This week, I visited the State Farm outside of Kalispell, where sheep farmers John Stites and Carol Treadwell Stites tell me about how they use their flock to improve the health of their soil. So what led you guys to get into sheep farming? I grew up, on a farm. and we had sheep. I knew what the sheep could do.

It was an animal that I wanted to work with. I just wanted to figure out how to how to do it and have them pay for themselves as my tool. So that's why I picked the colored Merinos. …

This week, I visited the State Farm outside of Kalispell, where sheep farmers John Stites and Carol Treadwell Stites tell me about how they use their flock to improve the health of their soil. So what led you guys to get into sheep farming? I grew up, on a farm. and we had sheep. I knew what the sheep could do.

It was an animal that I wanted to work with. I just wanted to figure out how to how to do it and have them pay for themselves as my tool. So that's why I picked the colored Merinos. There was a lady here in Kalispell, Julie Robinson who who had those. And we were able to get started right away with my dream.

And I really didn't start off in the regenerative mode. I started off, in what I was brought up, as, you know, which was use the fertilizers, use the herbicides, insecticides even. and what I found was I was, I was making greener plants or taller plants, but it just wouldn't stay. And, and I also, I could see that I was kind of I had dead soil and and, I just got this.

I started doing some reading. How do I make this work? And I started reading about holistic or regenerative farming and, and and I was like, wait a second, here I am. I'm this guy who is pretty conservative and I couldn't do it with just the sheep. And I don't have to pay for any fertilizer. I don't have to pay for any herbicide.

I can just do it with the animals. I kind of make sense. Yeah. And and so here we are. You know, all of a sudden, I saw. I saw improvement right away. I mean, it's a lot about how you manage them, too. You know, you can't just put them out there like in the old traditional way of, okay, I'm going to open the I'm going to open them into their pasture in the spring and then just let them go because they'll eat where they want to eat.

So that's why we use really small areas. And I've learned to improve that in time and certainly with getting new fencing materials and things like that. But it's it's been really exciting to see the change coming so fast, so fast. And, you know, and then next thing you know, you see more bluebirds, you see more deer, you see more elk.

the whole thing is really patterned after the way the great ruminants went across the prairies. You know, the the buffalo, 50 million buffalo went wrong. You know, we have some pretty deep soil out there, pretty deep topsoil out there. And, you know, they would work in one area. And then predators would come in and, and the wolves or the, the natives and push them to another area, pushing on to another area, pushing another area.

So what we're doing is we're putting them in a small area, taking it down to what we want. They moved to another area, moved to another area, moved to the other area. But if you want it to be sustainable, that means sustainable for us too. I.e. are we still going to want to do this in five years? Right?

We're going to be totally burned out, right? So we had to make sure that we work with systems that we can work with. And you know, I unfortunately, I see too many people going into it and just go hardcore high labor ways and they just can't sustain it. Yeah. You know, I mean, they are humans after all, right.

So what are the ways that you guys have made this more sustainable for yourselves? how we how we choose to do it with our fencing. And it's such that we care how long that takes us to move a cell. 45 minutes, 45 minutes. So we were really fortunate. We got a grant from the Fire and Conservation District, and part of it was to buy temporary fencing.

So we fence a whole eight acre perimeter, and then we use, poly wire on reels to break it into the smaller paddocks that John was just talking about. Yeah, we're actually just because of where we are, and we're still building our trust in our dogs and everything else in situations, because we don't even own that land over there.

That's our neighbors. Who's kind enough to let us graze on her land. it's, as we said, talk about amongst us. You know, it's it's a great trade off because she gets her land maintained. and and she gets the added benefit of, you know, really fire preventative as well. The other thing that's really neat about the sheep, there's I think a little bit unique is that sheep will go into a small pen like that and they'll eat the very top of the plant, and then if you leave them a longer, they'll make a second cutting.

and then they'll make a third cutting and they'll take it all the way to the ground. But but, I mean, you have to be smart enough to move them before they do that. you know, as I said, it could be three days. It could be five days. It really depends on what's growing there or not growing there.

we're also at times targeting invasive species plants as well. They will eat, nap weed. They they will eat cheatgrass. We can push them in on cheatgrass pretty hard. and, you know, at that early stage. And take it down and it works. Wow. That's great. It sounds like a really great way to maintain your property, and I.

Yeah, I've never thought about the invasive species aspect that this is beneficial as well. So tell me why it's important to focus on these practices, to focus on bringing, the soil back to, better health, regenerative farming really is about regenerating the soil. So. And when you have a healthy soil, you have a healthy ecosystem, and then you have a healthy landscape.

So some of the things about having a healthy soil is that you need to have roots in the soil all the time. And that's why, you know, John was saying we we only we eat, let the sheep eat. first coming in in a second cutting and then we, we move them because, once you take more than 50% of the plant down the roots in the soil, significantly decrease.

