Imagine going to see the Trailing of the Sheep Festival in main street Ketchum, ID, and there’s no sheep. It’s frequently been voted as one of the Top 10 fall festivals in the U.S. with about 25,000 attendees.
Sheep ranchers John and Diane Peavey started the festival from scratch in the mid-1990s so new residents in the tourist town of Sun Valley could understand why the sheep were trailed through Ketchum before being shipped to market, the value of the sheep industry to the state and the local area, the benefits to the land, and the products that come from sheep—protein-rich lamb and wool.
This year, two of Idaho’s large sheep ranchers question whether they can survive much longer. Low prices for lamb in 2022 were way below the cost of production, while about 70% of the lamb sold in the U.S. from domestic meat packers came from Australia.
“They’ve been importing 2,700 metric tons per week,” said Henry Etcheverry, a Basque sheep rancher based in Rupert. “That’s insane. We can’t sustain it. The imports are killing us.”
Etcheverry and Wilder sheep rancher Frank Shirts, who trails his sheep across Idaho 55 each spring before hundreds of onlookers, are supporting a national petition by Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF) sent to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Aug. 3 to secure tariffs and quotas on sheep imports via national legislation.
They are doing so as they ship their lambs to market in August, wondering how much longer they can survive.
The R-CALF petition, titled “Protect American Lamb: Petition for Relief by America’s Sheep Producers,” asserts that the nation’s large range sheep operations “are facing the prospect of near total extinction due to the unrestrained and ever-increasing importation of foreign lamb and mutton… Only with immediate intervention by the Biden Administration and Congress can the impending, catastrophic outcome be averted,” the R-CALF press release said.
Etcheverry, 74, and Shirts, 70, are both hoping to retire someday, and they aren’t sure if they will have anything to sell. “I’ve been doing this my whole life,” Etcheverry said. “We love the sheep. We love raising the sheep. It’s in my heart. It’s in my blood. But right now, it seems like we’re circling the drain. We have got to do something to fix this situation.”
Shirts added, “The Australians are dumping product in the U.S., and no one is doing anything about it. It just makes me sick. I’m not sure how long we can take this before we give up. And if we are forced to quit business, we’ll be gone forever.”
The Trailing of the Sheep Festival pays tribute to the fact that Central Idaho used to be the epicenter of sheep ranching in Idaho and the U.S. Thousands of sheep were shipped to market out of Ketchum by rail car each year. In 1918, Idaho’s sheep population was 2.5 million, six times the human population and the second largest population of sheep worldwide. Sydney, Australia had the most.
“The sheep were here before the skiing in Sun Valley,” noted Etcheverry. “A lot of these newcomers will see the sheep in the hills and they feel like they shouldn’t be here. But after they understand what they do, their contribution they make to the environment—they cut down the fuel for fire, they leave their droppings for fertilizer, they invigorate the plants with the pruning effect, and they contribute to the economy. People like them after they understand what it’s all about.”
Indeed, imagine how hundreds of Boise and Eagle residents might feel if they couldn’t come watch approximately 2,500 sheep cross Idaho State Highway 55 in April. The sheep crossing on the state’s only north-south highway is growing in popularity every year. People love to see the sheep following the green in the foothills of Boise and following the green-up into the mountains of the Boise National Forest. Video from the crossing has been picked up nationally by the NBC-TV “Today” show and USA Today newspaper.
A 25-minute documentary film for the Life on the Range educational video series on Frank Shirts’ sheep operation titled, “A year in the life of raising sheep,” has been watched by 951,000 people on YouTube—the single most popular story produced in the award-winning series so far.
But most consumers have no idea how tough the declining sheep market has been on producers. The R-CALF petition details how the domestic lamb industry has been in severe decline over the last 20 years, while market share by Australia and New Zealand has increased.
Often times, Idaho ranchers like to pass down their operations to the next generation. But neither Etcheverry or Shirts have someone in line to take over their operations. That’s why they’d like to fix the imports and the meat packer monopoly issues so they could sell their operations for a profit.
“If you’re going to do well in this business, you have to have some control over the market,” Etcheverry says. “We’ve tried to do that before when we had our own lamb co-op and meat-packing plant in Colorado. But during the COVID years, we lost that plant. Somehow, we’ve got to get control of this situation or we’re gone.”— Steve Stuebner
