A Sustainable Farm

A Sustainable Farm

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Donna Schoonover of Schoonover Farm in northern Skagit County is busy preparing for new lambs and shares with us what a month is like during lambing.

SCHOONOVER: We’ve chosen to do lambing and kidding at the same time to help with the sleep depravation issue. Between us we check the animals every three hours day and night to check their progress. And if somebody’s showing signs of labor, then we need to stay in the barn and make sure the process goes okay. So it gets to be really exhausting.

Sheep shearing day on their farm is March 29. Schoonover talks about what happens with the wool they collect from their sheep.

SCHOONOVER: The internet is great for selling wool, because you can ship it and wool products. I have in the past had roving made and yarn actually made from the fleeces and sold that as well. And then most recently, I’ve been starting to do some of that myself. I have a electric drum carder and electric spinner and I’ve been doing some dying and processing myself and selling both roving and yarn.

Along with the sheep Schoonover also raises a variety of other animals.

SCHOONOVER: What we raise as far as breeding and raising are the sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens. We also have donkeys and llamas as guard animals, and we have some pheasants, ducks, geese, and peacocks.

One of these offers a unique income base.

SCHOONOVER: There’s some people in Seattle that want to have, because you can have chickens in your backyard, that want them kind of temporarily, but not permanent, they don’t want to have to worry about keeping them through the winter or worrying about them when they go on vacation, so they rent them from me for periods of time, and have the chickens scratch around their backyard and lay eggs for them, and then they return them when they’re ready.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.