As long as you leave 50% of the plant, you have deep roots in the soil. Roots make passageways for the water to soak into the soil. Also, as long as you keep eating the grass, but not too much, the the grass will regenerate and grow. And when it grows, it actually leaks carbon into the soil. So that's also another part of putting carbon into the soil.

And it feeds the soil community, the soil microbes, the soil mycorrhizae and that whole system under the ground, creates porosity, the soil and that's the water soak in. More water soaks in. And so your your landscapes become drought resilient. also, the water doesn't runoff and carries sediment into the local streams. So you have a healthier watershed.

So, regenerative agriculture really is it's about regenerating your farm and your farm's soil, but also the whole ecosystem. and like John said earlier, we've seen your blurb. Bluebirds come back. other regenerative farmers, see, you know, a lot of wildlife come back. And the other interesting thing about it is that the insects come back and you might think that's a bad thing, but you have good insects and bad insects.

you have the insects that will eat your plants, but you also have the insects that eat insects that eat your plants. So you don't need to use, bug killer. Yeah, yeah. Like pests that. Yeah. Insecticide the birds as well. And it's, it all really works quite well just trying to do it cheaply by doing this, you know, kind of makes sense.

You know. also we'll see earthworms, you know, when you dig a hole out there where there were none, you know, and now we're we're seeing them and it's it's really it's just so simple. And it works. Yeah. but it's not something new. It's not a new concept or anything. Farmers are putting manure on their fields forever.

You know, they've been doing it. It's just that it's a little bit different. Business plan what we're doing, and a way of doing it. But it's it's working, quite well. And there's so many different ways of doing it, you know. Yeah. so, yeah, let's talk about the business side of things, because you guys told me that you sell your wool to people all over the world.

Could you tell me a little bit about how that process works? Yeah, it all started when when I made the deal with. With Julia, who I bought the first sheep with, you know, that, I promised her I wouldn't compete with her on a local scale, and that was. That seems crazy, but, it it was the smartest thing I ever did because it forced me to use the internet and and to look outside and beyond, because, you know, no one's going to come driving up our road and say, hey, can I buy some wool today?

And that's not going to happen, you know, and, and sitting in a farmer's market, it's great. For some people, it doesn't work for me. so I started using the internet and, and the fiber, artistic, community is growing so fast, and I think it is anyhow. Yeah. And, it's, there's ways to do it. And and wool is light.

It can ship, you know, you can you can take, 6 pound fleece. That's, you know, that big and you can put it in a box that they will show you the basic thing about that is that when you open the box and release it out of the bag, it expands to the same size. Yeah.

It just springs back in no time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, so it's, it's light and it can ship easily. It's the only farm product I can think of. So you can do that with. Yeah. And it's you know it's we're not having to process it or anything like that. We're just doing the best we can for the cleanest war we can get to these people.

Different colors, different ways. They they go about it with different things they're looking for. and then and then we send some wool down to, a mill outside of, Bozeman down in Belgrade, Montana. And, they turn that into they work that up into, yarn for us and roving the wool mill is, zero waste, solar powered, woman owned business.

So cool. So our yarn is grown in Montana and made in Montana. It's 100% Montana. Sunshine, water and air. So how do you guys work to keep the wool clean? Because you're. Show me a little bit about that. yeah. The coats. You know, when when I was first told about the jackets I want. That's not natural. That's not normal.

Yeah. What the heck? You know. And, And I say, what? But then I thought about it. I was like, well, you know, if you're in, the meat business, you feed a certain way to get your, you get your animal to a certain point for market. So why wouldn't a wool person do something special for their market?

And so essentially, that's what we've done. they wear these coats, every day of the year, except for maybe a little bit of time after they've had lamb, just because we don't want to get a lamb into a leg strap or something. Right. And each sheep goes through 3 or 4 coats in a year. So as they grow or the and their will grows, they get a larger and larger coat.

So it's not that it's not like yeah. Yes. Yeah. Like and like any tool you have to learn to use it. Yeah. you can mismanage those quite well just like you can mismanage a saw. The coats it's got is part of our business model. And being a small farm our flock is your 35. If we took our wool clip and took it to the whirlpool we would get, you know, a couple of pennies, a couple of penny calls for one.

And we it would not be sustainable financially. It would just be an expensive hobby. So by raising this specialty product, like a super clean wool that the hand spinners will buy for you, they will pay for clean wool. we make ten times what we would at whirlpool and that makes it, you know, financially sustainable as a small farmer.

Yeah. A lot of times when I've seen small farms like this, it is more like an expensive hobby, like it's just the joy of raising animals, which is in itself and then has to be at the heart of it. Yeah. You know, you have to have a farmers heart. Yeah. Tell me more about that. Yeah. You're farmers hearts, right?

