to improve their farm. Their goal is to install permanent 50-inch fans on one side of the barn to blow air in and 10-foot ceiling fans above the pens to keep air moving.
Late last year, the couple got the ultimate gift: a newborn baby girl.
Eli has an off-farm full-time job in plumbing and excavating, so that leaves most of the day-to-day work to Mackenzie. As a result, they are changing breeding cycles so that the ewes lamb every nine months instead of eight months.
“Each group will be held a month longer to get bred back,” Eli says. “Once they lamb, they will get held a month longer to re-breed. Instead of lambing every eight months, they will lamb every nine months. This will help the ewes get a break and help get the udders dried down.”
Growing market keeps calling
But even with the challenges of quick growth and a growing family, they see a unique opportunity in sheep.
According to USDA, lamb and mutton imports — mostly from Australia and New Zealand — account for more than half of the U.S. supply. There is room for domestic producers to fill in the gap.
"Sheep and goat are some of the only species that are not commercialized,” Eli says. “I see that the ethnic population is growing rapidly, and I also see that the younger generations, the foodie-type people, are starting to consume lamb again. I think that if we get it out to the general public and get it out to people who like beef and chicken, it can be successful.”
Consistency and meat quality are key to growing it, he says, and that means culling animals that aren’t desirable.
"Your best friend is your red paint can,” Eli says. “You've got to not be afraid to cull ewes because they're too tall or something else. You got to have a uniform ewe group to have a uniform lamb group. And that is something that we are still working through.”
While the business is hard, Mackenzie says they did several things in the beginning to set them up for success.
“We didn't buy ewe lambs right off the bat. We bought mature ewes that already lambed before, which I think was a good idea," she says. "If we had started lambing with ewes that had never lambed before, I don't think we would have grown as fast as we did. So, we definitely learned a lot by doing that first.
"We focused on making everything very labor-efficient knowing that I am the one that is doing everything every day. So that's definitely helped,” she adds.
And while their futures aren't set in stone, Mackenzie and Eli say they have the desire and work ethic to make anything happen.
"It's not easy to be young and in ag these days. You have to work for it, and we work for it," Mackenzie says.
“People are starting to see that the lamb market is the real deal," Eli says. "It takes a very good support group, and it takes a very good relationship with a very good wife to be able to do what we do every day, and have the trust in one another.”
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