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Partly to mostly cloudy. High 69F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..
Partly cloudy. Low 38F. Winds light and variable.
Serving Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey, Bellevue and Carey
Shearer Cody Crowdrey will generally shear about 40 sheep an hour, or one every 90 seconds.
Sheep use a chute like this one to enter a shearing trailer single-file.
Sheep shearing demonstrations are a popular part of the Folklife Fair during the Trailing of the Sheep festival. This year, Cody Cowdrey will conduct the demonstrations.
Shearer Cody Crowdrey will generally shear about 40 sheep an hour, or one every 90 seconds.
According to professional sheep shearer Cody Cowdrey, most people aren’t cut out for the job—and you should probably look elsewhere if you’re in it for a quick fix.
“It’s definitely challenging if you’re not in the right mood. It’s very physical,” Cowdrey explained. “If you’re not in shape for it, it’s like putting a couch potato in the gym. I remember when I was first learning, my back and the back of my legs were sore all day.”
Cowdrey, 36, of Lebanon, Oregon, is the youngest of three generations from the Willamette Valley who have made sheep shearing their lifeblood. For the past four years, he’s been on the road shearing sheep out of a mobile sheep-shearing unit—sometimes alone, other times accompanied by other shearers.
The nature of the job means traveling up to 600 miles to flocks in Idaho and Washington and camping in his trailer for a string of nights at a time. Altogether, Cowdrey estimated that he’s away from home for three to four months out of the year.
“Depending on the year, it’s anywhere from 90 up to 118 nights out in the trailer. I put about 40,000 miles on my truck last year,” he said.
“Basically, if the sun is out, someone out there is wanting us to shear their sheep.”
The living quarters are “a little small,” Cowdrey added.
“I sleep in the gooseneck part of the trailer. There’s a bed on one side, a sink and little propane cook stove on the other side, some shelves,” he said. “At night, you’ll hear wolves, but the coyotes, especially.”
Cowdrey jumped into the business full-time at 25, after working as a farmhand on a Willamette Valley grass-seed farm and shearing on the side.
“I got to the point when I was shearing so much and not going to the farm as often, and my dad got cancer, so I started pulling his trailer,” he said. “My dad’s good now, though.”
Cowdrey’s father, Mike, joined the family affair as a teenager and now runs about 700 ewes on the family ranch in nearby Scio, also in Oregon’s fertile wine country. His grandfather, the late Lynn Cowdrey, got into the business in his early thirties after a stint in the army and went on to give haircuts to more than 750,000 head of sheep over the next 50 years. (Lynn built the first mobile shearing trailer ever used in the Willamette Valley, easing the burden of transportation for ranchers.)
“My grandfather heard about shearing somehow while working at a plywood mill—he kind of stumbled into it—and started doing it part-time. As he got better and business kept coming, he became just a shearer,” Cowdrey said.
According to Cowdrey, ewe shearing season is “pretty much March through July” for more than eight hours per day.
“On a good day we’ll shear for two hours, take a 30-minute break, shear for an hour and a half, eat lunch, and do it again in the afternoon,” he said. “If we do get days off, it will usually be because of the rain—wool buyers don’t want to buy water, and if it sits around too long it can mold.
“Basically, if the sun is out, someone out there is wanting us to shear their sheep.”
In the winter, Cowdrey will tag more ewes than he shears.
“Tagging is where you pull the wool off right along the teats, swoop the crotch and do just a little around the butt, so when the lamb’s born the mother is somewhat clean instead of having all that wool there, and it’s really easy for the lamb to find milk,” Cowdrey said. “Starting in January, I usually drive up the [Oregon] coast and spend a few days just tagging.”
After tagging more sheep in Washington, he’ll return home in early March to shear up to 10,000 lambs in the Willamette Valley.
“There are lambs that weight 120 pounds. Some, 160, 170, basically yearlings,” he said with a laugh. “Those are not so fun.”
