BUNN -- The kids have been gathering here since June - 16 of them ranging in age from 7 to 18. They come to Clover C Farms in Bunn every week to learn what they can about sheep: how to feed them, wash them, trim their hooves, and ultimately, how to show them at the N.C. State Fair.
Carvel Cheves has been teaching young 4-H members such as these about sheep since at least 1985. The recently inducted member of the North Carolina Agriculture Hall of Fame is one of the largest sheep breeders in the state. But to the 4-H kids who flock to his farm, he's a role model and a mentor.
Good farming role models are more important than ever, says N.C. Agriculture Department spokesman Brian Long.
"If you look at projections for worldwide food demand, some say as much as 75 percent more food will need to be produced globally to feed everybody," Long said. "That takes technology and science, but it also takes people wanting to be farmers. So if showing livestock as a kid can maybe encourage that love of raising animals and working the land, that's great. We need all the farmers we can get."
Cheves, whose Franklin County farm has been in his family for more than 100 years, stresses to the kids gathered together for one last group practice that what they do at the fair means something. They won't only be feeding and watering their animals and hopefully picking up some ribbons, they'll be showing who they are to the people of North Carolina.
"We are ambassadors for agriculture for the state of North Carolina while we're at the fair," Cheves tells them. "We represent what is good about agriculture to the state. This is where we showcase what we do. So we need to be on our best behavior."
The fair opens Thursday afternoon and runs through Oct. 23. Last year, attendance topped 1 million for the first time.
Most of the kids making the trip to the fair this week have been in the show ring before, but a few of them are first-timers.
Isabel Nobles, an 11-year-old from Louisburg, lives in a subdivision, not on a farm. So until she came to the Cheves farm, she'd never been around any kind of livestock.
Isabel was immediately hooked. Ask her what she likes most about the sheep and she breaks into a grin: "Everything. I love all of it."
She bonded with her sheep, which she named Bobbit, and comes to the farm several days a week with her sister Sophia, 7, who has her own lamb,Daisy, to show this year.
Sophia, who isn't much taller than Daisy, says she was surprised when she first learned that the babies aren't kept with their mothers after they're weaned. She knows it's because the smaller ones can get injured by the bigger ones, but she still looks sad about that.
Isabel says the most surprising thing she discovered about sheep, apart from how much some of them shed, is how strong they are. And her Bobbit is pretty strong.
Unlike Sophia's docile lamb, Bobbit is one of the more stubborn sheep in the bunch and acts up a lot during practice runs at the farm.
"Her sheep is easy," Isabel says of Sophia's charge. "Her sheep will do anything, and mine's just jumping all around."
She's not kidding. During that afternoon's exercise session, Bobbit jerks her head and body so much that Isabel nearly wipes out on the dirt path.
But once at the show, Bobbit should pull herself together. At the two county livestock fairs the kids have already attended, Bobbit was better behaved than she ever is during practice at the farm. Alesia Moore of Youngsville, one of the 4-H leaders who helps Cheves with the mentoring, tells Isabel that's because once the sheep is out of her safety area, she knows Isabel is in control.
Cheves says all sheep are trainable, although one exception came to mind. Twenty years ago, his young niece took a lamb to show, and just as she led it into the ring, it set its feet like a snowplow and wouldn't budge. "She was dragging that poor lamb and crying like crazy," Cheves recalls with a chuckle.
No such catastrophes so far for this group. At the two county shows where they've already warmed up, they came away with 52 ribbons among them.
Seven generations
That group includes Cheves' two grandsons, Jacob Noe, 11, and Ted Noe, 17, the seventh generation of Cheves to work the Clover C Farm. The boys have been showing the animals since they were 5 years old, and have been to more shows than they can count. Their mother Cheryl, a veterinarian, showed sheep before them.
Cheves says that breeding and showing sheep can be a cutthroat business and that some travel all over the country and pay thousands of dollars for special stock. He doesn't do that. "We show what we have," he says.
And he has good ones. Cheves has had the fair's Grand Champion Katahdin Sheep for the last three years.
For the most part, the kids he works with show Katahdin (also known as Hair Sheep) or Suffolk sheep, a classic looking gray sheep with a black face and black feet.
Both are meat sheep, bred and raised to sell, but he also keeps wool-only sheep on the farm. His wife, Carol, a retired school teacher, uses the wool from those sheep to spin yarn, which she dyes with natural ingredients found around the farm, such as strawberries, sweet potatoes and red cabbage.
The kids understand the reality of what selling the sheep to market after show means, but it's not something they dwell on. Sometimes, 4-H leader Moore says, if kids have grown particularly fond of their sheep, their parents might purchase it to donate it to a petting zoo.
Gaining confidence
All of the young people here borrow sheep from Cheves to show. That's how Alesia Moore's son, Joey, now 14, started out six years ago. He loved working with one of Cheves' sheep so much, he got his own. He now has seven different breeds of sheep, 25 in all. He'll show two of his own sheep at the fair, but will still show two of Cheves' Katahdin.
Joey helps with everything, from daily feeding and care to birthing during lambing season. He used to get light-headed at the sight of blood, but now handles all that just fine.
Moore learned right along with Joey and now runs a large part of Cheves' mentoring program along with fellow 4-H leader Sandra Dunbar, who has four children showing sheep at the fair. She says working with Cheves and learning about showing livestock has transformed Joey from a painfully shy child into a confident, outgoing teenager who helps coach the younger, less experienced animal handlers.
He's knowledgeable about the sheep and eagerly shares that knowledge with the other kids, giving advice to the newer folks about what to expect. He's animated and funny when he talks about the sheep.
Joey wants to do something agriculture or livestock related when he grows up, but he's not sure yet what it will be. He thinks he's probably still too squeamish to be a vet, but the home-schooled student isvery smart. Judges often ask kids how many compartments are in a sheep's stomach, and they can all answer "four," but a judge recently asked Joey to name those compartments. He did.
Even Cheves seemed impressed.
