Sam's Icelandic Sheep Farm, llc

 

This farm started with a desire to own land. We looked in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, while the whole time Jerry kept saying "I really like the Ozarks." The Ozarks were my old stomping grounds. Both of my parents were born and raised here. I used to spend part of my summer on one or the other grandparents' farm, helping hoe the potatoes, check the cows, slop the pigs, gather eggs. So we also looked around the Ozarks, deeper into the heart of these ancient mountains.

There we found 80 acres of sloping, rolling, occasionally flat and occasionally steep land. There are 2-1/2 acre ponds (hopefully useful for fishing), a few small, seasonal streams that meander and cut deeply at times. This farm was once the "Whiteside" farm, a family who had owned this chunk for better than 100 years. But when the rambling farm house burned down, the family decided to leave the area and go north. There were a few people that tried to live here, but never succeeded. Then a neighbor who was hugely successful as a pig farmer bought this and turned the upper 40 acres into paddocks for pigs. That operation was retired in the mid 1990s and the farm was left fallow.

So now we have wonderful Icelandic sheep, bunches of chickens, an occasional turkey, sometimes ducks (though the wildlife is convinced we are providing these just for their eating pleasure!), guineas galore, and of course, our dogs: four LGDs and our Border Collie.