The dog days of August might seem a strange time to think about sweaters and stew, but I’ve been reading about sheep lately.
Sheep seem like greatly underrated livestock. They give us wool and mutton (sweaters and stew). You can even turn a sheep’s hide into traditional southern Italian bagpipe called a zampogna. I’m not Italian, but one day I’d like to play a Christmas tarantella on a zampogna made from a local sheep. A sheep with a name. Paulo, maybe, or perhaps Luigi.
But did you know that in addition to food, clothing and loud musical instruments that horrify my immediate family, sheep are also very efficient lawnmowers? Heck, even accounting for their flatulence, which I’m told is ghastly, sheep represent an ecological improvement over gas mowers.
Minnesota Power made headlines a few weeks ago for hiring a herd of sheep to manage the grass around the Jean Duluth Solar Farm.
The company seeded native plants well-suited for pollinators, but needs to clip the grass to give the new sprouts a chance. Enter the company Minnesota Native Landscapes, which deployed 100 carbon-neutral sheep to do the job.
In other words, bees make honey after sheep make money.
Landscaping with sheep is hardly a new idea, even here in Minnesota. In 1918, the state’s largest-ever wildfire claimed lives, homes and forests across northern Minnesota. In summer 1919, the Dupont Blasting Powder Company remained justifiably nervous about how close the fires came to atomizing its factory just outside Hibbing. The company purchased 1,000 sheep to graze away the fire danger.
Apparently, only “ewe” can prevent wildfires.
Sorry.
Dupont officials weren’t the only ones who thought this idea sounded not too “baa.”
Sorry again.
But seriously, thousands of sheep were imported across the Mesabi Range in 1919. They became common sights along the trolley lines and roads of the region.
Sometimes we must pause to consider what history really looked like. It’s one thing to read about “thousands of sheep,” but it’s another to imagine their fleecy figures teeming along roadsides, dotting the landscape like dandelion fluff.
The sheep were tremendously successful. That is to say that they ate and pooped for months on end with no explosions. In fact, local newspapers began touting a coming renaissance of sheep farming on the Iron Range.
Alas, the region never achieved status as a sheep farming hub. By fall of 1919, the sheep had eaten up considerable amounts of grass and companies like Dupont began to consider the expense of feeding them over winter. In Hibbing, the powder factory sold almost 200 sheep to the county work farm near Duluth and another 100 or so to the Great Northern Railroad. Remaining sheep were sold to local farmers, though it’s likely that many were lost to theft and predators by the end of the year.
People still raise sheep in northern Minnesota today. You might have seen a few woolies at the St. Louis County Fair earlier this month. When my boys were a little younger, we liked to visit the sheep at Mr. Ed’s Farm east of Hibbing, not terribly far from where the Dupont sheep once roamed. In fact, I like to think that today’s Iron Range sheep descend from the ones that kept the place from erupting into a gargantuan fireball a century ago.
So, yes, it’s nice that sheep are keeping the grass short around the solar panels in Duluth. If it works, Minnesota Power says it might call for more of them.
Never underestimate what sheep can do, especially when it comes to grass. I’m not quite ready to trade in my John Deere lawn tractor for a 300-pound Merino, at least I know the future is mutton to worry about.
Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and co-hosts the podcast “Power in the Wilderness” on Northern Community Radio. This piece first appeared in the Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024 edition of the Mesabi Tribune.
Using sheep to keep vegetation low, especially to lawn mower standards, has to be done with care. Sheep can improve the health of grazing fields and contribute positively to water management as long as there are enough of them to graze to the levels desired and then they are removed to allow recovery and prevent killing plant roots. This is most important on hillsides where water runoff can erode soil exposed by grazing, and where use of sheep is often attractive because of difficulty mowing due to steepness.
Done right, sheep grazing can substitute for mowing. Done too lightly, it will cause a changeover from desirable forage (which the sheep will eat up) to unwelcome plants like thistles and brambles that under grazing sheep will leave. Done too heavily, vegetation can be destroyed, erosion can occur, and desertification result. Sheep overgrazing is theorized to have been a factor in degrading soils in Greece and Southern Italy leading to large scale loss of farmland.
In the Northland, sheep are also an attractive target for wolves and feral dogs.
Before attempting use of sheep as a landscaping technique, people should consider getting a consultation with ag extension agents to learn the right management techniques. I’m sure the people running MN Power’s experiment are well versed in this, but others may not be.