Sheep shearing demonstrations are a popular part of the Folklife Fair during the Trailing of the Sheep festival. This year, Cody Cowdrey will conduct the demonstrations.
This week, Cowdrey will be shearing thousands of head of sheep in Homedale, Idaho, along the Snake River near the Oregon border.
On Saturday, he’ll travel to Hailey with his wife, Amanda, to give onlookers an up-close and personal glimpse of sheep being sheared at Roberta McKercher Park. (Demonstrations will take place every half-hour from 10a.m. to 3:30 p.m.)
Then, it’s off to eastern Oregon for a five-day family vacation, and back to work in Burns, Oregon, in mid-October.
“That will be a flock of about 1,200. Then I’ll do a flock closer to home, and around Oct. 27 I’ll go back to Idaho and shear a group of about 10,000 sheep near Wilder, which will probably take 11 or 12 days,” Cowdrey said.
With each sheep weighing in around 150 pounds, the daily cumulative handling of sheep for an expert shearer like Cowdrey can add up to around 15 tons. The work is backbreaking in every sense of the word, he said, and technique is key to avoiding occupational injury.
Sheep use a chute like this one to enter a shearing trailer single-file.
“You’ve got to build up your muscles for it to avoid [injury],” he said. “The pain is less if you shear faster. But if I’m stuck in the same position for a long time, even if I’m shearing less sheep than usual in a day, my back will hurt more.”
For Cowdrey, it’s all about keeping the art alive—at just over $1.50 per pound, the cost of wool hardly covers the cost of shearing, and many growers have years’ worth of wool stacked up. The market took a big hit when the U.S. levied retaliatory tariffs on Chinese wool imports around three years ago, he noted.
“It’s bad—with coarser wool breeds, like Lincolns, especially,” he said. “The fine-wool people, Rambouillets, are doing better.”
Cowdrey said some sheep will shear under a minute, but Rambouillets can take a good three to four minutes to do properly. He generally gets through some 300 ewes in 7 hours, 30 minutes—about forty an hour, or one sheep every 90 seconds.
As for lambs, the most he’s sheared in a day was 325 over about six-and-a-half hours in the Willamette Valley, he said.
Shearing is done in two parts: the “catch-and-drag” cycle and the shear cycle. First, sheep are guided through a narrow wooden chute into Cowdrey’s trailer single file, “butt to nose.” Then, they’re brought onto the shearing stand one-by-one, three in every door at any given time.
“To let them in, you’ll step down on a door level with their first leg joint, and you grab right on their snout—left hand on the snout, right hand on the back hip,” he said. “The snout’s the steering wheel if you want any control. If you were to try to grab a handful of wool, the sheep is going to go running and pull you instead. You can’t let go, because everybody’s got sharp objects in their hands.”
“When you’re first learning, your shearing technique will be bad. But everyone finds their own style. If it works for you, it works."
The “shearing” phase involves a “handpiece”—a higher-torque version of a human hair clipper, with a sliding comb and up to 13 teeth—which Cowdrey will guide down the belly, peeling off the fleece in a downward sweeping stroke. His other forearm will steady the sheep below the neck.
The goal is to expertly maneuver the animal to get the most continuous jacket of fleece possible, with minimal stress—and most importantly, without any cuts to himself or to the sheep’s wrinkled skin.
“Just like people, sheep have their own attitudes. Some are going to be mean—bite, kick. The best advice I heard is to treat them like a spring,” he said. “If you pull and press on the spring, it’s going to create some tension, and want to bounce back and fight. If you try not to stretch it and pull it, it’ll stay calmer because you’re not creating that tension.”
The shorn sheep are pushed down a chute on the driver’s side of the trailer and returned to the yard. Cowdrey will kick the wool through a hole outside, where the piles of fleece are baled in a hydraulic press.
“When you’re first learning, your shearing technique will be bad,” he said. “But everyone finds their own style. If it works for you, it works.” 
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