My name is Kathy (Eddy) Sanford. Let me begin by saying that I am not an expert on sheep. I began raising sheep, when I was fourteen years old, for a 4-H project. At the time I was living on 3/4 of an acre, in Placerville, California. There was not much room for livestock so my project consisted of buying one market lamb each spring to raise for our county fair. That was back in 1974, or so.

Since then, I met a wonderful man (Norm), got married (1981), moved to southern California, had two boys, (Ben in 1983 and Chris in1985), and moved again, this time to southwest Washington (1991). PHEW!

We now own eight acres, plenty of room for kids to run and explore AND plenty of room for some livestock.

I am a little nuts when it comes to critters. About the only thing we have not had on our small farm are pigs. Not that I have anything against pigs, it just hasn't been looked into fully...yet.

As soon as the boys were old enough I enrolled them in 4-H. It just seemed right to go into the sheep project since I had so much fun in it as a kid. At one of our first 4-H meetings I brought a picture of me with my first lamb (Hermie), thinking it would amuse some of the kids in our group. I really had no idea how much things had changed in the years since I was a 4-Her. One of the older girls in our group promptly pointed out that it was a picture of an "old style" dorset. Old style? OLD STYLE? I had so much to learn!

We decided to start our flock with three Suffolk ewes that we purchased from a reputable breeder in our area. We were having so much fun that we added Hampshires, Border Cheviots, and Romney (both white and natural colored). Our small farm was growing rapidly. Too rapidly. After a couple of very warm, wet winters we learned all about foot rot. We had too many sheep to rotate pastures so control was a real headache. This is when we decided it was time to re-evaluate our goals. Did we HAVE goals? Maybe now was the time to MAKE goals. We decided to sell all of our sheep. We tried to settle on ONE breed but Ben was hooked on Hampshires and Chris liked the stylishly long necked Border Cheviots that some friends were showing at the local fair. So we decided that two breeds of sheep on our farm would be okay. The next decision we had to make was," how many sheep can we care for properly?". We decided that we didn't want any more than ten sheep at a time. This will make for some difficult decisions in the future, I am sure, but I am hoping that we will be focused more on quality than quantity. In 2003 we decided to take a break from raising sheep and now only have llamas as pasture ornaments.

That pretty much brings us up to the present. I have learned a lot more about sheep than I ever thought I would. I have been a 4-H leader for the past eight years, took a course through WSU extension to become one of their livestock advisors, and superintendent for livestock judging at the Clark County Fair. I don't think that you ever stop learning when it comes to livestock animals and I think that's why I enjoy what I do so much.