Why do you love sheep? Well, yeah. a part of it for me goes back to another thing. And that is, you know, I, I live learned from my family, from my grandmother. You know, we had just got when we moved here, we had just gone through 2008 and that whole crash and all that kind of stuff. And I had read some of the stuff that my grandmother written about, the depression and about World War two and about how important, the little sustainable little farm was to getting through those periods.

And I said, well, I've got, I've got to make sure that I think about that because I think another 2008 might be coming, you know, someday. And, and so this all kind of blended together. And that's why you see our big garden process out there. And we now have a hydroponic, garden inside that we're growing our lettuce for, for the winter.

But it's it's in the heart of doing it then being on the land, you know. and I grew up on a farm. Carol didn't, she wasn't so sure what my ideas were, but and, and, and so you know, she's learned, you know, and it's, it's been a really fun project for us to do together because not only is it, you know, it's it's the soil project.

It's the garden project. Feeding us. It's the sheep project. They all roll together and we have different roles in that. And but they all complement each other, which is really kind of neat. You know, the, the, the sheep that compost pile out there, you know, part of that will go on to the garden, you know, and, and, and that takes care of that.

And it also will go in the fields. But yeah. Yeah, everything kind of helps each other. So John came home one day and he said, we're going to get sheep. And I'm like, okay. And then I went to go, hey, this is your project. And it took me a couple of years to warm up to it. but the two things that got me is like, I have I actually have a PhD, and my specialty is soil geomorphology.

and, and I wrote my dissertation on the role of soils in the global carbon cycle back when we called it greenhouse warming. And we were trying to figure out where all the carbon pools were. And so this is sort of like coming full circle. I didn't stay in academia because I wasn't academic enough, I guess. but you, you know, the sun shines, the grass grows, and the sheep turned grass into wool.

Wool is 50% carbon. They're little four legged fertilizers. They add organic matter to the soil. we shear the fleece and spill it. Makes it into a sweater. Carbon captured. You know, it's the carbon cycle. And, capturing carbon and building soil. So my, my, that's, you know, my passion on it is the building soil part. This common theme I keep reading, like people who didn't grow up in farming, that somehow they were drawn to it just, you know, it's not rocket science and it's not I'm not in a laboratory analyzing things and doing, you know, scientific research.

But it's like doing this experiment on the land. And I'm getting rewards for for that. And there's the whole relationship with the sheep and sheep are just merinos, especially such lovely animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. you know, one of my favorite things to do it. And I probably the most important thing I do is a coffee walk with a sheep in the morning, you know, just walk ING around with the use or walking around with the Rams and, you know, having your coffee just observing.

Is everybody healthy? Does someone need a coat change? Does someone need a hoof chain, you know, clipping or something like that. And, and it prevents a lot of the problems that I had the first time around when I was a, you know, a young bull, you know, just doing things and, you know, I mean, back then, I mean, I had my gosh, I had well over 100 years and, you know, the full wool clip, maybe got me.

And I was hoping to have enough money to pay this year and have the gas money to come home from driving the wool there. That was about all you got out of it. And to be in this world now is like, I really appreciate the difference. but I but, you know, it took some work and it took some thinking outside the box to get there, but yeah, you know, other people can do it too, right?

Because there's, there's so many different kinds of sheep and so many different kinds of wool and, and different people are looking for different things, and different types of wool can do different things, and they all are doing good things on the soil. So, you know, kind of find your thing. you mentioned there's a bunch of different ways to get into it.

If someone was going to venture out and start something like this, what advice would you have for them? Start small, start small, know your why? if you're going to get sheep, ask what you want to do with the sheep because that'll determine what sheep you should get. Do you want to raise wool? Do you want to raise meat?

Do you want you fine wool or a different curly wool or course wool? And there's a lot of value in the finals right now. Do you want white sheep? Do you want colored sheep? You know, and and, you know, start with the very best genetics you can find. Don't start with somebody else's problems just because they were cheaper, because they will not be cheaper if you are not free and you know if you can, if you can not spend much money, spend that much money.

But just Herman, how many sheep you're going to get because of that money. Right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, and now that would be your budget line there. You know, the other thing is, you know, one of the things that. Probably anyone who's lived here for a while, you can't buy land in this valley anymore. You know, the prices have gone up so much, and and and and use us as an example.

We have very good neighbors where we're grazing their land. So, you know, we're taking care of it for them. People are moving into this valley and buying 20 acres, but they don't really want to maintain it. They don't really want to care for it. They don't really want to have they don't mind seeing a few sheep out there, right.

As long as they don't have to worry about them. Right. So I think that's where the opportunity is really, is to start in your little corner and then be able to utilize some of these other facilities out here. Well, it seems like you guys have got it real, really dialed in here. and yeah, I appreciate you just showing me around your farm and taking some time to.

We love it. Explain your processes. It's really generous.