By ED MERRIMAN

Baker City Herald

Suzen Fors got her start raising sheep 25 years ago when her then 10-year-old daughter, Elesa, raised market lambs as 4-H projects, and she’s been raising sheep ever since.

andquot;My daughter was in 4-H and she wanted to raise market animals. She had been taking breeding cattle (to the Baker County Fair), but there was no money in breeding cattle, so she decided she wanted a market lamb,andquot; Fors said.

andquot;We got a wether and a ewe. The ewe was so good looking we decided to keep her and raise sheep,andquot; Fors said. andquot;She was a good breeder and a good mother.andquot;

Fors said she developed a love of the farm life during her own childhood staying at her grandfather’s ranch near North Powder. She encouraged her children to participate in Baker County 4-H programs because she wanted them to experience what it’s like to care for and raise animals, and to interact with farm kids and other andquot;wonderful peopleandquot; involved in 4-H.

Although her daughter and a son, Michael, are both 30-something and have moved on to careers and families of their own, Furs has continued raising sheep and a few head of cattle.

She does this with help from her husband, Jack, who wooed her years ago on horseback (he had an appaloosa and she rode a quarter horse). The couple married and moved from the Portland-Vancouver area to Baker City in the 1970s to be closer to Fors’ grandfather, and to raise their family on a small farm of their own.

Over the years, Fors said, the family’s sheep flock grew to 14 head of certified scrapie-free black-faced Suffolk-Hampshire crossbreds, which she maintains annually, despite selling a dozen or more lambs each spring to area ranchers and 4-H youths.

Normally, Fors said she has her sheep sheared several weeks before the Tri-County Wool Pool, which is scheduled this year from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturday, June 13, at the Union County Fairgrounds in La Grande.

Most years, there’s enough warm, dry spring days in Baker County for Fors and other andquot;backyardandquot; sheep producers to get their small flocks sheared in time for the wool pool.

This year, however, the weather has been anything but normal. Fors said the spring weather has been so cold and wet that with one week remaining until the wool pool, she and many other sheep raisers are still waiting to get their flocks sheared.

andquot;You can’t shear the sheep when they’re wet,andquot; she said.

Fors said she’s counting on good weather Sunday, when 76-year-old Gordon Pennington, one of Baker County’s last old-time sheep shearers, is scheduled to shear her flock of 13 ewes and one ram.

Jay Carr, a former longtime Oregon State University Extension Service livestock agent in Baker County, said large flocks of sheep numbering in the thousands once roamed the range and pasture lands of Baker County, but over the past few decades it has declined to the point that the Jacobs family ranch in Keating Valley is the last of the large-scale sheep operations in the area.

andquot;At one time there were hundreds of thousands of sheep all over Eastern Oregon,andquot; Carr said.

Today, most of the sheep and wool are produced in what Carr calls andquot;backyardandquot; flocks, ranging from a few head of sheep to 200. Other than the 1,200 to 1,800 sheep raised by the Jacobs family, Carr said he is only aware of one or two others in Baker County who maintain flocks of more than 200.

andquot;Any more, it’s mostly the backyard producers who go to the wool pool,andquot; which Carr said has been expanded to include counties where wool pools are no longer held, including Umatilla and Harney counties, in addition to Baker, Union and Wallowa counties.

During the height of Oregon’s sheep and wool industry, andquot;wool pools were held all over Eastern Oregon. Now, there’s just two left one in La Grande and one in Prineville,andquot; Carr said, adding that there’s also a wool pool or two still operating in Western Oregon.

Figures on Oregon sheep production shows sheep numbers peaked statewide in 1930 at nearly 2.6 million total head valued at nearly $23.3 million. The state’s flocks plummeted to less than half that amount at just over 1 million head in 1945, plunged to 689,000 by 1950 and after surging back up to nearly 1 million head between 1952 and 1960, began spiraling downward during the mid-60s and continued dropping to less than 500,000 head for much of the 1970s, 80s before dropping below 400,000 head in 1995 and under 300,000 in 1998.

Oregon’s total sheep industry has been running between 210,000 and 245,000 head throughout the first eight years of the 21st century.

The total value of Oregon’s sheep crop peaked at nearly $35.4 million in 1980 when the state’s total sheep inventory was reported at 495,000. By comparison, the total inventory reported at 215,000 head had a reported total value of $26 million.

Over the past decade, the number of shorn sheep reported statewide has declined from 290,000 head to 188,000 head, the total wool production has dropped from nearly 1.9 million pounds to less than 1.2 million pounds, and the total value of wool produced statewide has declined from $1.15 million to $690,000, according to figures reported by the statistics service.

Wool prices reported by the OSU Extension Service for this year’s Tri-County Wool Pool in La Grande range from $1.05 per pound for wool from white face sheep, 71 cents for coarse white face wool, 40 cents per pound for wool from black face sheep, 35 cents for lambs wool, 22 cents for bellies, 12 cents for tags and crutchings and 10 cents for black wool.

andquot;Short and six-month wool will be half-price of white face and black face wool, with a 10 percent deduction in price for tied wool or for the presence of polypropylene,andquot; according to an Extension Service press release.

Overall wool prices reported by the statistics service over the past decade ranged from 58 cents to 65 cents per pound over the past decade, with the exception of the period from 1998 to 2002, when overall wool prices in Oregon ranged from 27 cents to 38 cents per pound.

Carr said a wool buyer from Elliot Woolen Mills in Utah has attended the Tri-County Wool Pool and purchased wool nearly every year for more than a decade, and the mill is expected to send a representative again this year to the June 13 wool pool.

For more information on this year’s wool pool, contact Jayne Kellar at the OSU Extension Service of Baker County at 523-6418.