Dates and Mates

Dear Folks -
The last few days, I've been working to develop a better yearly calendar -- sort of a Farmer's Almanac to keep all the animal needs and activities straight. It all began because we have to move the breeding date from what we had this year to insure that the lambs aren't too old to show at the Maricopa County Fair next year 'cause, try as I did, we blew it for this year's dates. The fair rules base it all on the lamb's teeth -- if they have 'em, the lambs can be shown. If a lamb is missing even one, or have an adult tooth coming in, they can't be shown: simple as that.

Anyway, because the lambing date moved, the shearing date had to move as well. Researching the best way to do that, I got lost in the world of shearing and ended up looking at shearing information from Australia (the Queen of Sheep Country) as you can see from the mailbox I found.

Interestingly, Frederick York Wool-sey (no joke) invented Australia's first mechanical shearing device. You can read more about him here. The shearers were suspicious of the newfangled device and it took him a while to get his mates to agree to try it out. With a contract to shear 180,000 sheep he finally got 40 men to agree to use it and eventually each man could consistently shear 100 sheep a day with the new tool. Their rate pales though when compared to Jackie Howe, the Aussie master shearer. In 1892 Jackie sheared by hand 321 sheep in 7 hours and 40 minutes. His shearing medals were auctioned off in 2008 and brought $360,000 (AU).
Do you ever feel like there are whole worlds about which you know nothing? I regularly do, and this was one of them.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd