From Row Crops to Sheep Flocks
Meet Lynn Born, a first-generation sheep farmer.
Lynn grew up in Northern Ohio on her family’s row crop and cattle operation. From a young age, she knew she wanted to escape farm life. As soon as she had the opportunity to leave; Lynn went away to a University in Canada. Unfortunately, the pandemic struck halfway through her time in obtaining her degree. Despite the six-hour drive, Lynn used to go home once or twice a month, but when the borders closed, she was forced to live away from everything she had ever known.
She thought, “Gasp* Buy meat from the grocery store!?”
Her entire life, her family had meat taken from the freezer. Her family had three freezers in the garage: one for beef, one for pork, and one for chicken, all of which had been grown in her backyard.
Having lived through COVID, Lynn’s life completely transformed from what she was used to, so much so that it made her reevaluate her future. She started looking for multipurpose animals that would be good to raise on a homestead and settled on dairy sheep.
To better understand the industry, Lynn watched a lot of YouTube homestead content at the time and stumbled across sheep content. Watching producers do their farm chores daily brought a sense of nostalgia that helped her through the most challenging moments of homesickness. The semester slowly ended; within one week of returning to the States, Lynn was on a road trip ten states away to pick up a single dairy lamb.
After purchasing her first sheep, she graduated with a Management Economics and Finance degree. She then became an accountant and, oh, bought 125 more sheep!
“Because when one isn’t enough, you jump straight into the deep end, right?”
She didn’t stick with dairy; she only has three dairy sheep in her flock now. She chose Polypay (white-faced commercial market sheep) as the breed for her flock.
What is Lynn doing currently? She just finished her first lambing and is gearing up to start selling Easter lambs for 2024. With a background in finance and an interest in data collection, Herdwatch quickly became love at first click.
With lambing season being so hectic, a frictionless record-keeping method remains essential. Lynn is excited to use Herdwatch to record all the new lambs and take daily notes.
Lynn shares, “I want to know everything about these lambs, so I don’t have to judge based on what they look like when it is time to choose which ewe I want to keep.”
As a part-time farmer who is extremely busy with an off-farm job at the peak for sale time, Lynn appreciates all the Herdwatch features that make it easy to keep track of everything. Lamb medications are essential to her operation, especially when it comes time for the market. Additionally, as someone who loves to analyse data, she often uses the functions to pull Excel reports of her measurables.
Lynn shares, “Someday, many years down the line I will look back on my first lambing fondly not only in my memories, but also in my records through Herdwatch!”
