Chad Lepley wants to take his new farm in a lot of different directions.
About three years ago Chad, who operates a tree service in Arkansas’ White County, got into sheep raising. He initially researched raising goats, but eventually turned to St. Croix, a hair sheep breed; they yield meat and milk, but no wool.
“That was all there was in Arkansas,” Lepley told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor. “I started looking further, and then I realized that wool was very valuable. It goes anywhere from $5 to $150 a pound.”
He and his wife Dawn spent months looking for the right breed, with good meat, milk, as well as wool. Finally, they found a woman in Missouri who was getting East Friesian sheep from a supplier in Wisconsin. Native to northern Germany, the breed didn’t arrive in the U.S. until the 1990s, but it is among the highest producers in terms of milk yield, something Chad discovered right away with a ewe they whimsically named Honey Boo-Boo.
“She is anywhere from 1 to 1.5 gallons a day at peak,” he said. “That’s a lot of milk for a sheep.”
Chad has names for all the animals in his 26-head flock, and he said new ones come from known bloodlines. One, a ram named Stretch, “was the biggest ram I’ve ever seen. At a year, year-and-a-half old, he was huge. That’s what I’m hoping for; everything you breed the dairy sheep to, they get bigger. They produce more meat.”
One of his East Friesian/Dorper cross rams weighed in at a recent sale at 230 pounds.
So with more, and bigger sheep, he needed a bigger farm. In March, the family moved to 20 acres in the town of Bald Knob and dubbed it “Yahuah’s Farm…a place of family. A place not our own, but Abba’s.”
When they got there, the place was buried under discarded pallets; they’ve gradually cleared it off. Lepley’s goal is a flock of 100, which he said he’ll easily be able to maintain.
“We’ll be rotating paddocks where we can hold more sheep all the way around,” he said. “I plan on doing 1.5 acre lots; once we get closer to 100, we will probably do 2-acre lots to be able to evenly eat all the grass, and let it be able to grow back evenly.”
He has a lot of plans for the existing flock. He’s been using the sheep’s milk for his own family or giving it away for others to try; he wants to get his kitchen certified by the state so he can make and sell products like cheese and yogurt, and has been looking into bartering use of the facilities or a church or restaurant in exchange for dairy foods.
“We’re going big with this,” Chad said enthusiastically. “Nobody around here knows anything about this; when you say, ‘Dairy sheep do what?’ They’ve never even heard of it. We’ve made soap, lotion, shampoo, conditioner, detergent and dish washing liquid.”
He said sheep milk is less than a quarter water, compared to three quarters for cow’s milk. “13 to 17.5 grams of protein per cup; it’s like eating a steak when you’ve had a bowl of cereal.”
He’s been selling the wool to co-ops on Facebook, and has learned how to shear his sheep himself.
Chad also plans to sell dairy foods to a health food store in nearby Searcy; the store also wants lamb, but local slaughterhouses were booked through the winter. Eventually, he wants his product to be federally inspected and to sell it to supermarkets as well. Under Arkansas law, he can sell up to 500 gallons a year of raw milk off the farm.
“I’d like to go raw all the way around, no pasteurization,” Chad said. “If it’s better for you, why mess it up? I made ice cream last year, and people went crazy. I had a lady who was 82 years old who hadn’t had milk in 12 years; she loved it. She cried when she handed me the little jar back, because she didn’t get sick from eating ice cream.”
It’s a diverse farm. Chad has a young cow, chickens and one goat.
“We got rid of the others,” he laughed. “They get out of everything…You can’t keep them in a fence.”
They are also breeding AKC Anatolian Shepherds for their own farm, and for sale. Chad has an electric fence to keep the sheep in, but not thieves or wildlife out; that’s the dogs’ chore. They’ve got a new litter of pups that are 75 percent Turkish Anatolian, 25 percent Pyrenees. Lepley said he sold some dogs to his Missouri sheep supplier, who had lost a dozen sheep to a single wolf and also had problems with coyotes, bears and boars.
Those problems have ended, and Lepley said some of his neighbors have experienced theft, but he hasn’t.
“Anything gets in this fence that’s not allowed to be here, it’s dead,” he said.
Chad hopes to get 100 percent into sheep and dogs, and just maintain the tree service for a few customers. He said he can hand-milk 10 gallons a day. Chad also added that his milking sheep have personalities, especially one ewe.
“I can come out here and sit in the chair with no one else around, and she’ll come over there and lay in my lap. She likes that attention.”
The hair sheep are wild by comparison, he said; none of them come up to people or are gentle or good with kids.
The East Friesians can cost up to $2,000 apiece, compared to $200 for the St. Croix, so Chad plans to breed the hair into the wool sheep. That, he believes, will eventually lead to wooled crosses with plenty of meat.
In the meantime, Chad continues to prepare the property for these diverse enterprises.
“A neighbor is putting in a perimeter fence for me, and then I’ll start working on paddocks and each little section all the way around,” he said. “We’ve got a sawmill down here, and we’re going to make cedar trim out of all this cedar. Why burn it? Make something out of it. We’ve done a lot, but there’s still more to do.”
