What does retirement mean for a sheep farmer?

Mar 11, 2015

By Jonathan Davies

The average age of farmers in Canada keeps rising, and while leaving a pasture for a golf course may be a welcome relief for some, retirement can be a daunting task in itself. The B.C. government's website features a guide for farmers ending their careers, which begins: “For many people, dealing with succession planning and farm transfer arrangements is sort of like taking on a porcupine - it's prickly and hard to approach - a creature one would just as soon avoid entirely.”

Local sheep farmer Carolyn Turner has recently gone into retirement and her experience has been less prickly than many. Last spring she sent sheep off to Cookstown auction in Toronto for the last time, bringing in a decent profit as it coincided with Ramadan – a time of high demand for lamb.

It was a long time coming – 43 years to be precise – but the time she spent farming for a living was joyful. “My passion was always animals,” she says.

Her mother grew up on a farm during the Depression and knew she wanted to live in town. She married a teacher and they settled in Bowmanville, where Carolyn was born and raised along with two brothers.

Her father, who taught science and agriculture studies, pointed out the breeds of cattle as they drove to visit her maternal grandparents who were still farming. A horse-crazy teen, Turner went on to study at

Queens but cut her graduate studies short when, in 1972, she and her husband Ron came upon a 40-acre property in Elginburg.

They bought the farm and while it underwent growing pains early on, these were eased by the fact that she started small, had the added security of a teaching income in the household, and, perhaps most importantly, knew she was where she wanted to be.

Horses came first. They converted old stalls into boarding boxes and began with a couple of their own Arab mares, eventually boarding on a small scale. And while horses would be a continued presence, sheep became a more prominent fixture in the late '70s and grew to a flock over 50-strong at its height.

Turner's focus was on meat and she initially marketed her product through direct sales. She brought her sheep to now-defunct Hoffman's for cutting and wrapping, and then delivered the cuts. Her customer base began with a few friends and acquaintances but grew quickly to a point where she could not keep up with demand.

While this marketing avenue was successful, devoting time to deliveries and attention to the myriad cutting requests grew cumbersome. For roughly the last two decades the sheep were sold to

Cookstown through a delivery driver with good instincts for when to ship for a good price. On top of this, the rigorously-tended herd presented well, and she often got top dollar.

But even for an animal lover whose farming career has gone well, there comes a point where the physical demands, coupled with worries over threats to flock health, lead one to wind down the business. While Turner insists she needs animals in her life, she has been glad to let go of lambing – being up at all hours for a stretch of nights in early spring every year – and the burden of diseases like Sore Mouth and Foot Rot that can crop up even in the most meticulously-run farms.

Foot rot appeared on Turner's farm about four years ago and persisted through a variety of treatments. An anaerobic disease affecting the area between the toes, it can leave the animals lame. While she was able to eventually bring the disease under control, it was a harrowing ordeal. This alone did not shutter the operation, but with her own health problems – worn knees and heart trouble - it became clear that a change was in order.

Turner has not followed the clichés of Canadian retirement: golfing in the summer; wintering somewhere warmer. She still has 21 sheep left to take care of, and while she has stopped breeding them, they are used in training herding dogs, which her neighbour Lorna Savage raises.

While many farms grapple with easing a farm business on to a new generation of farmers, Turner has not gone this route. There are, however, young farmers raising sheep, creating a more indirect succession. Though she is retired, Turner remains a wealth of knowledge on sheep and horses – one of those rare individuals whose hunger to learn more about them is never sated.

Jonathan Davies is a farmer himself. He operates a small farm at Harrowsmith with his partner X.B. Shen. Jonathan is contributing a series of articles called Frontenac Farming Life, which profiles the lives of local farmers who are trying to make a living through farming, navigating struggle and hope. If you would like to have your story considered, please contact Jonathan at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..