By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

EATON, Ind. — A small puppy tumbles out to greet visitors at the Russell Sheep Co. farm. Someone who isn’t a dog expert might be forgiven for thinking Buddy is a Great Pyrenees, as it’s a well-known herding breed. After all, at this age they’re also balls of fluff with short legs and long tongues.

This brown-and-white patchwork pup, though, happens to be an English Shepherd (Jeremy Russell, whose parents own the farm and business, explained the Great Pyrenees is usually white). His father, Paul, later explains how the family has tried to use the Pyrenees in the past, with poor luck; one, in fact, killed sheep. Buddy’s job isn’t going to be so much guarding the Russell sheep as it will be barking at predators and marking his territory to scare them off.

“We are just in a hotbed of coyotes through here,” Paul said of their Delaware County farm, a few miles north of Muncie.

It’s why instead of leaving their scores of sheep out to graze overnight during the warmer months, the Russells herd them into a barn each evening. Related to this is an unwillingness to feed more livestock by buying donkeys or llamas, which have good reputations for guarding pastured sheep – but they also cost money for food and veterinary care.

The drawback to the barn is that somebody needs to be home every night, so there aren’t many opportunities for vacations. Paul pointed out its benefits, however, outweigh this inconvenience.

Making tradeoffs is part of farming, especially for small growers and livestock producers who hope to make it their only source of income. To do this, many try to “add value” to their operations by diversifying what they raise or how they sell the finished product. On July 28, the Indiana Farm Bureau (IFB) hosted a tour of two farms in east-central Indiana in different stages of value-added production.

Different stages
Shortly after they married in 1976, Paul and Diane Russell started building on 80-plus acres of bare ground in Eaton. “Since then, we’ve expanded to what you’ve seen,” Paul said, gesturing around at the four outbuildings, grain storage and house, “several of these buildings in the last couple of years.”

Diane grew up with sheep, so the couple and their three children kept what Paul called a hobby flock for many years. The couple were able to make their living from crops and now still divide 1,250 no-till acres largely between corn and soybeans, with three-quarters of the beans a tofu-grade marketed to Japan through IOM Grain, LLC of Portland, Ind. The Russells have also sold grain to Precision Soya and Beck’s Hybrids.

In 2003, Jeremy – then an eighth-grader – began taking more interest in the sheep and his parents agreed to expand their flock, with their youngest son more or less in charge of the sheep (their two older children, Lindsay Ford and Adam, are not farmers). In the last year alone, they doubled the flock and now have approximately 100 ewes, including lambs, and six rams.

They’re working toward breeding upwards of 150 lambs next year – each pregnant ewe has about an equal chance of producing a single or twin lambs. Right now is breeding season, in fact. In the main barn – designed with a high ceiling to allow some heat to rise and dissipate in the summer months – ewes and lambs are housed together on one side and rams, in separate pens on the other.

Breeding occurs by putting some ewes in with a ram for two days, then marking the ewes and waiting to see if they become pregnant; if not, the Russells try again. Paul explained a sheep not closely penned may make a break for freedom, so the barn is fitted with a series of small pens and circular gates down its middle section, through which ewes are herded back and forth from the ram pens. Jeremy and a friend built many of these using what they learned in high school welding class, and he does similar work for other area landowners.

The Russells want to grow to 200-250 sheep in the next few years, but the parents – who are in their late fifties – are hesitant to do so until Jeremy decides if he wants to take over the farm after college, or if he’ll go elsewhere; he’s a sophomore at Purdue University. Like other farmers facing retirement, they would like to pass their business to their child, though Paul acknowledges nationwide, this is happening less frequently because those children move away or don’t farm.

He thinks anyone who wants to get into farming but doesn’t have a background might do well to find an older farmer mentor to learn from, and put themselves in line to buy the operation, perhaps in the next 10-15 years when there’s a “massive retirement in ag.” He read a recent article which stated 43 percent of Iowa farmers will be retiring in the near future because that many are older. Surely, he reasons, this statistic can’t be too much different across the rest of the Corn Belt. “I don’t think Iowa has all the old farmers,” Paul said.

Also, “you don’t have to farm 500 acres to be a farmer.” The Russells do, but they know plenty of people who work with much less land and manage to make a career of agriculture – and of the more than 1,000 acres they farm, even they only own about 200.

But, Paul recognizes for a small operation to survive, “we need to be finding value-added avenues for everything we do” – for example, the tofu soybeans, and the fact a nearby ethanol plant exists adds 17-20 cents per bushel to the selling price of their corn, even though the Russells don’t sell to that plant. (The latter is what he jokingly calls “accidental value.”)

Drew Cleveland is certainly not a big farmer; he and his wife, Cathy, owned the first stop on IFB’s July 28 tour, Cleveland Family Farm & Market. Their 12 acres are located, appropriately enough, in Farmland, Ind. They lease nearly 80 acres to plant to corn and soybeans, but Drew and Cathy divide much of their own land between livestock and vegetables.

Like Paul, Drew comes from an ag background – a 500-acre farm with more than 2,000 feed-to-finish hogs per year – but unlike the Russells, the Clevelands are largely on the front end of establishing their value-added farm business. Currently, Drew’s own pork operation consists of two piglets the family adopted from a county fair petting zoo, when the owners were looking to get rid of them. “So, we’re started now,” he joked.

(Please refer to the newspaper for the remaining portion.)