“The whole animal is being used”: From lamb to skein to blanket

(‘Lamb’, by Incé Husain)

The tree-rich countryside of Louiseville, Nova Scotia gives way to pastures and a red shop filled with wool blankets, knitted paraphernalia, and skeins of colourful yarn. At its side, a barn door hangs open; lambs and sheep bleat within, pressing wet noses and soft heads to passersby who near their enclosures.

Gillian Crawford, co-owner of Lismore Sheep Farm, arrived in Nova Scotia twenty five years ago. Formerly a teacher working in New Brunswick, she met her husband, John, a Scottish sheep farmer, while on a teaching exchange in Scotland. The couple travelled from Scotland to Ontario to Nova Scotia, building flocks of sheep and selling wool and meat.

“Over the years… we decided to put more emphasis on the wool,” says Crawford, sharing that meat market crashes had reduced the price of lambs. “We put money and effort into the shop side of it and the processing side of it.”

Crawford says Lismore Sheep Farm is home to around two hundred sheep. The sheep are sheared annually at the farm, and then most of the raw wool is taken to MacAusland's Woollen Mills in Prince Edward Island where it is washed, carded, and spun into yarn or woven into blankets using looms. A truckload of wool is also sent to Briggs & Little Woollen Mills in New Brunswick for producing yarn and dyeing them in desired colours. Finally, the wool returns to Lismore Sheep Farm in multicoloured skeins, blankets, and creations by local knitters that deck the shelves.

“The part I like best (about the work) is that the whole animal is being used,” says Crawford. “If it’s killed for meat, then it’s being used, but then the skins get tanned, and the wool is used year after year… and it ends up with these beautiful products like wool or blankets or yarn… The sheep are raised here, we see the end product, and its a nice product that is useful and can last for a long time.”

Crawford considers the pandemic-driven trend of shopping more locally and our planet’s climate crisis to have led people to start living in an increasingly organic way.

“It’s the whole combination of people wanting natural products, and locally produced products,” says Crawford. “The idea that the sheep are raised here, they eat grass, they’re raised in a barn, it’s not a factory process or anything like that... People like that idea.” ♦