(bright music) - I like the fleece a lot.

(attendees laughing) I'm Joanie Ellison, and we're at our farm in Pelican Rapids.

We raise sheep and good times.

(laughing) Today, we're shearing sheep.

We have 36 sheep in the barn, plus six lambs.

And we shear them in December, January, because we want the lambs to be able to get to their moms' udders, and with six inches of fleece, it's really hard.

Every year when it's time to shear, I send out an email, then I say, "Anybody wanna have an adventure today, we're gonna shear sheep.

You can do all kinds of different jobs.

You can skirt fleeces, you can give shots, you can wrestle sheep, you can haul fleeces."

And we've been doing this for 40 years.

I think people come to our farm for fiber days and for things like shearing because they really love making things and they really love learning things.

And this is a place where they can come and learn about the sheep, they can get ideas for projects to work on in the future, they can share their enthusiasm with other people.

It's just a really fun, fun day.

People come from all over.

I mean, we've had people come from Western North Dakota, we've had people come from the Twin Cities, we've had people come just from all over the state.

We do this because my folks gave me a spinning wheel about 50 years ago.

And I learned how to spin, and we moved to Pelican Rapids, and the store that I bought my wool from for spinning closed.

And we went, "Oh, what are we gonna do?"

That was before the internet, you know, I didn't know any place to get wool.

So when I was having my second daughter, I was in the hospital and they brought me two books, instead of flowers, or candy, or something (laughing) like that.

He brought me two books about raising sheep.

And so we've been raising sheep ever since.

(shearer buzzing) (attendees laughing) (bright music) Our sheep are sort of Heinz 57 sheep, my ewes are all different backgrounds, but the rams I buy specifically for what they give me.

And what the Caramel rams give me is shorter sheep and really fine crimpy wool that'll be spun into something really nice.

(shearer buzzing) And when the shearer comes, we trim their hooves, and we only do that a couple times a year, and then we'll give 'em their vaccinations.

And we vaccinate 'em and we shear 'em at this time of year because their lambs will be here in a week or two, and their lambs will have those antibodies from their mom's vaccination.

So we can vaccinate the lambs right now, and then six weeks after they're born, we'll give 'em their second vaccination.

Our shearer is Tom Reinhart, and he can shear a sheep in three minutes.

When Dave and I do it, because we have to, because sometimes sheep get injured and you have to shear 'em, it takes us three hours.

So it makes great sense to pay somebody to come in and shear the sheep for you.

He also does a wonderful job.

The other people that are here are all volunteers, and some have never worked with sheep at all before and some of them have never given shots before (laughing) and some of them have never touched wool before, but some of them are experts at it.

And then a couple of 'em just came for the ride.

The kids, I think, will learn a lot.

They will learn to feed sheep, they will learn to bottle feed lambs, they will learn to skirt fleeces.

Probably 10 or 15 people worked at the skirting day.

We spread the fleeces out on a table, and then take out the pieces that have dirt in 'em, the pieces that have manure in 'em, the pieces that have hay, all the dirty parts.

People buy wool from me, they buy fleeces.

That's what you call the wool just after it comes off the sheep.

And then we bag it up and I take it into the house and I skirt it again, just to make sure it's really, really clean.

If I get through the whole year and I haven't sold those fleeces, I take 'em to the spinning and carting mill, and they turn 'em into yarn for me.

(Joan laughing) (sheep bleating) And I really love haiku.

Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that has 17 syllables.

The first line is five syllables, the second line is seven syllables, the third line is five syllables.

And it's supposed to be about nature, and then about sort of an aha moment.

You set up a story, and then you solve it in those 17 syllables.

And I decided that I was gonna write one haiku a day.

And I started writing haikus about the farm.

I called that book, "To Farm is to Hope" because it was part of a haiku.

And the reason I said that is because every time you turn around at a farm, something's going wrong.

And so a lot of the stuff that I wrote in my books is about the hard parts of lambing, the thing that makes it hard to do.

And the only way that you can keep doing it year after year after year is if you can hope.

You know, you hope for those days when the lambs are all healthy and you hope for those days when the fleeces are beautiful.

And that's what I wanna share with the people that come is, you know, these are wonderful things.

And why I called my last book "To Farm is to Hope."

Dave and I are 77, and everybody's saying, (laughing) "When are you gonna stop raising sheep?"

But we somehow just keep doing it.

And (laughing) as long as we can hire kids to help us put up hay and as long as we can do the work ourselves, I think we're just gonna keep doing it, 'cause they're so damn cute.

(laughing) (lamb bleating) Oh my goodness.

- [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.